Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Plexes are not available through normal game play. They must first be purchased with real cash through the account screen, and then added to game through the gift menu. It requires 100% player action and desire to spend real money on an in game item.

This is the only way a plex becomes available for a normal player to buy in game. And while yes A plex for ISK is a fair trade it still does not void the fact that a player can Buy a plex with real cash, and then in return for selling it in game receives a massive advantage in the form of plex over other people who can not afford to buy them.

This has been repeated over and over, if you still do not understand why a Plex is a pay2win Item, you need to google pay to win and read up on it and what classifies in game mechnic terms as such.

You will find that a Plex is in fact the very definition of a pay to win item, not simply a figment of our imagination.


And

Yes you are trolling. And you know it. I have seen your posts in other threads and I know you are intelligent enough to understand why this is the case.

You said:

A pay to win item is something that is purchased for real world currency, and gives the owner of it an advantage over other players.

I said:

A pay to win item is something that is purchased for real world currency, and gives the owner of it an advantage over other players.

A Plex:

A. Is bought with real world money, this is the only way to attain one. All Plexes in game were purchased with RL Money.

B. By being Sold "For ISK" Allows the player to attain an Unfair advantage over other players. (Due to the Value and ISK amount being so High). The unfair Advantage being an ungodly sum of ISK which is enough to buy a full set of +5 Implants (Which cuts 90 days off training per year), or a Pirate Factions Fully Fit and Rigged battleship for example. Etc.

* Having a lot of ISK is an advantage in Eve, the more you have the easier it is for you to get by, just like real life.

* Why Mine? Why Mission? Why do anything except PvP? Just buy a few plex sell them for a few Billion Buy a 20 mil SP pvp Char, and fit him out with a T3 Crusier! All in a matter of minuets.

* Who cares that the average player can't afford to Buy plex and must work for weeks or months grinding ISK in order to do the same! Your rich buy a plex and hit the easy mode I WIN button!

C. Pay to win.

D. How is that^^^^^^ Not this: A pay to win item is something that is purchased for real world currency, and gives the owner of it an advantage over other players.

Plex represents game time... you purchase game time from CCP (ultimately) and they either apply that to your account, or allow you to have it as an in-game asset (PLEX).

CCP allows you to sell PLEX on the market, using isk as the currency.
CCP allows you to sell characters on the market, using isk as the currency.

From one view point, a wealthy person could buy a ton of plex on day 1, sell it on the market for a large amount of isk, and use it to buy a character and any assets they coveted. This is why you think it is pay2win. You are wrong.

Isk is only accumulated via grinding in game. Every 0.01 isk in game* represents effort put into the game by a player.
SP is only accumulated by training skills in real time. Every Skillpoint on every character* represents time spent by that character training.

*ignore christmas gifts, starting sp, reimbursements, or other sources of isk / SP. There are a few cases, but they are not relevant here!

While the wealthy person may get items/SP instantly from their perspective, from the overall game's perspective... they did NOT. That isk, and those SP (on a character) were already earned via in-game processes that took the efforts of other players. PLEX is a tool that allows players to trade the efforts they put into the game for more subscription time. There is NO PAY-TO-WIN here.

Now.... back onto topic... HELL NO to SP redistribution.

It doesn't matter if CCP changes the game and makes your old ships less effective. You've already benefited from the SP you have. That is what you got for your investment. At no point do the SP you have acquired now guarantee your current in-game expertise will still be FOTM. Since the creation of this game, CCP has been changing stats of ships, game mechanics, etc, etc, etc.... That's how they keep the game going strong and alive, it's how they retain players. In a game with regular major expansions, things change... a lot!!! It's absolutely ridiculous that you think CCP should allow you to instantly respec your skillset to be top-of-the-line with the next FOTM.

In the end, your entire argument comes across as a bratty child throwing a temper tantrum over having M&M's instead of a snickers bar when they CHOSE the M&M's in the first place. As I'd tell any child, I don't care if you suddenly crave caramel and peanuts... STFU and live with your choices...

huh....

I'm explaining the macro-economic principle: PLEX do not add, nor remove, isk and/or SP from the game. In comparison, most other pay-to-win games add Skillpoints, or Certpoints, or game-changing items directly into the game economy for RL money. In EvE, only game time is added to the "economy" for RL money... Somewhat uniquely, that gametime can then be traded to other players that want the gametime and are willing to give away the work they've already put into the game for it.

For Clarification, Plex is NOT related to ISK inflation. Isk Inflation is determined on a Macro-economic scale by the influx and outflux of isk, as well as the influx and outflux of goods, and the value added to goods from in-game services (like manufacturing, logistics, etc). We get various production indexes from these macro perspectives. Inflation has everything to do with the VALUE of ISK, and very little to do with the value of PLEX (although it is a coveted good that is a minor part of the overall equation). When isk is plentiful and very easy to accrue (from isk faucets), then the value isk falls and the energy put into acquiring resources becomes worth more isk (inflation) (and vice versa).

Plex is primarily a MICRO-economic product. The price of plexes is determined almost entirely by supply and demand. When there are a lot of plexes, and/or not a lot of people paying for their accounts via plex... plex prices drop. When there is a shortage of plex, and/or more people paying for their account via plex... plex prices rise.

Now, interestingly, the availability of plex is uniquely coupled to the RL economy, because the total amount of game time purchased from CCP is directly related the disposable income of the player-base, but that doesn't make PLEX a macro-economics entity.

What's your point?

The discussion is not about whether it is fair.
The discussion is not about whether it threatens game balance.
The discussion is not about whether or not this is a sustainable game model for a company.
The discussion is about whether or not a person can pay money to instantly gain a significant advantage in Eve.

And the answer is yes, they can.

