EVE General Discussion

I agree that people would buy PLEX with ISK if they dropped back to 400mill.

But that's too late.

For the PLEX price to drop that badly ...
... we'd have to shed a shitton of subs.

If all PLEX hoarders suddenly dumped ...
... then yes, people would buy like mad.


If the PLEX price through lack of demand, though ...
... then we lost a shitton of subs ...
... and only survive through via an iron lung.

We might get out of it alive ...
... but that's guesswork.

4 hours of playing EVE for 15$ of IRL value seems about right to me?

Pretty much this. Making money in this gme is the least difficult thing you can do. It practically puts itself into your wallet, as long you aren't foolish with it.

This can actually be improved.
1) Go to a system where the NPCs are selling skill books
2) Buy a bunch. ISK has now left the game.
3) Fly those books to trade hubs, and list for 2% below NPC price
4) Watch books sell rapidly
5) Repeat, laughing as you pour not just your isk, but billions of other people's isk out of the game.

The issue is that PLEX is used for many things thus driving the price up. Falsely IMO. Some people just want to convert PLEX to ISK and that's it, some just want to add more game time. But you are paying for all the extras it offers, even though you can ever only use it for one thing at a time. So you're paying a premium for it.

We know that CCP had another motive to establish PLEX, and that's to combat ISK Sellers and RMT and also gain some valuable income. Why buy it from the RMTers and get caught (see how they ramped up security on RMT) when you can buy ISK from us officially. They knew there was a market for it, so why not exploit it. To say different is being completely naïve.

The thing is people are a little spolit in EVE, not many if any allow you to pay for game time, buy using ingame currency where you can grind that money, ultimately if you want never pay for the game. People should realise that too.. You actually never ever have to pay for anything in the game if you work for it. Sadly though grinding with low rewards isn't fun and it is a grind. If you PVP as well then its near impossible to feed the PVP habit and grind for PLEX. Unless you have a few accounts.

Therefore CCP know that (the bit I don't like) you cant sustain a good pvp habit constantly, because the isk grind is terrible, so they sell you ISK via PLEX instead. Great business model to make real money really quick.

Be interesting to know how much CCP make via PLEX

Fix the price of PLEX is fixing the symptom not the underlying cause. It is like telling somebody who is a Type II diabetic to simply reduce their blood glucose by taking their medicine. It does not treat the underlying problem (too much insulin which has led to insulin resistance). In this case, it is too much ISK flowing into the Eve economy.

The solution is rather obvious.

1. Reduce the ISK flowing into the economy.
2. Increase the ISK flowing out of the economy.

Ways to approach 1 are as follows:

A. Decrease incursion payouts.
B. Decrease rat bounties.
C. Decrease insurance payouts.
D. Decrease mission rewards.

To implement 2 some possibilities are:

E. Increase the price of BPOs.
F. Increase the price of (higher end) skill books.
G. Increase LP store prices.

Of course, none of these are terribly popular with most players.

That said, most of the proposed solutions in this thread are not solutions at all.

Ask post-WWII Germany how that works out. Not saying that the situations would be completely parallel, but the effect on the economy would be disastrous at least.

Best case scenario, everything cost 10x as much as it did before and the people with tons of ISK on hand and plans in place to turn ISK into assets would be in a even better position and the people who just want ISK to fund w/e they are doing would just need to get more ISK, the grind would take just as long(if not longer), the numbers would just be bigger.

Worst case scenario, the economy in the game crashes as people jack up prices on everything (or pull goods all together to calculate the new price points) and no one knows how to price anything, do they leave the prices as is? Do they jack everything up 10x? Or do they find a middle price range? Remember, most prices of things in the game are based around how much it cost to make it and how much people are willing/able to pay for it. If everyone suddenly got a huge boost to income, don't you think the manufactures and miners of EVE would want to see some of that?

Look at the Chinese server if you want to see what happens when ISK generation is out of hand, and that is with the current system is in place.

Lots of stuff to cover in those three posts quoted above.

First off Mr. Epeen’s comments. PLEX do help limit RMT. Because PLEX are so high in value they are an attractive alternative to buying RMT ISK which can get your account banned and result in the player losing money (CCP takes that ISK away). The higher PLEX prices go, the lower RMT prices have to go to compensate for the extra risk and to compete. Will it stop RMT? Interesting question, and my answer is that at some price it will make RMT activities in Eve Online unprofitable and yes it will kill RMT. Of course that price might be quite high and there might be other problems with PLEX prices being that high that are bad for the game and possibly even worse than tolerating a certain level of RMT.

Tippia’s comment. Yes PLEX, in theory, can impact the value of ISK. If CCP sold a bunch of PLEX on the in game market it could take the ISK it gets and either “sequester” it or even destroy it. The problem is that creating a PLEX simply to sell on the in game market in this fashion does not result in money for CCP. They could use any PLEX they obtained from a seized account which was presumably paid for at some point, but that is probably not that large a quantity of PLEX. I suppose…CCP could create new PLEX that is equal to PLEX that are destroyed in game as well. They did get money for those.

Lastly, there are only a few things PLEX are good for. Extending game time and converting ISK in Aurum. The exchange rate was pretty bad for the later, not sure if that is still the case. Also, some players use PLEX as a hedge against inflation if they are going to be leaving the game for a period of time. Those are about the only uses for PLEX and none of those uses really drive up the price of PLEX. Instead it has been most likely due the acceleration of ISK entering the economy. Imagine if you logged in one day and found 50 billion ISK in your wallet. Some other player just picked your name at random and dumped his ISK in your wallet. Would you possibly go out and buy a year’s worth of PLEX? Some players might. Now imagine EVERYONE getting extra ISK in their wallets. The price of many things, and especially PLEX would likely rise. Even if you didn’t spend all those billions buying and holding lots of PLEX till you can find a place to invest the ISK would not be a horrible idea.

Or Zimbabwe circa 2008 and 2009.

I am not a religious person, but Amen to that Gully.