Well who else would they be helping? If one of the main reasons for introducing plex was to “buy your buddy a plex” and make it easier to pay isk for their sub then that is it’s sole purpose. It was blatantly for folks who didn’t have the cash.
Why do you have the assumption that everyone should have a debit card? or money to even play Eve in the first place?. It seriously shouldn’t take a genius to work out plex was generally created to help people who lack the real life finance. There are some things in life that we really shouldn’t require evidence for and we should be able to rely on our own wisdom, experience and logic to work out if something is correct.
You should be able to accept that the absence of real life money created the need for plex because eve is such a wonderful game. Plex was a very simple transaction where 2 types of customers came together, one wanting isk and another wanting game time, nothing more.
Also, The drop in PCU was due to people having to spend more time grinding for their alts sub. They got tired and decided to stop using their alt account. Again you should know that practically every player had plexed alt accounts, Everyones seen the old skool forums where people show off their Eve gaming rigs, they all got 4 screens for multiple accounts, the use of alts advanced their gamplay and earning so they could afford 350m for a sub easy.
This is just my perspective, and I think the people who have had a long and involved eve experience will know whats right.
Here’s a challenge for you Teckos, find/create a graph detailing the isk cost and consumption of plex over the periods 2009 to 2017, highlight on the time axis the dates of when new features were added to plex. Now that would be an interesting graph. Edit: Also add concurrent logins if you can. Hopefully it should be clear to see what drives login numbers and plex isk cost. Also feel free to add dates of major design changes to the graph. If such a graph already exists please show me where.
You seem to be good with these graphs so you’re the man to get us the data
All of us and themselves by kicking RMTers in the balls. RMT can degrade a game economy quite quickly. Further, if it proves to be a source of additional revenues and even profits, then “Us” and them again in that with profits they keep the game going.
I don’t, I just don’t see that if somebody does not have one they should be assured of playing the game.
Perhaps you should thus refrain from lecturing me on the nature of business then. My view is that CCP does things with an eye towards their bottom line with everything else being at best secondary. My guess is CCP would like low income people to be able to play EVE, but if losing them and keeping things going is what it takes…well too bad for the low income players.
What I accept or don’t is irrelevant. What matters is what CCP sees as earning improving their profits. The upside is that improved profits will help insure that the game is here for the rest of us to enjoy. Is losing people who can no longer PLEX their account a loss? Sure. But how much of a loss? I do not believe that the decline in the PCU is due entirely to PLEX. In fact, my guess is that PLEX plays a negligible role.
Based on what evidence? Sorry, but really you have exactly what data?
I’m sorry but…Whisky Tango Foxtrot? If somebody can afford a decent gaming rig and 4 farking screens…yet they do not make enough to be able to buy a 12 month sub at $10.95/month or $133/year? Maybe they should have done with 2 screens and thus been able to afford another 2 years plus worth of subs.
I’m not trying to sound like a jerk, but really EVE is not something that the poor huddled masses are thinking about. Most likely they are thinking about food, shelter, and so forth. Lets not make this into some sort of “we’ll help the poor by giving them access to a video game that does feck all for their overall situation.” We’d be doing them much more of a favor by doing things so they can get jobs vs. access to a video game that won’t put food on the table.
That data does not exist except at CCP. So tell them to send it to me and I’ll see what I can do.
Lol teckos, you seem rigid in your approach to things, it would be cool to get on a voice convo with you to discuss logic. I’ll have to deal with you later as I’m at work
You don’t have the time? You don’t have the money?
Well… GO PLAY SOMETHING ELSE!
Why do freeloaders think they are so important? Must be an internet thing, because I am quite sure I haven’t seen people argue in retail about how they are entitled to better promotion giveaways, longer free trails or higher rewards for bonus cards.
Silly attitude IMO. No one is a freeloader if someone else has paid their sub in exchange for isk. That’s all Plex used to be.
The relationship between Plex buyer and seller was a good one. The Plex buyer was more than happy to grind a reasonable amount of isk for the Plex seller due to the Plex seller not having the time to grind isk. So the people who couldn’t afford a sub could use their time to pay for the game. Time is a commodity that can be traded.
Game time is a unique product that must not be confused with anything else.
And what changend? The system still works the same way as before. You are just upset the relationship got better for the PLEX seller and worse for the PLEX buyer. I still pay the same honest earned dollars for PLEX. And think you can tell me what is the reasonable amount of imaginary space bucks to sell the “as good as real money” PLEX for and what is not?
When the next guy is willing to pay more ISK, guess what? Exactly I sell my dollar/PLEX for more imaginary space bucks! Now you may write a thousand post about how I should get less ISK, I still won’t sell it for less than market price. Should CCP interfere so people that spend real money get less ISK and people that grind ISK have an easier time? Well, that cleary depends on what side of the deal you are, isn’t it? CCP DID drop free PLEX in events, I think that was enough.
When more people want to pay with ISK than are willing to pay with real money the price for PLEX shifts, I still don’t get all the complains about that.
This is where most don’t understand, you’ll still get the same money if there was a game time only Plex, you could still trade your dollars for a Plex that buys skins, apparel and other game features, my only complaint is the isk price is too high due to Plex having many features.
