It’s a good video to watch. It help explains the challenges game designers face in keeping their currency from over inflating. It will also help explain why PLEX will hit 5M ISK per, one day.
Enjoy!
Post Script added: any mention of RMT in this thread is only ancillary to the discussion of EVE’s economy, PLEX prices and what it could mean for Omega players.
I HIGHLY DISCOURAGE ANYONE FROM EVEN THINKING OF GETTING PLEX IN A WAY THAT VIOLATES CCP’s EULA, ToS etc!!!
I am truly sorry but who cares what price PLEX hits.
If you can’t afford one account with IRL cash then budget it in. If you choose to play Omega using PLEX then you will have to work harder and spend more to play Eve Online.
Personally if PLEX hits 2.5bil for 500, w00t quite frankly. More ISK for me to blow on PvP ships
There’s a big picture to this lesson, and that is paying subscription time with PLEX should stop. PLEX should only be used to buy ISK. This would be one way to remove the incentive for botters to bot for a gazillion ISK, buy PLEX and the sell PLEX on the black market for real money.
CCP should make buying subscription time only with real money, and cut out the competition to their bottom line. Alphas can still enjoy a free game but if they want to be Omegas they should pay with real money and not with PLEX.
You would be surprised. Many people.
PLEX being more expensive means less characters in game, because peope could not afford multiple alts, it means more bots, that means empty space filled with RMT and game dying. Its repeat of the situation with chinese server.
Honestly, it starts to look exactly like there.
Unfortunately, I believe the horse is already out in the pasture as you are closing the barn door.
In EVE terms, that Blockade Runner has already entered warp.
But why else would people buy PLEX if not for game time? Except if CCP starts selling SP directly from the NEX store (I expect CCP to introduce the daily omega injector soon™).
CCP has never been particularly interested in chasing bots. I strongly suspect there are subscriber number targets in their deal with PA, and allowing massive fleets of bots to exist is probably the easiest way to inflate subscriber numbers, so expect botting to go wild.
Why else do you buy PLEX? Sigh, if anyone reading this doesn’t know the answer I envy your innocence. Virgin eyes and ears can skip my post.
People farm (or bot) to put their unused computers to work getting massive amounts of ISK. There’s another post here in general discussion where I explain how I saw one guy botting about 1.7 trillion isk a month.
This isk is used to buy PLEX. But seriously, 1.7 trillion isk will buy 450,000 plex…enough to plex an account for years (off of one month of botting). What is this person(s) doing with all that other PLEX?
Selling it on the black market. In other words converting their computer time to real money.
RMT sites, and other places will pay you for your in-game assets in real world currency. That means if I had enough free computers, I could set up a bot farm and go off living my life while my bots made me cash. In our example in my other post 1.7 trillion isk in a month is roughly worth about $15,000(usd) (at CCP’s sell prices). But we have to realize everyone is taking their cut here and there.
The 0.0 Alliance/Coallition is going to get the first cut for allowing you to operate in their space. Lets say they take 1/3.
Now the service that performs the actual conversion from in game currency to real currency needs to take their cut. Right now RMT sites are taking about 1/2. They are buying 1bil isk for $3 and selling 1bil isk for $6.
So what does that give us? In my example whoever was running those 8 super carrier bots out in NULL is currently paying about 600mil a month in rent to the alliance, taking 1.1tril a month to convert to cash and putting about $3500(usd)/mo in their pocket.
Maybe CCP believes it will defeat world poverty by leaving botters alone? I’m glad to think CCP is not the mafia then, because I think there would be some folks getting broken knee caps. 
I happen to think that removing the ability to buy game time as an Omega with plex will make Eve a better game. However CCP is likely very worried that there will be a big fall off in active players and for a while that certainly could be the case.
Feel free to talk about RMT sites existing in the world, but don’t link to them on CCP’s forums - they frown on this.
Oh that’s going to happen anyways, because PLEX will get priced out of the range of most player’s ability to purchase PLEX with the ISK revenue they make. That’s when players stop playing if they only have an incentive to play EVE only as Omegas and are faced with an ISK paywall.
RMT is a problem in general for all MMO’s, if game companies even think of it as a problem.
The purpose of this thread is to discuss EVE’s in-game economy, the increasing price of PLEX and what it could mean for Omega players who depend on ISK revenue to pay for their PLEX in-game.
This is the problem EVERYONE plays the game to PLEX accounts. Nobody plays the game itself. It’s all about creating havens to easily PLEX accounts. It should be skins/injectors only.
I didn’t link them. I put in their website address and their auto link system converted them to links. If they frown on this they should perform some sort of censorship on their own algorithms that they are using.
Now, if Plex were to cost 5mil per (2.5b per 500) then it would cost you $15 to pay for omega for a month with a risk of getting negative wallet/ban. Why risk when you can do the same and spend those $15 to get Omega by officially supporting the game? The more expensive Plex is - the less reason to go to RMT sites and risk an account, unless they decrease their prices in response resulting in less profit for both botters and RMT sites.
So you link a video about inflation in video games and then suggest devs to start printing ISK out of thin air for $ compared to current system where buying plex with ISK is actually an isk sink (sales and broker taxes).
Botters will bot and RMTers will RMT regardless of plex mechanics.
Because the botters don’t care if a player gets caught for buying PLEX from them, and they can always under cut the price that CCP sells their PLEX to attract them.
Furthermore, I would not be surprised if there are players who swear they will never give a dime to CCP because of spite. Maybe they are only a minority, but I think they can impact the game, and not in a good way.
Yes, but we also could talk sbout the severity of that problem.
If PLEX will go up on market, it means bad times for good, honest ratters and people plexing alts, and good time for those who bot ISK because they have less competition, less people chasing them and reporting, and can still make ISK by putting hundreds of bots in the game anyway.
nothing will change. If botters buy, for example, 90% of plex monthly and 10% goes to “honest ratters”, then if plex doubles the price these odds wont change except that both parties will buy half as much for the same ISK.
which means less profit for running that bot farm and at some point it might become unprofitable to bot at all (unlikely tho).
My suggestion is that CCP stops allowing PLEX to buy game-time. That’s at least half of the reason why demand on PLEX is driving in-game prices and why botters are stepping up to meet that demand.