EVE General Discussion

I am unsure how me using ISK in exchange for web traffic which gets me money isn't relevant. Without that ISK I would have far less traffic, but with the ISK it gives me an advantage and gives my users a reason to visit my site.

My point is, if I made such a site and cut out the I give you ISK side the chances of it growing quickly and me getting significant advertising revenue is small. However by leveraging the ISK I can ramp up the popularity of the site artificially and not by the merits of it being a great site but because I am paying users to use it.

I am not saying that is what other third parties are doing I am saying that my plan is something as far as I can tell is perfectly within the EULA but I hardly think its fair and could in theory be done.

No, you're just willfully being ignorant. On TMC, all EVE-related articles are paid for in ISK, any non-EVE related articles are paid for through non in-game means. Pretty simple to comprehend.

But why would anyone click your referral link then? If you pay me ISK to spam your website in chat, sure, I'll take your ISK. And then I still won't click on your referral link. And neither will anyone who sees the spam, because they get literally nothing out of doing so. It's a lot easier just to go buy a PLEX from CCP or a time code from a site I actually want to support.

So yeah, sure, you could probably do it and it probably would not count as RMT. Essentially you would be the world's first "ISK for EVE chat spam" service. You'd basically just be paying people ISK to spam chat with a link to your site but not actually providing anyone any reason to go to your website or click on your referral link (because you can't, and the moment you do with in-game ISK/items, yes, it becomes RMT).

It's not relevant because the ISK isn't what creates the cash earnings. You are not spending ISK to receive cash.

One more time: those who get ISK aren't providing any cash in exchange. Those who provide cash aren't getting any ISK in exchange. At no point is in-game and out-of-game assets exchanged for each other. Even if the same part hands out ISK and receives cash, it's not RMT unless the two transactions are related in a quid-pro-quo arrangement.

…and the counter-point is that you're not cashing out. You are earning money from ad revenue. You'd be doing that without the ISK. You could earn the same amount of cash without spending a single ISK in the process.

Not quite. Your plan is explicitly to cash out — to trade your ISK for cash. This isn't allowed. That's why none of the sites are doing that. Instead, they have two completely separate transactions going on at once: one is out-of-game cash for out-of-game services, the other is in-game cash for game-related community services. The two are not coupled or connected. They could stop doing one and the other would keep going because they are not reliant on each other.

If you can't see the difference between this and RMT, there's probably no point engaging you in a conversation about it.

And let's face it, CCP aren't about to demand all 3rd party sites shut down because they have ads. Generating ad revenue while spending isk for content (which lets fact it, you don't need to pay content writers to do, Mad Ani paid isk in game to run alt accounts to generate twitch revenue) isn't a problem. Selling isk because you don't want to rely on ad revenue is.

I get what you are saying now.

What I am doing is paying for advertising etc. So instead of using my real life cash to pay google ad words, facebook, etc to generate traffic to my site. I can use the ISK I have in game to get the same effect.

Damn double forum post

Lol, you never called for it, but you made it quite clear that you consider someone paying isk and having a website that makes money being RMT, even though the transactions are unconnected. And by all means go and make your hypothetical website. Pay people to write content and slap some ads on the site. Good luck with that one.

At the end of the day you are making unreasonable connections where none exist. The only way for sites that generate revenue to be totally unconnected to the spending of isk would be to never post anything about EVE, since pretty much any content that gets written about costs isk at some point to happen.

You are right and then I said that I see the point Tippia and others where making and that I was wrong to connect it to RMT as it isn't.

I think you are also going out our way to make unreasonable connections with regards to the costs of content. Sure it cost somebody something in game for that content but what they spent doing that wasn't anything above and beyond the normal course of the game.

If we are talking about live streamers they didn't pay for content unless they went and actually paid somebody to fight them.
If a story was being written about an event it won't matter because that story wasn't the content it is just a retelling of the event, the writer is the entertainment.

I am here just having a conversation and at the same time trying to make it clear that third parties don't have to pay for content with ISK, and I feel that they probably shouldn't be allowed to if that content is then monetized..

This is what TMC is doing regardless of how the Goon lovers wearing Arabian sun goggles make it out to be.