Am hearing about players with over a dozen accounts, all PLEXed, which has me thinking on the ratios that suggest may under lie the market.
If we assume when someone does pay for an account, it is only to subscribe PLEX on one character. And at most, they toss an additional amount to buy a large injector a month. With the reality likely overlapping between subscription buyers, and straight PLEX buyers, being much more spread out and irregular month to month.
Does the ratio of Alphas PLEXing up ever get to a point where too many of them are chasing too few PLEX subsidizers that purchase with their out of game currency? More so, if those out of game currency purchasers drop off, leave Eve, for elsewhere, what is the knock-on effect? Does it start an unvirtuous feedback loop rather rapidly? Does the market have time to chew through PLEX reserves? Does CCP start central bank lever pulling by suppling the market PLEX?
CCP does interfere in the PLEX market - source they’ve said so at multiple fan fests.
CCP can utilise sales to encourage new Plex entering the market - self evident.
I did a count of PLEX reserves a.k.a subscription debt many years ago and CCP also account for ‘‘unfulfilled subscriptions’’, the count was enormous something like if everyone stopped paying there was enough PLEX to keep the PCU count sub’d for 3 years. I have no idea what it looks like now but you can do the math just by looking at the market which will be a tiny fraction of PLEX in the game.
The main issue that CCP has to manage is n+1 for any given activity, if you can do anything in Eve at tiny profit then you might as well multi box or bot the heck out of it, so CCP need to reduce the rewards to make it a tiny + sum game as the account multipliers are just so dam big.
That means casuals doing vanilla activity that is easily botted or multi boxed like null annoms or mining are likely to be moaning about terrible income as it is tailored for the dude multi boxing 35 accounts or has 100 bots running while activity that is less easily botted or multi boxed like Abysal grinds pay O.K for single accounts.
Recent poverty patching is an attempt to bring the subscription debt back to manageable levels & encourage purchasing of additional PLEX.