Most recently it was made out of thin air…
I came back to the game after 2 years. two accounts with free gifted aurum over the years so I had ~1200 PLEX when I logged in.
Why? Why not 553 million or a billion or some other number? Just because the price of something 5 years ago does not mean the price is going to be the same today. Look at computers, the dollar value has not changed much but the quality sure has. So if anything there the price is cheaper. Conversely something could also be more expensive relative to what the price was several years ago. The supply and demand is not something that is static over time.
Soooo…I buy the sPLEX for £14.99 sell it in game for 1 billion and then turn around and buy 2 PLEX and save myself £4.99. Gee…that won’t do something like drive up the in-game price of PLEX at all. Nope.
You are creating an artificial arbitrage opportunity here and at least half of the player base will spot it inside 5 minutes and the in game prices will converge…and my guess is…we wend up pretty much where we are now.
That is equal to 2.4 of the old PLEX. 500 “nuPlex” = one 30 Day PLEX. Still, enjoy that extra ISK or the 2 months of game time.
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All I see here is “I make up non-comprehensible arguments why I should be able to pay for the game with a few hours of ISK grind”.
When PLEX was 500 Million ISK that was lot of ingame money. It hasn’t been for some time now. I can think of so many ways to make 500 Million ISK in one evening that is seems to be kind of absurd to believe it was worth the sub for one month.
OK, if a pure game time Plex was available to buy, how much would you think it would be worth in terms of isk?
I get the feeling you’re one of those folks who will insult my speculation and have nothing to add to the convo yourself. Also note that I changed speculation to 350m to 500m for 30 days game time only.
The demand for a game time only Plex is limited to how many people want to play eve using that method. Let’s say 20k people use this time only Plex per month, sales will be limited to that amount which will help determine the isk price.
My idea of a feature plex, this Plex will sell differently due to its advantageous nature.
All I’m suggesting is splitting the game time and other features of Plex and then letting the players decide what isk price to put on both types of Plex. I feel this is a reasonable idea which should be explored. A lot of what I’m saying about isk prices for my Plex idea is speculation I can agree.
Nope… As long as you can convert any kind of PLEX into ISK and back it will be a item of speculation and investment. Clever players bought PLEX just to prevent their ISK against mudflation and granted how good that worked that won’t change. Furthermore PLEX will always be an incentive and gift.
ALL players would use ISK to buy PLEX when the price was low enough. EVERY player is a potential buyer. EVE has not a communist market where the fastest 20k get a cheap PLEX and everyone else has to wait for next months tender. You lower the price, your number of users gets up. Got it?
We don’t have the numbers but if you want to start calculating anyway start with 100k buyers at a price of 1 Bil. ISK for a month of EVE and work on form there.
Some copypasta from reddit, they got the alts thing quite spot on:
Before the introduction of skill injectors it did not matter if you wanted to PLEX an alt that had to lean skills or not. Now, with skill injectors, you have to distinguish the price in ISK for PLEXing a pilot while learning new skills and the price of an alt pilot that has no need to learn any further skills. Cyno-alts, scanning-alts, indu-alts, trading-alts, hauler-alts to name just a few. Because PLEXing an alt that does not need to train new skills got far CHEAPER, even with the new PLEX prices. The math:
PLEXing an alt that is still learning new skills is 500 x 3.5 Mil. ISK = 1.75 Bil. ISK. All time high…
Plexing an alt that does not need to learn new skills and get its SP extracted and sold at the end of the month: 500 x 3.5 Mil. ISK – (840 Mil. ISK – 340 Mil. ISK) x 3 = 250 Mil. ISK. Long time low…Price per (Nu-)PLEX 3.5 Mil. ISK, Extractor 340 Mil. ISK, Injector 840 Mil. ISK and I only assumed 1.5 Mil. extracted SP per month. With a good remap and implants that alt pilot is even learning skills at a slow rate for a discount price of 250 Mil. ISK per month. As there are many, many alt pilots out there, why on earth should PLEX be any cheaper? My conclusion: The non/slow learning alt-pilots set the price and the mains have to pay up or sub.
TL;dr: Alts with a limited role are cheap as ■■■■ when you use extractors. Mains that still want to learn new skills pay up for that.
About as much as it’s going for right now.
I’ve been hearing this argument since PLEX was 300 million (per 500).
