EVE General Discussion

PLEX is an object that can access a few services, but it doesn't make it something that will make it a liability on the balance sheet.

Shop gift cards are an IOU and have a monetary value which will effect a balance sheet. But I just don't see that with PLEX.


I say with PLEX, PLEX isn't an IOU, it's an object that can be used in several ways. When buying PLEX that is what you are buying, the PLEX. Because other than the initial payment to buy the PLEX it's only dealing in virtual currency. PLEX can move between multiple players before it is used where it is removed from the game.

The gift card still has a monetary value, a debt the company/group is obligated to fulfil.

Game time - can cost anything CCP sees fit either real currency or isk (PLEX). Although they have to try and stay competitive as well as profitable.

Aurum - You can buy it with real currency, but can you sell it for real currency? No.


CCP put a sales price on PLEX when they sell them (whatever they feel is the right price). But when you redeem the PLEX into the game their value is isk and what that value is depends on the in-game market.

You can make comparisons between isk and real currency and some people do. But that doesn't change the fact that they're still only worth isk.

It is very much the same. Somebody gave CCP money in exchange for a promise game time. CCP owes game time to whomever redeems that promise irrespective of it being the original buyer or somebody he sold it to for ISK.

In any event…given we are arguing over a technicality relating to PLEX, I think it is safe to say the OP’s original concerns are not really valid.

As for devaluing SP, if anything this change is more likely to work in the opposite direction. A very wealthy player who wants to get to the end of a skill he did not previously have he may very well “sink” a lot of SP out of the game making the remaining SP in the game more valuable not less.

As for limits and regulation of a new market….having worked in an industry that is very, very heavily regulated my initial reaction is, “NO!” Either come up with a compelling case as to why because such a regulation could set up the very thing I mentioned earlier, that it ends up inadvertently benefitting one group of players over all the rest and destabilizing the game.

Many of the fears expressed by people are almost child-like. People having hysterics over the super-rich parading around their 300 million SP characters and….???? We have no idea how liquid the SP market will be. We can look at the character bazaar, but that information is not easily quantified and is likely only a subset of characters being bought and sold. Other markets that are similar, such as the AUR token market in Jita is not very liquid at all.

Further, while there might be some players who have characters they’ll be willing to drain SP from, to some extent it will depend on the details. Suppose you have mining V on your PvP character and want to get rid of it…well you won’t be able to fill up a SP extractor/injector with that. It is just 256,000 SP. Can you still use the extractor or do you need to find another 244,000 SP you need to drain? Is there another 244,000 SP on that character to drain? I don’t plan on draining many currently trained skills on my characters, even one’s that after say changes to carriers might be far, far less useful or even useless, at least not right away. Because if skill for using capital remote reppers goes away entirely…will CCP reimburse players with free SP….or not and leaving our only choice SP extractors? And to continue extracting SP from most if not all of my current characters you’d have to pay me ALOT of ISK—i.e. I am not going to a seller, and given my main and alt SP levels probably not much of a buyer either, so I won’t be helping to make that market liquid.

If the market is illiquid then the fears of 300 million SP characters strutting around in droves is just not going to happen. Even if the market is fairly liquid given one will have to sink far more SP out of the game than they are injecting into their character it is unlikely to be a sustainable or wide spread practice. So not only do we know to what extent there will be a sudden surge 300 million SP characters, the next question is…what is the effect on the game. A 300 million SP character is not going to be better than 5 50 million SP characters for PvP. In such a contest my money will almost always be on the 5 players with their 50 million SP characters.

And just to be clear, I am not a fan of this proposal. It could turn out to be great. New players can buy SP at a much lower out of pocket cost to get to an SP level that really opens up the game. Older players who sell the SP get more ISK and more people to interact with in the game, and it is all daisies, sunshine and rainbows….or it could work out in an unexpectedly bad way as I wrote here. Making big changes to a complex system can often have serious unintended consequences.

Apologies for the wall of text.

You can be stupid with gift cards like that too. If you have a walmart gift card and your house burn down, walmart won't accept your claim that you had a gift card in your burning house and so won't give you stuff for it's value. The exact same that happen if you cart your PLEX in a badger and get blown up.