Player Features and Ideas Discussion

So you haven't been keeping up with the latest Subscription stats, the Eve News, or even the gossip, not to mention, you do not understand population demographics.

People will quit Eve Online & people will die, the numbers are already in decline. If no one new comes, it will survive until the there aren't enough players to keep anyone coming back, including you.

Survival is not the issue, flourishing is. It is no more the private universe of all you OF than it is mine, you have no more right to it than I, regardless of time playing the game. I paid, I am equal to you or and better if you PLEX out, period!

And without the continued support of people that actually PAY real outside world cash, the game cannot and will not survive, so it is really not from the old players, but from the NEW


New Players always pay for the Old Players play!

Seriously, where do people come up with this idea that plexing isn't paying?

You know those things aren't generated out of thin air, right?

If you purchase PLEX with ISK it does not generate REAL cash for the Owners, so it cannot be considered the same as "paying" with cash.

I don't know how anyone else views their $, but I earned the money in my pocket, you want it, you give me what I WANT FOR IT, not what you want to offer. You can pay for what YOU want yourself. By entering into a PUBLIC Business, it is assumed you are selling items the PUBLIC wants.

The game was originally designed by getting a Consensus of what the Players wanted, so why is it ridiculous to want to know and to alter the game as what the MAJORITY wants, not the few Elite, that is why our world is dying right now, are you the Rothchild or Rockefeller of Eve Online?

I am the new subscriber, I want Name Change, Fully Customizable, able to Invent new Tech (not just upgrade existing Tech), able to fly multiple ships at ONE TIME. And I will fight, push, bribe, plead, petition, threaten, extort and beg to make all of these things happen ASAP, for my enjoyment (as you don't care about mine I certainly can't care about yours) you've had 10 years, time to give us our turn.

The sole source of PLEX is people who have bought them with cash. The sole reason to buy plex with cash is to sell them for ISK. There's little/no other reason to buy a plex with cash. Directly subbing my account is, in fact, about $5/mo cheaper than it would be if I bought a plex with cash and then applied it.

People who buy plex with ISK, therefore, create the demand that encourages other players to buy plex with cash, at a premium, and in advance. Without people paying ISK for them, nobody would ever buy a PLEX.

So, yes, it is very much the same thing to CCP, from an accounting perspective.

No one is buying plex in-game? Really?

I guess that's why there are absolutely no buy orders for them in any of the major market hubs, right?

You just failed Econ 101.

Prices are that high because there is either a limited supply of PLEX in the game or high demand for them.
Since there seems to always be PLEX on the market, we can assume that supply is not the issue.
This means that the price of PLEX is largely driven by demand.

Until demand drops or a supply glut occurs, prices won't drop.

Well, there IS a limited supply of PLEX in the game that is on the market at any given time. But yeah, the price is most likely high due to demand. People often make the following mistake:

“My God the price is high, that means people will not be buying as much!!!!”

That is called reasoning from a price change. Problem is we don’t know why the price is high. Could it be a supply shock—i.e. a sudden drop in the supply of the good in question? Sure. But…it could also be due to a surge in demand. For example, if I told you, “The price of gasoline has gone up $0.5/gallon.” Was that price increase due to supply or demand changing? What if it were later spring/early summer? The….so called “driving season” here in the U.S.? That is the price increase is mostly due to an increase in demand AND people are actually buying more gasoline…which is why the price went up.

Most people cannot seem to reason with supply and demand very well, IMO. They often fail at distinguishing a shift in the demand curve--which holds other important variables constant--with a movement along the demand curve. That is, demand is usually graphed as a function of price alone. However, demand is also a function of income. The demand curve you draw on a piece of paper with price on the vertical (y) axis and quantity on the horizontal (x) axis is the locus of points showing demand for each price level….holding income constant! Change income and that line you drew will have to move to the right (and increase in income) or decrease (a reduction in income).

Similarly for the supply curve. Supply is the horizontal sum of the suppliers' short run marginal cost curve…which holds the prices of the other inputs constant. Change one of those input prices and the entire supply curve with itself shift to the right or left depending on a input price decrease/increase, respectively.

So the very notion that the price of PLEX is so high that nobody is buying them is assuming that the high price of PLEX is purely a supply phenomenon…but that assumption also has an implication…that the price will start to fall. There are lots of PLEX sitting on the market and not selling. The solution is to…lower the price.

Further, I bet if we could get our hands on the data I bet we’d find that many of the sellers of PLEX are…wait for it…wait…noobs. They want to get a pile of ISK, but don’t want to grind for it. So they buy PLEX and throw them up on the market for people who are ISK rich (maybe RL cash poor, or just don’t know what to do with their vast pile of ISK, etc.). In fact, some indirect evidence for this is that many of the characters bought on the Character Bazaar are in fact “new” players. Chances are these players have not ground out 30-40 billion ISK in a 2,3, or even 6 months. They probably got out the credit card and bought 30 PLEX, sold them for about 35 billion and then toddled over to buy a character…which requires an additional PLEX for the transfer, IIRC.

Another bit of evidence supporting my position is that whenever CCP has a OoG sale on PLEX the price in game drops.

In other words, my guess is that CCP is selling lots of PLEX, and you are quite simply wrong.

Ahem...you mean accounting mumbo-jumbo.

You are correct, though that I believe CCP counts an unused PLEX in game as a liability on its books (deferred income).

So with the arguments made, the op selling the character so someone else can have a "character whose name is close to mine" and can get what they want, ccp gets plex used up which is good for everyone, and no names need be changed in game. Wins all around, apart from brand new players wanting to make everybody's work a better place, according to their fotm ideals.

And an admittedly redundant thread can be closed, which is the most winning part of this thread.