EVE General Discussion

I am trying to understand the logic here of the many eve players that believe ISK has a monetary value, but first, my two cents.


1. Once the game is downloaded, players that really know their thing and that are very dedicated to play this game, have ways to play any way they like, without paying for accounts nor any pixel item in-game using RL money in terms of PLEX.

Question: Such a person loses let's say a carrier, so why would that person now lose real life money? He did not spend one cent on it and that person chose to play eve of his or her free will, so the time invested is also not worth real money.


2. PLEX is bought with RL money to get ISK. But you cannot turn ISK into RL money.

Question: Why is something that only benefits one organization (CCP), worth RL money to everyone?


3. Everything you have in Eve, your character, your ships, everything, belongs to CCP. They can do what they want with it (surely, wrong actions will cause people to leave the game, but perhaps they could become so filth rich and troll all, who knows hehe, but this is not the point).

Question: Why do people still think that ISK still has a RL value in that regard? Buying isk is basically giving money to CCP while the pixel items you get for it still don't belong to you but to CCP, so you give them money to be able to use some of their pixel items.

How can you lose the money you give them anyway to begin with when you lose an in-game pixel item that is already theirs?


I understand that when people are dependent on buying PLEX to play the game to its full potential, for many reasons such as: not enough free time, too much work, too lazy to spend the extra time, to them this could have a real value, but why do all adopt suddenly that for all eve players, ISK can be related to real life monetary value?

One of the main arguments could surely be the whole time investment, although you play eve kind of as a luxury. You do not need it technically in terms of surviving biologically, although I can already foresee the people say "Eve is life" etc, and I am sure it is for many :), but the point is, even if you compare how many hours you spend playing it, and the rate you could make isk in that time, the point still is that you chose to play eve out of free will but you do not need it to survive. You can see it as entertainment, a luxury, depending on where you are from, but I am curious to read why people think eve has or has no real life monetary value.

No trolls on this one please.

It depends on the context. When news outlets report "$300,000 worth of stuff destroyed in EVE Online batlte" it helps with giving a perspective on the effort that went into building the sandcastles that were mercilessly kicked down.

EVE is ultimately a video game, of course. All the time you sink into it is worth as much as the time you spend watching TV or playing games. It's an entertaining social activity, nothing more.

Although you briefly touch upon it, I think you seriously underestimate the personal worth players of any persistent world attach to 'their' ingame posessions based upon general market 'worth' and how much effort it took them to obtain. Eve having a system of ultimate loss rather than, for instance, a corpse walk to pick up your stuff after you have died, only serves to accentuate this.

If you lose your ship in Eve you may not be losing something you 'technically' owned, but you do lose something that for all practical purposes in game you did own and, most likely, spent some amount of time attaining.

Any argument that seeks to negate those two factors as a means to objectively devalue real world item worth simply doesn't take into account the human condition, in my opinion. People naturally attach worth to things they own or perceive to own, regardless of how they obtained said items and even more so when effort was required to obtain them, regardless of the activity being carried out.

It puts things in perspective and is obviously also good publicity, ships destroyed in value of xxx thousand dollar, means if u would have to buy those in game through tunring plex into isk it would cost so much.

Xxx thiusand of work hours destroyed doesnt make a great headline nor is catchy.

Money is is a one way land, the other way is called rmt and is hot news as always and also illegal

Digital goods have an intrinsic value the same as other types of goods. And when you consider that the definition of currency is nothing more or less than a medium of exchange, the digital transactions of such goods has a very real impact. PLEX is sometimes said to have a real-life value, but I'd say that's only partially true. As you said, CCP essentially owns the goods once you've purchased them since it is a one-way exchange, and there is no exchange rate (which would be RMT). That said, the effort people go to in order to get the isk they've made, or the effort to get the money to buy PLEX, gives a certain value to the items. Ultimately though, I think it has to be said that the wealth you amass within Eve has no real-world economic value, although it certainly does have sentimental value.

I think I read someplace that the avg EVE player has around 1 Billion ISK in cash.

That means that if you're plexing your account, you have barely enough to buy a plex in Jita. If you lose, say, a 500 M ship, you may have to shell out 15$ RL cash to sub your account that month.

If you're subbing your account with cash and don't have that much time to grind more ISK, and you lose a couple 500 M ships, you may have to shell out 20$ RL cash to buy a plex and sell it in Jita to replenish your ISK wallet that month.


To sum it up, for the avg EVE player, losing stuff for 500M or a Billion or two can have a very real impact on your RL wallet. So yeah, you're pretty much aware of the $ value of ISK.

I disagree with this as I mentioned in my example relating to this topic. If you do something out of free will in your spare time, that has no monetary value. If I go to the cinema on my free time I can't say that I lost money because of it because I could not work for 4 hours for example. It was your choice and free will to go to the cinemas.

Well, to that person as I suggested it might then have a value, correct, but what if you are the player that never spent one cent on any PLEX, and you lose over a one year time span let's say 5 bio isk, did you lose physical money then too?

I think most economists would vehemently disagree with you there. It also makes no sense; time doesn't simply become worthless because you're partaking in an activity that you happen to enjoy. On the contrary the very fact that you have made a conscious decision to do one thing rather than another means that it has an intrinsic value to you, whether you choose to acknowledge that value or not, otherwise your decision would have no meaning.

A lot of economists would argue that whether you attach direct value or not to the time you choose to use in order to do something (such as the cinema, in your example), the act of simply going prevents you from doing something else. You have therefore lost out regardless of the decision you made because you could be doing something else. The popular phrase 'there's no such thing as a free lunch' is often used to demonstrate this principle.

Everythgin you can buy with money or Time has a real life value. Is daydreaming anyone that believe otherwise.