Player Features and Ideas Discussion

So we all know about the new PLEX system coming soon - it's a change many take issue with for lots of different reasons (the Vault being one of the biggest), and I've come up with what I'd personally have preferred in place of what's happening now. I know many might think otherwise, but that's why it's a "suggestion":

Instead of "PLEX", call the new currency a different name (there's no reason to call it a Pilot-License-Extension):

New (currency) would be tradeable on-market as with the current new system, & have an accout-wide "Vault"

Instead of using 500 "PLEX" to add 30 days of game time, spend 500 (currency) for a PLEX on the NES

A "PLEX" bought on the store would exist as an item, and not be reverse-redeemable for (currency):

The License Extension would be tradeable on-market, the same as other pilot services (e.g. Extractors/Resculpts)

The License can be activated to add 30 days of gametime to your account or to a chosen other character's account

The License would not be able to be safe in the "(currency) Vault", retaining the risk that comes with moving one

(This also preserves PLEX-tanking as a viable fitting option)

Additionally, an easy change for immersion's sake would be to change the New Eden Store's name:

The store might be called, for example, "The Empyrean Exchange - a joint service of CONCORD and Interbus"

This provides a more immersive and less jarring store, which makes more sense in-world

It also matches the idea of CONCORD providing the licenses and services available to "Empyreans"

Adding some personal bias into this as well, the new system makes PLEX feel worthless in comparison to the old system - the new icons seem cheap compared to the old & gold & valuable-looking one, and the images for purchase of the new PLEX on the online store are uncomfortably close to how lots of freemium or mobile games advertize their premium currency.

Thinking of why CCP may have gone with what they did for the new system, though, it seems like the new system's currency is only called PLEX for the sake of name recognition by players; if they took PLEX off the online store and only had this differently named currency, the "no more buying plex oh no! they're doing microtransactions CCP is bad!" crowd would likely be very vocal and backlash could occur, even if you could purchase a REAL PLEX in-game and trade it around exactly as before.

I'd personally be far happier with things changing to be more like what I described above - and I know it likely won't affect anything to suggest it here, but I've got some strong feelings about the new system and I know many others who feel similarly.

-Uriel

That's likely the point behind it. With these changes, you are supposed to hoard and buy lots of cheap, worthless currency to exchange it for money-grab-scheme items in their store in order to give them more money than they deserve from the subscription. CCP has been pushing hard into that same direction for a couple of years now. Instead of giving people more compelling reasons to subscribe, they go the way of clawing money out of the player pockets with cheap and largely useless items of questionable appeal and quality.

The money grab in this entire thing is that you get presented with items of questionable quality (the really lackluster Charon skins, for instance, which have severe defects) that cost or have cost you several months of game time in AUR value (the titan skins or special edition skins, for instance), although this has always been marketed as "micro transactions". CCP so far has also put very little effort into dispersing this false claim and only very recently started offering higher quality skins that actually deserve the title "visual improvement" as well as allow players to gain skins via playing the game, not via paying real money for them. I don't see how a reasonable person could not call this a money grab.

Aurum had an account wide wallet and I imagine the PLEX vault was the easiest way to consolidate the currencies without a lot of development effort. In my opinion both the more granular PLEX and the account wide PLEX vault are quality of life improvements to the game.

Skins and clothing are vanity items - 100% optional and they confer absolutely no gameplay advantage. A completely voluntary transaction where both parties perceive themselves better off - not a cash grab. Extractors confer no gameplay value by themselves - a player needs to fill them with earned SP. PLEX purchased from CCP and converted to ISK in game will let you buy shiny stuff but most players don't think of that as pay-to-win since the shiny stuff tends to explode unless you have the player skill to use it effectively.

Probably the one thing I see being unanimously requested.

Gotta second this. It's been requested a few times by a few people. Most really don't seem to care, and I've seen about an order of magnitude more discussion over whether or not the market history should be carried over, which indicates that the majority of players are fine with the name staying around, even if you can trade it for more things.

None of that is a money grab:

• I know people who quite like those Freighter skins. Also if you've missed it they've been going back and tweaking some of the older skins a little as models get updated.


• EoM and Kador skins have been requested for literally years, even before SKINs were a thing.


• The various faction shirts are fairly cheap in terms of AUR, as I said before you can see exactly what you're getting, you're not forced to buy anything, and if you don't want it you don't need to get it. Again, there are people who want this stuff and it helps pay for the development of the rest of Eve.


• There are plenty of clothing options available that are unique to the various empires and cultures.


• SKIN prices go up as the cost of the hull goes up. They're vanity items, if you can afford a Titan you can afford a couple of PLEX to make every Titan you'll ever fly a different color of shiny.

Seriously, this seems less like any actual criteria for a money grab and more than you don't like it so you're complaining, but saying "I don't like the available items on offer" is, for some reason, not something you want to express so instead you're calling it a money grab...

It really is, just because you think it's priced too high doesn't mean it's not a micro-transaction. $20 for a permanent cosmetic is no where near the most I've seen charged, and when you consider that it really is 100% permanent and can be bought with in-game money it's not even that much. Every micro-transaction model is going to have a different pricing setup, if CCP are selling SKINs and their internal metrics say that the model is working and meeting expectations based on their pricing structure then it's working fine.

That's been the EoM and Kador color scheme going back to basically the start of the game, if CCP changed it you can bet they'd get complaints. Yes, EoM used to have a more matte-black base, though the new look is metallic grey, not plastic. That's kinda down to personal preference though.

That's probably because modeling unique clothing for niche factions like the pirates is really really time consuming and isn't likely to have a great return on the time and effort spent. That's why all of the unique and faction specific stuff is for the base races. Not making stuff that won't sell well doesn't make the other stuff a cash grab, it's just smart time management.

I don't think it's that CCP doesn't care. They've put a *ton* of time and effort into developing their SKIN tech, and I'm sure there are artists at CCP who would love to spend more time doing more interesting clothing. The fact of the matter is though that the playerbase has indicated, strongly, that they don't want CCP to focus on anything WiS related at the cost of in-space features. So when you say "puts no effort into them" what the project manager in me sees is "doesn't allocate time away from other things for them" because it's not a case of effort, it's a case of time spent on that vs something else.

Want more interesting clothing? Poke the CSM, organize the playerbase, and get enough people together to show CCP that there's demand for iteration on WiS without another riot occurring.