So maybe lets just restrict disposable income in null and option to extract SP to a small amount of highly skilled characters, so SP farms will not be able to function. Because with current situation it is like system and some players themselves are excluding many people from the Omega status, and they stop playing and there is less people in the game and I think social games like EVE is are suffering very much from that.
CCP have to react if they want to keep more players in the game.
Absolutely agreed.
One point I would make regarding other uses is in skill extractors. Unlike skins, I would fathom that this is a significant sink of PLEX and absolutely contributory to value inflation, particularly as skill points can be sold for profit.
Ooo, I really like this notion! I hadnāt thought of it, but it makes sense as far as I can tell: make it a high-end thing to start extracting, maybe only extract from characters with minimum 20-25M SP (or maybe higher.) ALSO, make it so only characters with, say 5-6M SP or less can use injectors. Then you have a special premium ācatch-upā service for new players if they really want to skip the initial training (bad idea in my opinion - but let it be their choice!), and also it makes a big gap between producer and consumer, so that someone canāt just inject a new alt to the point where it can be turned into a SP farm.
Itās really too bad that the ISD locked my thread due to redundancy even though my thread was much more thoughtful and explainative then this shitty thread.
With that said here are my final thoughts.
Normal inflation of plex prices and people complaining is one thing, artificially inflating plex prices as a side effect of using plex for every cash shop item, is most likely an unintended side effect.
Eves claim to fame, quite literally is the fact that you could play enough in game in a month to afford your next month subscription with out having to pull out your debit card. That is becoming less of a reality for an ever growing percentage of the population due to artificial inflation and isk faucets in eve online.
Eve is only 13 years old, there is a lot to learn. Donāt be so quick to dismiss threads just because youāve seen them before, this is a critical issue that is facing the game and will be the death of the game. The moment itās not reasonable for people to earn a plex per month via casual game play will be the moment the game dies.
Why? How do you know this? Because the plex model is the only reason this game has stayed alive over the last few years, that coupled with gambling websites that drone tens of thousand of actual big plex sales over the years that is no longer there.
The moment that it becomes unreasonable for a normal person to get a plex via normal game play the less value a plex actually becomes, and it becomes a commodity for the rich and the elite. Which means it will get used less, traded less, and less exits the game. Ultimately plummeting the market driving the price down, YET at this point it could take years to reach, years.
The game has already had 9 years of inflation on plex since it was introduced.
Three things that hurt plex prices, skill injectors, isk faucets in sov space, and the shutting down of the gambling websites in game. Those sites brought in so much plex to the market that it helped keep the price down even though it was growing.
Iād dare say that if the gambling websites didnāt exist, from 2010+ Plex would be over 3 billion right now, thatās how much it helped keep the supply available to keep the price down.
Then you have skill injectors not really going to talk about those here but they drive up plex prices.
With all this said, something has to be done. And these are my final thoughts on the matter.
Donāt dismiss threads just because youāve read them before. Youāre always going to have greedy people and hard decisions to make. Is it worth upsetting a few thousand players in order to maintain the game and keep revenue coming in? Absolutely. I wouldnāt even blink an eye to destroy 10k players experience to save 600k players experience.
FIX THE ISK FAUCET
FIX PLEX PRICES
How much of Eveās profit comes from SP farms? An SP farm needs to generate skill points to farm so Omega time or an MCT and one large injector requires an extractor. By revenue what percentage of NEX sales do you think those three items make? My own speculation is somewhere between 99% and 100%.
CCP backed themselves into a corner with skill injectors. Breaking them will be extremely painful and thereās a very good chance it would be fatal.
Hmmm, unfortunately, thatās a good pointā¦ Here it would be a choice between short/medium-term revenue (keep the SP trading as is) and lose players over the long term, or plan for the future (by dumping or restricting SP trading) but with no guarantee of a recovery of long-term player uptakeā¦ Seems to me like slow death one way, high risk the other.
I donāt see it as either. With a healthy supply of PLEX SP farms should only put a very slight pressure on the market.
IMO the problem is undersupply and I think thatās caused by two things: The oversupply of ISK from carrier ratting and the lack of things to spend it on. Since ISK is relatively easy to acquire and nothing to spend it on fewer people need to put PLEX on the market to exchange for ISK.
Absent any change the price of PLEX wonāt level off until the price of injectors gets to a point where people stop buying them.
Greed is bad. That is all I have to say.
Yes, I couldnāt agree with you more. Unenlightened self-interest (ie. greed) can be a very destructive force (and some like to pretend itās āhealthy competitionā to justify their position, but instead itās merely the anathema of cooperation.)
Anyhow, Iāve drifted off topicā¦ 
Your $15 had more purchasing power in 2003, to the tune of about 30% more according to the readily available inflation calculators.
In real terms Eve is cheaper than it was a decade ago, $15 @ todayās purchasing power would get you about $11 worth of stuff in 2003.
TL;DR Your basic premise fails to take into account inflation, and is thus moot.
Donāt know if youāve looked, but CCP values injectors over subs by default. Just look at the prices in the New Eden Store.
Injectors and extractors should have been cash only purchases. Sure, thereād be some āEvE IS PAY TO WIN!!ā nonsense, but even with PLEX taking over for Aurum, the economy would not have been thrown into the instant chaos you see now.
PLEX has a real world value now more than ever, and that value is no longer determined by the price of a sub.
Absolutely 100% agreed. Cash shop items should of been for cash only, and that goes for literally everything. Pay to win? Everyone says that Sp doesnāt = skill. Iād like to see them fricken argue against their own arguments.
Maybe they should have thought twice before getting rid of their lead economist.
+1
Actually plus an extremely large number.
Do you mean CCP Dr.EyjoG? I though he left to pursue career as scholar.
There is CCP Quant now who is publishing graphs, tho he was around the time when CCP Dr.EyjoG was working there.
Yep, the Dr. was the one with the knowledge and skill.
And he decided to use it in a Icelandic university rather than keep working at CCP Games hf. Maybe he had his own ideas about hiring the EA guy to introduce MT in EVE?
EA is cancer and I am ashamed that CCP allowed anyone from EA to work for them. Micro Transactions are not the solution to staying a float.
Charging for expansions, monthly subscriptions is how you do it.
But charging for expansion is not EVE style! When I joined, main of the selling points was that EVE have free expansions for everyone, and you can use PLEX for gametime. Now when PLEX is so very costly, less people can even think about paying with it for gametime, and if you include paid expansions, you will make EVE even more unreachable for players who want to play the true and unrestricted EVE for small cost.
On the other hand with the plex being split into 500 parts now, people can choose to combine plex bought for ISK and for $, which at least reduces costs of the subscription for players.