Step 1) Drop $1000 on PLEX
Step 2) Buy an insanely good character and a fully fitted supercarrier or some ****, in less than a day.
Step 3) Go kick somebody's ass that you were unable to kick previous to step 1 (assuming you have a basic understanding of the game)

$$$$ led directly to ass kicking
Thus, "pay to win"




This is not a difficult concept.


Um yes it does. In the term "pay to win," both nouns refers to the same character: one particular human, only. They're the ones paying and the ones winning. It's all from their perspective, not the universe's.

Are you suggesting that "pay to win" means "The entire game community can pay to increase their average wealth?" Because if so, that's really dumb and trollish. Not gonna lie.

Lets look at a distinct case of P2W.

OK, an Item is provided for real world currency that is not attainable through any other means.

We'll say A battlecruiser.

Now, this battlecruiser can't be extremely powerful because this would negate balance and everyone would spend real money for that one ship. It needs to be destroyable because that is Eve.


However, this one ship is more powerful than other battlecruisers. It's basically a Pirate battlecruiser as an example.

Now, this is P2W because that player attained an item that is more powerful than comperable ships, but did so with real world currency.

Now, if the player sells that item, did he still pay to win?


YES

How?

Well, that specific ship wasn't "winning" for him.

Many people understand winning to be beating a boss, completing a game, getting the highest score, defeating your opponent, etc. etc...
However, "WINNING" can really only be determined by your goals.

If you went to a soccer match and lost, well, the other guys won, but if you went to the soccer match and your goal was to play your hardest, then as long as you completed that goal you won. Reguardless of what the score board says.

This is Even more so in Eve.
You can't win the game, so winning for you may be buying a new ship, having the skills needed to fly a ship, building up a powerful force, establishing a WH corp, or even more direct forms of winning such as defeating an opponent, forcing another corp to disband, ganking a miner, getting the highest priced killmail and/or podmail.


The PLEX program can give you an advantage towards attaining these goals by allowing you to trade that PLEX with another player for isk, which can be used to purchase ANYTHING.

So, what is the difference between this, and purchasing(with real money) a ship that is more powerful than comperable ships and selling it?

Well, the difference is, there is no difference.

Purchasing a PLEX is paying to win.

Lets say you wanted to flood the market with PLEXes in order to drive down the market costs, so you sign into the account screen and buy 100 PLEX with your tax return.

You can pile them up as a group and sell the at 300 mil each. Well, there's bound to be someone that's going to buy you out and put them back on the market at a higher price, but, there's also the chance that someone rich enough wouldn't come along in time and other players would come along and try to beat you in order to sell their PLEX in order to get fast cash.

Assuming the later of the two was the one that happened, then technically, you just won at your goal.

You could have spent isk on those PLEX, but if you wished to keep your isk instead of losing it, then purchasing them with real cash essentially allowed you to pay to win.

Reguardless of what you do with the item, and whether or not someone else spent time attaining isk to trade with you, or spent time building up the character you are trading the isk for, the point is YOU were only able to attain these items without the time investment because you spent real world cash.

If the PLEX program wasn't available there would be only 2 other ways you could have accomplished this goal.

1) Spending the time necessary to earn the isk to purchase the items you wanted and attain the SP you needed.

2) Be lucky enough to befriend a vet of Eve who doesn't want to maintain 8 accounts anymore and decides to give you one for free with everything you want.


In the case of number 2, this is just a gift. You're not paying to get ahead, you just got lucky in who you knew and being in the right place at the right time.


In the case of number 1, you earned all of this through traditional manners which took time and effort.

With the plex program it doesn't require any investment into the sandbox by you, other than the amount of time it takes to sell the PLEXes..

This is paying to win no matter how you look at it.

Do you have ANY ideas that aren't mind blowingly terrible?
Games that have re-specs have them because you CANNOT master everything on a single character.
EVE does not have re-specs because you CAN master everything (eventualy) on one character.
Additionaly, unless you stupidly limit yourself to only flying ONE ship and doing ONE thing with that ship. The amount of skills you never use is tiny. (it also helps that the majority of skills in EVE are support skills that help multiple ships/activities)

All of this is circumvented by the "diminishing returns" of higher meta equipment.
Example: an imperial navy heat sink is easily 10x the cost of a t2 heat sink, but it is certianly not 10x as effective.
The super short version of what I'm getting as is that while you CAN pay a stupid ammount of rl iskies to get plex and then sell them for in game iskies, then buy a rifter and fit it with officer mods. The chance that those officer mods would enable you to win a fight THAT YOU WOULD HAVE OTHERWISE LOST is nill.

No one will ever be able to train every skill in eve to 5, and even if they could, CCP would introduce new skills in order to keep this from happening.

That said, allowing a reallocation once, or even once a year, is no different than the example you give.

No one in Eve will ever master everything, and every once in a while it's nice to change things up.
I have lots of sp in caldari ships and missiles.
Why is it wrong for me to want to change things up and try something different?

In Eve our heads are basically computers.
We can inject skills into our memories and learn how to use them without any direct training.
We can alter our attributes to suit our needs.

This is basically like saying that I can alter what makes me, me.

So, why can't we alter our memories so that we can focus them into something else?



How about this as an added penalty... any skills to which sp is removed from reducing the skill below lvl 1 will cause a loss in that skill from memory thus destroying that skill from injection, and you must inject the skill to which you wish to apply the sp into.

In other words, you lose the book you had, and have to buy the new book.

So train for it. You (should) already have all/most of the support skills so it won't take long to be able to train into that "new thing". Meanwhile the skill system prevents me from becoming the master of "insert activity here" and removing any chance of a newbie ever out specializing me "which isn't hard to do, my sp is all over the place", AND the current lack of "re-specs" prevents newbies from doing something idiotic with their skill points.