EVE General Discussion

Yes and no.
People who plexed alt accounts from the excessive isk , now need to farm much more or look for a plex somewhere else.

Maximum price for the plex is defined by CCP , and can vary much when you consider non USD/EURO currency based countries. For some people subscription is like 1 hour of work , for others it is like 1 day of work ( some parts of Russia, most of the China population , bigger part of Africa).

On the other hand ISK payout is the same all across the RL.
In order to earn for plex ( for RMT or not) you need :
( usually 1 char )
- 5 hours of running good higsec missions/ incursions
- 3 hours of running good nullsec missions
( per char)
- 2 hours running FW
- 1 hour running LVL 5 / good WH sites
- 7 hours of carrier ratting / smart bombing null anomalies ( selling escalations).


This calculation base on the assumption you know what you are doing , have skilled chars , and you want to do it.
Like you see there are many ways to abuse the system.

People ( teenagers ) coming from poor countries can make good , local, income by farming and selling plex.

Lets take into consideration FW ( low skill required , very small initial investment)
4 characters doing missions.
Farming 8 hours a day / 20 days in month.

Time needed to plex them : 8 hours.
Number of PLEX that can be farmed during rest of the time : (each char earning 4 plexes daily ) 19 * 4*4 = 304 plexes
Now take into consideration , that for some people 1 plex value is a 1 day income in poor countries.

You could say that i over estimated this values.
But they are real for people that know what they do.

Isk value of the plex is not important here , as long as there are big differences between EVE players RL income, and you can farm stuff for isk endlessly every day .

Not exactly, as more expensive plex makes people from rich countries to pursue ways to acquire cheaper way to play the game , and for people from poor countries there is no difference how expensive is plex in terms of isk , as long they can sell one at higher rate than base hour pay.

For example.
Person for UK , average play 5 hours a week.
Income 200mil / h

Plex price 500mil , time needed to farm one 2,5hours ( so only half of a weekly play time to pay for an alt account - acceptable for many people)
Plex price 1.2bil , time needed to farm one 6hours ( over a week of play time to pay for the alt plex)

If this person can get 2 PLEX for a hourly pay from other than CCP source it can think about pursuing it.
This is stupid , but again how many stupid things you can find on killboard, how many people get scammed every day in eve.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_average_wage

Look at this , and remember that average pay is not minimal pay , so in every country you will find people earning half of average pay.
Compare this to Plex price - and then think about all people running multiple carriers/FW/Incursions 23/7.

It looks like in Ukraine and in Russia there are people that earn enough to buy less than 10 plexes/monthly for a whole monthly pay.

10 plexes = 12 bilion.
People multi box FW bombers and make this kind of isk on a weekly basis.

Don't tell that possibility to earn in a week more than a monthly pay is not appealing to some people.

Lets not forget about players from this poorer countries - something that for UK players is incontinent - for them is much more harsh.
Keeping an alt account paid using $ for a total of a 1/5 of monthly pay is not an option.

So from my perspective , high in game plex price is actually promoting RMT transactions for poor player.
I always wondered how much PLEX is worth on the russian local black market.

The issue with PLEX is it has always had something of a "pay to win" component and a 14 year old kid from a country where an hours work at a gas station after school buys you a PLEX can afford to throw stuff away in PVP while a player from some other part of the world may be able to afford to pay for sub every second month if they are lucky.

That has not changed, its just the current higher PLEX prices have put the issue in the spotlight and also brought a lot of the "you suck for living in the wrong country if you have no money for subs go play some other game and stop annoying me" types out of the woodwork.

Really? PLEX is too high so ban CODE? The meta-gaming never stops...

First, if miners are really buying PLEX and selling it on the market for ISK to replace barges, that is actually lowering the price of PLEX. More supply = lower prices.

But really, if miners are buying PLEX to be able to afford mining ships they are doing it wrong. Mining is a PvE activity which is suppose to generate resources for the players. If they are losing more ISK mining than they are making from the resources so they need to buy a PLEX, they would be better just not mining at all.

PLEX prices are only on the way up. The ability to sell skill points will cause a proliferation in alt accounts that will be farmed mostly for SP, and used on the side for PI, industry, and yes, near-free gank alts for CODE. Right now you can plow PLEX into an alt-account for resale on the Character Bazaar, but with the SP change you can do that much more efficiently, and on a month-to-month basis so you can react to the market. Rich players will be basically subsidizing these huge alt farms needed to supply the SP demand, and these farms in turn will require large amount of PLEX to run which will send the price sky-high. Predicting how high is a fools game as it depends on how much these super rich players value SP, but judging from the prices of these Blood Raider Cerebral Accelerators, players are very keen to pay for SP. I would not be surprised at a doubling of PLEX prices within 3-6 months of SP extractors going into the game.

How da fuk do you make 200m per hour?

Simple stop paying stupid prices .. if you all just boycotted buying plex for a week or more prices will reduce.

That would work, but we need our subs running. We'd need some ways of informing EVERYONE to not buy PLEX, but that would include the sellers, so they would know the demand drop is temporary and not care much. So, this boycotte isn't that simple to arrange. It would work if we started selling PLEX directly to those needing it at a reduced price, without involving market, but I'm not that rich IRL. And that would require ways to inform people just as well.

Indeed they will, unfortunately Anthar was specifying hisec income at those numbers and time periods earlier in the thread, which automatically excludes FW and WH stuff.
I would love to see where he's pulling these numbers from; because while Incursions may well pay out on that level, lvl 4 missions, even including LP as income, generally do not.

So basically he's using an outlier as his benchmark for the income from missions, the truth is closer to 20 hours of hisec missions than it is 5.