EVE General Discussion

More likely he bought them with a stolen credit card / hacked paypal account and is using plex to launder the transactions because he knows the buyer has zero recourse to get a refund for digital goods when the plex turn out to be fake/no good.

Its like isk seller scams, if they don't deliver who you going to complain to? Ccp? You were breaking their EULA

No one's going to stop subscribing and switch to making ad-hoc AUR purchases just because they're only a bit more expensive. The idea is to get the ad-hoc purchasing guys to come back by offering them better value.

I'm not reading anything about those selling plex, just about those buying them. So let's theorize a bit about that other side, the supply side.

The plex system is beautiful exactly because of it's simplicity, and seems to have boosted CCP revenue far more than I thought it would back when the formalized GTC for isk trade was first designed and implemented. At the time I was a rather vocal proponent for the GTC trade system, since it evens the playing field and opens up revenue stream left untapped for decades within MMO's, in a way that isn't unfair and benefits game companies and communities.
It seems to have worked even better than I imagined it would for CCP, seeing how their subbase skyrocketed.

Now, as to what to make of the high plex prices at this time. Since we don't have the figures on reveue streams CCP has we can only guess. My guess however is that what we should be reading into the sudden rise of plex prices is something like the following:

Let assume for a minute that over the last decade, CCP revenue has shifted from an equal distribution according to amount of subs held per person to a far more uneven distribution in which one part of the playerbase is rich in time, poor in cash and another part is poor in time but rich in cash and funds the former. Therefore: the latter is now responsible for a far larger amount of total CCP revenue than the former. Maybe it even goes as far as that 80% of CCP revenue comes from just 20% of it's unique account holders. A rather bold and extreme assumption, but let's assume for the sake of argument.

And let's also assume that the average spending behaviour of these cash rich but time poor 'spenders' has remained fairly constant in the last year, as has the behaviour of the time rich but cash poor "players'.

From these assumptions it follows that PLEX prices are more then just a market statitic, but also reflect shifts in the distribution within the total player base: where low plex prices in isk indicate that there's relatively many 'spenders' and high plex rates in isk indicates there's relatively few of them and far more 'players' that would rahter spend time to earn isk and buy their plex.


Considering that logic and the earlier assumptions about constant behaviour and that 80/20 distribution of revenue over players, what can be conclud from the observation that PLEX market value in ISK tripled in a short period of time?

Right: that in the months leading up to this price hike CCP lost not just a fairly large numbers of subs due to cancellations, but more importantly: lost those subs in that part of it's player base demographic that accounts for that relatively large part (my example: 80%) of their revenue.

It's just an example, but far from being worried about AUR effects and such trivial matters, thinking along these lines makes me extremely curious about CCP's revenue data, about what is typical behaviour for the çash rich' player demographic, about what makes specifically those players happy and unhappy, about how aware CCP is of these matters (or not).

The game benefits from both cash rich and time rich, obviously. But where a drop off in low-revenue-associated player numbers would be worrying, a significant drop off in high-revenue associated players is downright threatening. The former could impact total revenue, but would not neccesarily do so or might even lead to a higher total revenue since getting less isk for your plex might result in you selling MORE plex so you still gain the same amount of isk in game in total, and so CCP would actually be getting more cash because the number of players demanding plex on the ingame market dropped.

However, the latter shift, where it's the high-revenue-associated players that are cancelling will always hurt total revenue, and much more than would be reflected by just the amount of active accounts or logged in players would suggest to us on the outside of things.


I'm so curious now... would really love to see that data and figure out of this correlation does exist and wether it is meaningful or not. CCPs choice to regulate gametime-based-RMT in the way it has was pure brilliance at the time and an exiting experiment that must have paid off far beyond expectations. I wonder what has been learned from it and wether or not these changes or shifts in playerdemographic and behaviour that I describe here are real of just my imagination.

i like to buy plex so i can sell them for isk.

I like isk

farming isk is for poories

As for the "think of all the poor students!!!" argument... Paying for your sub is roughly the price of one beer a week. I'm pretty sure you can afford that. if not, I would suggest getting a small job that fits alongside your studies (plenty of work for an hour or two a week available.)

The "problem" with high PLEX prices appears to be on the supply side. It is simply too easy to get the ISK to fund your pvp needs (incursions for example) so nobody is putting down real cash and selling PLEX. On the other hand, demand is ever increasing due to all the new options. Fixing PLEX prices artificially will probably only reduce the supply, as people will simply stop selling.

Skipped to keep it short

The idea about "donaters" leaving makes a lot of sense, and can be part of the issue. And thanks for confirming my estimations and guesses otherwise. I haven't looked at that side of the problem, though... Considered it +- homogenous.

what we need is a nice war, wars always solve monetary problems, help the economy, lift the team spirit, bring publicity.

war is such a nice thing to have ... ingame of course.

I've personaly knows 2 people who are not playing anymore (we start as a 3 person team in EVE), both of them brough their first plexes for 250mil, both of them every time i'm trying to get them back - ask me for PLEX price, and after answer "something around 1.3bil" telling me to gtfo.

You are correct that there was only p2p MMOs back in our days :), however EvE is already have all properties of a f2p model (selling skins and cosmetics technically for RL money), but still have a subscription.

And i'm crying inside when even shitiest random MMO have "active players" 10 times more than EvE (and i can't even get back 2 of my friends). The MMOs market have a LOT of products and there is not enought to just be "best MMOs on the market" when you actively loosing one, very imporant component (the first M) "Massively". And PLEX prices (and the subscription as a thing) are definately not helping bringing back some players (or even convince new ones to try EvE and "pay" for subscription and "pay' for skins/cosmetics). Because of PLEX prices it is not managable for more and more players every time they break a new "line", someone leaved when it growed up to 400mil, someone at 800mil, someone now at 1.3bil, but everytime EvE is losing a bit of players because of this.

Been said but will say again. It's just all around too easy to generate income in this game. When everyone is a billionaire, a having a billion bucks is like having nothing.

It's about to get worse. CCP is talking about a Tribute system that rewards people for completing deadspace sites (missions, plexes etc). 8 years ago when i started playing I would have been like "cool, more isk", now I'm like "blegh, too much isk".

Of course 8 years ago there was no way to make a billion isk in a day using mostly frigate sized ships. Now there is.

If you stop being poor and stop buying PLEX the price will go down!

However I like buying PLEX and selling them too you, So please keep buying them!

I cant wait till i can sell 5 plexes for 2bill a piece!