It’s not ALL speculation. Also this is pretty bad for CCP since they are pretty much the only source of new PLEX - the other being hoarded stockpiles which don’t help CCP. The PLEX you bought 5 years ago for cash does not help CCP’s P&L statement this quarter.
^^ This. Most players buy PLEX to play. The few that buy PLEX with ISK to get Skins ‘n’ stuff wouldn’t move the price much.
Actually, it kinda does because the money from PLEX is listed as differed income until it is used. They don’t consider the money as “earned” until the product is used.
That’s an accounting trick. Try paying an employee with it.
I do not believe that such a change has actually taken place driven by CCP, but you are quite right, there has been an effective change driven by the price of PLEX in isk terms.
Of course there are those who would have you believe that the entire purpose of plex is to Give certain players ever increasing profits, and that is the natural order of things, driven by “economics” 
and produce nice graphs, and quotations from “popular” airport paperback Economic books. Which can sound like a reasonable proposition but are ultimately misleading.
There is value in Plex fulfilling its original role, hopefully CCP will eventually realise, and get a real economist to look at the issue rather than an official reciever.
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\me rubs eyes in disbelief .
Someone can see my point 
There is major value in a type of Plex where the only offer is game time and no other feature.
Also if a “game time only Plex” was introduced it would also affect the economy in a positive way once the isk cost of it settles.
Don’t ever underestimate the astroturfers, they are very good at it.
One would almost believe that people look up to them on their pedestal with wonder and awe, as opposed to seeing them as just someone loud on a soapbox.
Of course when one inevitably questons the motive funnily enough they just get a bit louder.
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I’m surprised, you’re one of the most opinionated people here yet u can’t even speculate how much 30 days of game time on its own is worth in isk.
I expected you to at least give a good estimate based on what you know because you are a well informed person.
Why are you here if you don’t want an honest convo?
I could but that would merely be my subjective valuation of game time. I haven’t sat down and thought about what would be the most I’d be willing to pay per PLEX for 30 days of game time.
Market prices are determined by lots of people interacting via the in-game market tools. People make offers for both buying and selling and people on either side accept. A person with a reservation price of 10 million ISK/PLEX is right now happily buying. A player with a reservation price of 2 million has been priced out of the market. Depending on a host of factors the resulting “market price” is what we see with the median. In short there is no “right” price.
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This is not an engineering problem. The number of people who buy PLEX for game time is likely the result of a complicated process. For example, now that my wallet is sufficiently fat and I have some decent in-game income streams I buy PLEX to reduce wife-aggro. Was that the case a couple of years ago? No. Further, that number likely changes as the price of PLEX changes, in game incomes change, and even as player preferences change over time.
The last one is quite important, IMO. For example, in the 1940’s and 1950’s it was the fashion for men to wear hats. It isn’t anymore. Why? Did some bureaucrat issue a dictate saying, “No more hats!” No. Preferences changed and wearing hats, for whatever host of reasons, became less fashionable. Are PLEX more in demand now than say 5 or 6 years ago? I don’t know, maybe.
And what if the ISK Price is 1 billion or even 1.2 billion? What then?
What if PLEX is a superior good? A superior good is one that when your income goes up by x% the share of income allocated to the good goes up by more than x%. To use some numbers to highlight what I mean by this consider that a player’s income goes up by 10%. If PLEX is a normal good he might increase his “consumption” of PLEX by 10%. If it is an inferior good PLEX consumption would drop to say 5% of his overall income. If it is superior good the player might see PLEX go to 20% of his income. If PLEX is a superior good, then rising incomes would dictate a rising demand, possibly faster than the supply is rising and thus a rising price. If this conjecture is true, then there is almost no way to go back to a 350 million ISK price except by dictate. And one thing just about any economist will tell you is, whatever you do…don’t ■■■■ with prices, especially price controls. Do that and it is usually a disaster.
I think it work in the case where you force the prices up. I mean, Canada’s egg, chicken and milk system hasn’t crashed yet…
That’s of course not needed for PLEX and would also just piss off the “PLEX are too expensive” crowd anyway.
okay i will tell you
its the value of a plex divided by 30
for each day of gametime it represents
then divided again by the amount of playtime per day a player is willing to spend to farm it
lets say 1 hour
so how much does a player make in an hour…
lets go with the lowest common denominator which is an alpha player
maybe 2m isk/hour
so a plex by your standards is worth 60m isk