EVE New Citizens Q&A

Played a while back. Thinking of coming back. Confused by the subscription options.

The Add Game Time page shows:

1 month $14.95 ~~~ 6 months $71.70

The PLEX page shows:

1 PLEX $19.95 ~~~ 6 PLEX $104.97

If there any functional difference between paying straight up for game time subscription or buying then using PLEX, other than the fact that PLEX can be traded in-game?

Because that's a sizeable difference in price otherwise. Or is "Game Time" something funky that doesn't actually mean subscription?

Plex can be sold in-game for ISK, which I would hazard is more common a use than directly being used for game time.
If you want to subscribe, buy game time. If you want a PLEX you can sell in-game (or use for other things in-game), then buy PLEX

There is no functional difference between paying with plex or with real money as far as adding game time to your account is concerned.

Plex on the other hand can be bought for ISK in game which essentially makes it possible for you to play the game using someone else real life cash money.

Simplifying somewhat, IMHO there are ONLY TWO PURPOSES FOR PLEX and new players need to be taught this somehow because it's really confusing to people.

Deal with PLEX in the following two cases only (as a new player at least):

1) You want a huge amount of in-game Money (ISK). (Buying in-game money for Real Money)

In this case you buy a PLEX from CCP for $19.95 (or $17.50 each for bundles of two or more, no discounts beyond this for larger quantity purchases) and you receive them in game through Redeem Items (or the character select screen). You then sell it on the market for around one billion ISK.

The actual in-game value of a PLEX in ISK fluctuates over time as it's all player-to-player transactions and depends on how many people want Real Money -> ISK vs. ISK -> Subscription.

Note that there's a one-hour delivery delay after you pay for your PLEX before it shows up in game. Also note that if you buy a multi-PLEX bundle, it arrives as a single Redeemable Item and must be redeemed all at once in one place!

You can redeem the item at any station (wherever you're at) and, as everyone will tell you, you never want to travel with a PLEX in your cargo hold, because people WILL scan you and gank you and they have a 50% chance of getting your PLEX and you have 100% chance of losing your PLEX, your ship, and will be out the $20 (no refunds, no replacement). So you want to go to the place you are going to sell your PLEX (currently Jita and Amarr seem to have the best prices with high volumes) before you redeem it.

Note that when you look at the market you will see both buy and sell orders, and there will by typically 50-100M ISK difference (could be more) between them. In order to get the higher value equivalent to other sell orders, you need to create your own sell order, putting your PLEX up for sale at the price of your choosing. This will require something like 68M ISK (I forget exactly) from you to pay the escrow and broker fees, so the first rude surprise will be that you can't sell your PLEX on the market for a high price if you have no ISK to begin with. There's also no guarantee your PLEX will sell for the amount you ask, or how long it will take, and in a buyer's market people will immediately start undercutting your price so you might have to wait a while before you're rich.

You can however sell instantly to any buy order covering your station. In that case the fees will all be taken out of the transaction rather than needing to be bought up front. You will get a bit less, but you can be (almost) a billionaire in seconds.

It's also possible to sell PLEX one-on-one with someone in the same station, but this is risky and in general the last thing you want to do is pay attention to anything said in Local in a trade hub :) You can also sell them via Contracts which only have a 10,000 ISK setup fee, but fewer buyers may look in Contracts.

2) You're rich in game with billions of ISK and want to pay for a month of your subscription with ISK instead of real money.

In this case you simply buy a PLEX off the in game market from someone who bought it for real money for purpose #1 above. You then right click it and activate it and boom, you're a Subscriber (Omega clone state) for 30 days from the moment you activate it.

Note that you're not getting a "free subscription", since some other player paid at least $17.50 in real money for that PLEX you're buying, so CCP does even better off of "Plexing" players than they do off of regular subscribers, and thus CCP loves when people pay for their subscriptions with PLEX. You don't have to worry that if everyone did it the game would be in trouble.

You can actually do three different things when you activate a PLEX. You can get 30 days sub on the current character, you can donate the play time to another character (your own alt account say, or use this method to pay for a friend's account), or you can use it to activate a month of multiple-character training so that two characters on the same account can train at the same time (even subscribers normally only get to have one character on an account with an active training queue).

Two PLEX can be used (are needed) for the account-to-account character transfer process, used to split or merge accounts or to buy and sell characters.

*) If you are a new player and you just want to be a subscriber and have "Omega" features, then just pay for a subscription, you do not need to do anything with PLEX.

The game refers to a "Pilot's license" and "Omega" or "Omega Clone State" and PLEX is a "Pilot's License EXtension" and people get the idea that they "Need a PLEX to buy Omega" etc. But really it's just that "Omega" means you're an active subscriber, and PLEX is ONE way to pay for that (the most expensive and complicated way if you want to pay with real money).

If you want to be "Omega", just go to the eveonline.com site and log into your account and see what the current subscription offers are. Right now it's between $11 and $15/month (vs at least $17.50 using PLEX) to pay for a month of subscription, depending on how many months you pay for in advance. Right now the deal is you get some multiple-character training time if you buy a multi-month subscription. Last month they had deals as low as $8.25 for Alpha players subscribing for the first time.

You can pay online direct to CCP using Visa, Mastercard, American Express, or PayPal.

STEAM

Note that if an account was created through Steam, you can buy PLEX, subscriptions, etc. through Steam as well. So far the pricing seems to be the same as the regular site, but special offers can vary. You can create a regular CCP account name and password for a Steam account (and then buy PLEX and subscribe directly I believe), but you can't convert a regular account into a Steam account as far as I know.