EVE General Discussion

I'm fully in favor of all these changes. The Tippia tears alone would be worth it.

Except there won't be any Tippia tears, because if you can PLEX for SP, so can she. Which means Tippia keeps her so-called SP 'advantage' over you. Ironically enough, Tippia is very much in favour of helping new players advance in SP as efficiently as possible and maintains an excellent, widely-recommended skill plan without which many new players would be taking shots in the dark over where to go next.



The premise of this argument is that everything goes through plex and by virtue of that is available through isk. Let me know how you go with using said isk to accelerate your skill training right now. Your premise is false and in that, so is your argument. The bottom line is, all isk does for you right now is buys stuff on the market. Sure, you can load up on PLEX and faction fit a Tengu but you'll just wind up a shiny killmail for a dozen or so frigates, a few with neuts, the pilots of which could have half your SP, and who take you down just for the lulz of killing a faction fit Tengu. Sure, you can buy all the skillbooks you can carry, but you can still only fit so many of them in your training queue. The bottom line is, PLEX as it is is self-regulating. People who are doing well at EVE are more often than not using it to sub their account. People who are buying it for isk are not necessarily doing well at EVE because of that alone, or even as a small factor.

But if you turn PLEX into something that gives people the ability to pay for their advancement, you remove progression from the game. As I've stated before, if you're going to negate progression with such a move, you might as well just remove the system entirely, which then negates the need for PLEX for this purpose anyway. The only other time PLEX becomes useful in this regard is giving people with money an advantage, and that's the problem with pay-to-win. Although, I'd be welcome to a trial run of the system just so I could say 'I told you so' when the vets start plexing their own SP and stay ahead of the newbs anyway.

Which doesn't matter because someone still had to take the time to train that toon to fly a Tengu, and it also doesn't matter because having SP to fly a Tengu, whether fit well or not, is not the same thing as having the experience with one to know what you're doing with it.




Yes, I can, because if you can use isk to train SP then suddenly the bazaar fills up overnight with highly-trained toons that were PLEX-skilled. That over-abundance of PLEX-skilled toons will up the supply, lower the demand, and reduce the cost. You won't be making the game more competitive for new players, you will in fact be making it much harder. "But a new player can buy one of those toons!" Sure they can. Know how to use it? Given how many new players don't even bother to read the tutorials, what are you really expecting to happen?

EDIT: I also note that you're making the assumption that I support the character bazaar but, I don't remember explicitly or implicitly suggesting that at all.

You might not realise it, but you just hit the nail on the head. What you're telling me is that new players will have high-SP toons at their disposal without the experience to use them effectively, and veteran players will have higher SP toons with all the experience to use them effectively. So the argument that it makes newer players more competitive is naught. What can and would be demonstrated by this move would be a severe unbalancing in favour of the veteran players. Which is why I, as a veteran player, welcome it entirely.

But it would destroy EVE by way of attrition, and the newbs would be the victims.

Strawman. That's not what I said. If veteran players are using isk to boost their SP or buy more readily available high-SP toons out from under the new players, including their ability to PLEX-boost their own already high-SP toons, then you've got a whole other story, and that's what I'm talking about so please, try to pay closer attention to what I'm saying. You were so close to getting it a moment ago. The advantage new players game from this model is next to nothing compared to the advantage that veterans would gain.

Additionally, what you're saying here is that nothing would change. Am I right? If that's the case, then why make a change that achieves nothing?

I'm really quite surprised that anyone would want a model where you continuously pay for a video game just to get an advantage. Well... actually, no, I'm not, it's no different from the rich thinking their money should give them more privilege than anyone else, but I digress. The point is, and one that has been made repeatedly in the past and in this thread as well as demonstrated, that in its current form PLEX is not pay to win. I personally question the character bazaar model, but that's beside the point - just because something is bad for the game as it is, doesn't make "well since we're already here why don't we make it worse?" a good argument for implementing bad changes. I could use the same type of argument to support to complete and utter removal of mining from the game. Well, since we have npc's seeding blueprints already why don't they just seed the minerals as well? See how easy that is?

Although I don't have any particular problem with things as they are, this thread does bring up the point that I'd actually be happier if the Character Bazaar (as well as DUSTS booster packs) went away permanently.

I'm pretty sure that is the exact opposite of what the OP intended though.

Logical fallacy:

• More SPs don't automatically translate to more win
• We are only suggesting PLEX for more SPs
• Therefore PLEX for more SPs is not pay to win

Here's the problem. You want PLEX for SP so that a new player can quickly catch up to a veteran player. The new player can't, because she doesn't have "practical experience".

If new players can spend PLEX for SP then the veteran players can too. Except that the veteran players can bring more PLEX to the table than a new player generally can. This allows veteran players to suddenly create armies and armies of high SP pilots who also happen to be dangerous because the veteran player has lots of "practical experience".

So the question for you guys is.. do you want the game to be as hard as it is now? Or do you want the game to be 1,000 times as hard after your changes are implemented?

It's not, because the SPs that the character on sale have do not come from nothing. Those SPs accumulated like all other SPs in the game. You're paying to transfer a character so that you are an owner of the character with SPs that accumulated normally.

If you're in a corp and you move up the ranks, the corporation will make many resources available to you. You can use these resources to play the game better since now you can afford more. You're analogy is akin to saying that these newly bestowed resources is RMT because the character himself didn't work for it. No, the corp resources isn't RMT because some other pilot somewhere else legitimately earned that ISK.

It's *transfer* of SP, not *creation* of SP.

Logical fallacy, because it ignores a variety of factors like veterans ALSO plexing for SP. I might note that, as supporters of this idea so vehemently point out, and rightfully so, SP don't provide the pinnacle advantage in any given scenario. So if they acknowledge this is the case, then why do they need to accelerate it?

EDIT: I just read the rest of your post and realised you already said most of this. I'm getting a coffee before I post again.

This I agree with the above quote 100%