So the idea is; CCP sells game time only Plex which should settle around 400m. Then they can sell a game feature Plex for a more expensive real life cash fee and isk fee which should be worth 600m to 800m.
So all im saying is seperate game time from Plex and make it into its own Plex product. So one getting less isk for plex is not the point I’m making.
Wanting to return the price to its initial 350 million ISK level though is free loading if it happens via any other route that voluntary exchange.
And that is still true today. PLEX transactions are voluntary transactions. The buyer wants the PLEX more than the ISK, and the seller wants the ISK more than the PLEX. If this were not true for either party the transaction would not take place.
Game time is a commodity, clearly. Just like a loaf of bread.
You really believe this? I have billions sitting in my wallets right now. If the price of PLEX were 350 million I could afford to buy 100 PLEX immediately. And my wallet is probably not that impressive when looking at the entire population. My point is that at that price there would be a rush to buy lots of PLEX. So much so that the price would likely rise well above the 350 million mark. It might not go back up to the current level, but there is almost no way you are going to get it to 350 million or maintain it there without some sort of price control IMO and which case instead of people not getting PLEX because the don’t have the ISK, they won’t get PLEX because there won’t be enough to meet the demand–i.e. a shortage. I have never understood why people think that artificially driving the price down and causing a shortage and depriving people of something is a good thing, but when the price is high and doing the same thing it is a bad thing…hmmm wonder if there is a cognitive bias for this?
Markets are an example of an emergent order and as such you cannot achieve goals like this ex ante. The problem is that the entire process is far more complex than people realize. Even if you had really, really good information on all of the constituent parts you cannot determine, ahead of time, where that process will go. And what makes it even more confounding for many people is that this order, after the fact, often looks designed. We see this all the time in nature. Darwinian evolutionary theory is like this. At a given point in the evolutionary process you cannot see how the current structure could arise via the process. In fact, this fact is what makes intelligent design look so compelling to many people who do not understand this aspect of the evolutionary process.
And many processes involving humans work this way too. Language is an example of an emergent order. Nobody is in charge of say the English language. There is no committee that gives us new words. No single person or committee decided that “google” would become a verb for the rest of us. Someone used it, and those they interacted with liked that short hand, and also started using it and it spread. So language also evolves over time.
Markets are a complex form or social interaction and also have this property. So the idea of, “We’ll do this and get this outcome X.” Is not going to work very well.
We could return PLEX to being just game time and create a new item in game that can be traded on the market and also bought from CCP for RL currency, but the notion that PLEX prices would return to some given level (350 million) is almost surely incorrect.
I can’t tell if you are serious or trolling, anyway:
When you could buy aurum and PLEX separately the PLEX Prices were on a slow but steady rise while Aurum was mostly stable. I am quite sure that it is not the Aurum to PLEX conversion that fuels the PLEX price. Apparel got even more useless without walking in stations and a lot of permanent ship skins were handed out/dropped over the last year. A lot of unused Aurum got changed to PLEX (like all of mine) and all those people that didn’t spend the free Aurum giveaways on store stuff surly didn’t so after it got converted to PLEX. The timing was just a coincidence, the big change were the skill injectors and the new ways to fund alts with them.
A “pure game time” PLEX would even more skyrocket then the new one did. Because I think the PLEX price is mostly driven by alts, alts that get skills extracted and last but not least players that don’t want to pay real money for their main accounts. It’s simply the demand for game time paid in ISK. The selling side (people that sell PLEX for ISK) seems to be quite stable when I look onto the number of orders. And I am fine with it as I pay a sub and sell PLEX now and then.
400 Mil. ISK for a month of game time. With all the ISK floating around in EVE now. My sides. Why don’t you just ask CCP to work for free.
Ok, 350m to 500m is what a pure game time plex is worth. this was its value before ccp started adding more features to it.
CCP could create a game feature plex, all the other plex services are worth 500m to 1b, perhaps ccp could charge £9.99 for the pure game time plex and £14.99 for the feature plex. The dudes who want a little bit of isk buy the pure game time plex and the dudes who want more isk buy the game feature plex. Obviously the player market will determine the isk prices, I don’t think my speculation is far off.
As I say it is speculation…what would you think the isk value of 30 days pure game time is? be clear here I’m only talking about game time and none of the other services plex services.
I’ll agree it is partly true today. but another truth you seem to ignore is that what if the buyer only wants pure game time and is happy to pay a reasonable price for that? Did you consider that the buyer only wants the plex for the specific reason of subbing?
Remember, I’m not talking about selling the current plex for 350m to 500m, I’m talking about a pure game time plex. I have a full understanding that todays plex is actually worth the isk value it is now with all the features added.
It is still true. Just because PLEX has other uses and the player uses it for game time, then it is the case he wanted the game time vs. the other things.
I don’t know what my reservation price is, I’ll know it when I run into it.
Yes, I know and I don’t think it will go back to that level. Just as the evolutionary process will almost surely never go back to dinosaurs, I doubt we’ll ever see 350 million PLEX again…save in perhaps some weird case.
