Market Discussions

PLEX is apparently 3.9B on the Chinese server. 630M is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of PLEX price possibilites.

Have you heard of Google?

2 in 0.9 Jita 4-4 @ 660m Range Station < 5 minutes ago
+93 in 0.9 Jita 4-4 @ 650m+ Range Station < 5 minutes ago

the average chinese has much less money to spend on a computer game, thus the demand for plex is much higher and people are more willing to grind A LOT to be able to play in the first place.

58 PLEX units were added in Jita +1 in New Caldari all at over 660m.
There also are 2 more at 660m in Jita.

I am down from 6 accounts to 2 and would be down to 1 if mining unboosted was more interesting than watching paint dry, but at 670mil I am about to call it quits after almost 8 years playing. Work a full time job, shower, eat dinner and breakfast drive back and forth to work and guess what? Not enough time in a day to do this. Add in a significant other and/or kids and forget it. No logging in for an hour every couple days and a few hours on the weekends to run a few missions or work on manufacturing a little. Need to spend your entire time making isk or the accounts start shutting off. I am suffering from major burnout as well so EvE, even though it is a great game. is getting harder and harder to justify playing. I can play one of many other MMO's totally free without having to play a couple hours a day to pay for them and there are some new games coming out that I can play for $15 a month (which I can afford).

There are a lot of us who pay with plex others bought, but CCP doesnt care, they made their money the instant the plex was purchased and if I dont buy it from the other pilot, someone else will. Perhaps if enough of us quit over it CCP might do something but otherwise inflation will be rampant in another MMO (cough) SWG (/cough)

Of course CCP care.

They care about their players, they care about retaining those players, they care about recruiting new players, they care about their subscriber count, they care about their peak concurrent user count and they care about their profits. Anyone running a business like CCP are is going to be concerned about these things. To claim otherwise is just foolish.

There is a difference, however, between caring about players and being able to keep all players happy in a massive sandbox game with a player driven economy. The first should be a given, the second is basically impossible.

I feel for your situation and I am held back by the cost of PLEX just the same as you. I've recently cut down from 18 accounts to 13 and am considering dropping one or two more, because things that were worthwhile when PLEX was 500m are not so worthwhile when PLEX is at 670m+. I too cannot justify paying subs on EVE accounts, as I'm semi-retired now and don't have the income I once had. I love the fact that CCP has made it possible for wealthy veterans to play the game at the expense of others. But none of us has the unalianable right to play EVE for free.


And if that is true, it's the market that is setting the price of PLEX, not CCP.


Maybe. But if enough of us stop using PLEX to run extra accounts the market will adjust and the price will come down without any intervention from CCP at all.


Inflation isn't the big deal that people make it out to be in EVE. The majority of people claiming it is are just plain ignorant.

Interesting number.

I think one of the larger problems with the current situation is PLEX hoarding. It is such a good investment that people keep obscene amounts. For PLEX investors this means something like ~50% increase in yearly value for almost zero risk - PLEX has been consistently rising in price and will continue to do so until CCP changes something. Yes I realize that PLEX will always go up as the game gets older but one of the reasons for rapid growth is PLEX hoarding. More and more people are realizing that it's better to keep PLEX rather than ISK and this just accelerates price growth. People often compare PLEX to gold in real world - but that's not true, PLEX is like super-gold. I mean how can such an amazing risk free investment be healthy for long term economy?

Personally I would love to see some sort of mechanic that would discourage PLEX hoarding. For example, there could be a PLEX-unique additional tax that would be 'time dependent'.

Let's say when PLEX is created in-game it would be time stamped and for the first week (?) you can sell it without any penalty. After that there would be a 1% tax added each week(?) when you attempt to sell that particular PLEX. If you would hold to a PLEX for months it would get to a point where it's simply not worth selling and you would be 'forced' to use it on your own account.

Yes this idea goes against the free market that we have but I think it would create a healthier economy in the long run. Sure PLEX would still increase over time - but the growth rate would be slower (and the growth rate would be driven by actual supply and demand and not by speculators), since people would not hoard PLEX as an investment but they would just keep smaller amounts for their own personal use.

On top of that I think such a system would also be good for CCP. I'm pretty sure they would rather see that pile of half a million units of in-game PLEX get smaller.

Hmm... but PLEX isn't something that is purchased (from CCP) in-game.
Maybe I was very wrong assuming that the ammount of AUR is insignificant.

Could it be that "subscriptions" means PLEX and GTC, "in-game purchases not yet consumed" means AUR and "sale of goods not yet delivered" are GTC codes already sold but not yet claimed?

No, that would be far too sane. Eve allows all kinds of socially destructive behaviors which it would probably have a larger number of players without. Removing the ability for people with too much isk to hoard vast amounts of plex at the expense of your average hard-working multiboxing miner would take something very important away from this capitalism simulator.

I don't like the comparison of plex to gold either. Gold doesn't really have practical use that justifies its price. I compared it to the housing market in another thread. On one side you have everyone who needs a place to live, on the other people with large piles of money who wants a safe way to turn them into bigger piles of money, and they drive up prices until people can just barely afford a roof over their heads, and sometimes beyond that.

Like the myth of the slowly boiling frog, people can easily tolerate a 200% increase in basic costs of living over decades (adjusted for inflation), but could revolt against a 10% increase in a week. The few who refuse to play along with minor changes are normally replaced by new pets who take pride in their ability of being able to afford whatever prices the investor class demand of them. As long as these kinds of prices rise slowly, they can keep rising very far above what simple demand and supply (between producer<>consumer) would ever support.

For those of us who wouldn't play this game unless we could pay for our time with isk, plex is like a drug our characters need in order not to go into a coma until the next "30 days free if you come back" offer. Still I'd be more interested in seeing how it turns out the way it works now, even if that's from an inactive account. Maybe in a few years half of null will be owned by one guy and his 100 multiboxed Avatars with renter support fleets (assuming this is not already the case).