no hes right politicians know ■■■■ all about economics
the more they meddle the worse they make it and it costs the taxpayers
Price supports are basically a form of income redistribution via prices and it is a bad idea in that it introduces distortions into the market. An actual transfer of income via lump sum taxes and transfers would be far, far less distortionary, but also extremely obvious what you are doing (rewarding a politically powerful group). If you do this kind of thing here and there it can be done without causing serious problems. But when you do it for something like gasoline it is a complete shitstorm.
Basically when you have a situation of concentrated benefits and diffuse costs this kind of thing goes on.The people getting egg subsidies via prices are a small group and the benefits are concentrated. So it is easier for them to organize and become an effective lobbying group. The costs are born by everyone who consumes eggs which is likely millions. So to put some numbers to it, suppose the egg price subsidy is worth $2,000,000 and there are 200 egg producers. That is a $10,000/producer subsidy on average. If those costs were spread over 10 million people the average cost is $0.2. In this case most people are rationally ignorant of this income redistribution. And organizing to counter it is simply not going to happen.
Here in the U.S. it is sugar that has the price supports by keeping out foreign sugar. Americans pay 2x he world price for sugar, IIRC. There is an anecdote where Bill Clinton got a call from a sugar grower in Florida (Alfonso Fanjul, Jr.)…Clinton returned his call within 20 minute and they spoke for about 22 minutes (for the President that is alot of time). Why the phone call? Because a few hours earlier Al Gore (the Vice Pres.) had spoken down in Florida about plans to levy a tax of $0.01/pound on sugar to fund the $1.5 billion dollar plan to clean up the Everglades…mostly due to sugar cane runoff. The Fanjul family eventually donated over $900,000 to the Clinton/Gore/DNC that election cycle. How much was the sugar price support worth to just that family? The General Accountability Office estimates it at $65 million/year…and the tax was defeated in Congress.
I think you misunderstand the “Plex are too expensive crowd” I believe they just want game time seperated from other plex features.
When plex was only game time I knew many people who plexed, I also knew many folks who had 2 or 3 accounts and dual boxed on everything they did in game, most of them used plex. I liked their attitudes toward they game and they were thankful that someone could pay the sub for them for isk. I knew one british dude who used to grind missions for his plex, he would come home from his 9 to 5 spend time with his wife and kids and then spend about an hour grinding. His situation was that he had 3 kids and didn’t want to pay a monthly sub and wanted to save that money. We talked a lot on comms and I helped him on a few missions.
My point is that since more features were added onto plex the value increased and people like my buddy could no longer invest the time in grinding for plex, I miss our convo’s. Eve needs people like this to remain in the game, he was happy to work and contribute to the economy of Eve. I’d never have referred to him as a freeloader, no way.
Some folks in this thread seem afraid to acknowledge whats going on. I think many of you arent even clear on what the convo is. I guess depends on perspective as well, my perspective is that I’ve seen the changes from when plex was first introduced, all I am really suggesting is to keep the use of plex as it was initially intended which was game time only but some people have a problem with this which I find illogical.
How is your game time only PLEX and skins and trinkets PLEX any different from the PLEX and aurem system we had until recently?
It isn’t really.
Can you explain how it isn’t different?
How long have you been playing Eve for Teckos?
Prior to the change to nuPLEX we had Aurum and PLEX, you could buy most for RL currency. The market for PLEX was around 1 billion. With PLEX you could dual train, use them for game time or character transfers. Dual training via PLEX is really just another form of paying for a sub. Character transfers were, IIRC, broken with nuPLEX. So at best we’d see some drop in the value of PLEX at best down to 1 billion ISK.
My Idea is different because game time would be a plex on its own with no other features. Aurum was different and could be brought using plex (or real life cash) to purchase items like ship skins and apparel.
When plex was first introduced it simply added 30 days of game time to a pilots account, that’s all. It would be great to see game time separated into its own type of plex, it would be very interesting to see how the market and PCU numbers respond to such a change.
I’m really not sure why teckos types what he does about the idea as I think the idea holds water. I’m yet to see any meaningful responses as to why it wouldn’t work.
How is what you just typed the same as the idea I presented? It’s blatantly not.
You’ve still got the game time tied up with dual training and character transfers, my proposal is to completly seperate gate time from ALL other plex services and then create another Plex with these services. so you’d have a “game time only plex” AND a “game feature plex”
Both types of plex can be purchased for isk or real life cash and can not be converted into the other.
There’s a massive difference, my idea will test how much isk 30 days of game time on its own is worth.
I want the old skool back!! everyone knows nothing can beat the old skool way. I have no idea why people always want to complicate things when in reality it’s as simple as ABC. I respect CPP alot for their achievements but I feel due to the eagerness to make money they’ve changed plex not realising most plex users would be more than happy to pay for game time only using isk.
In my experience ive never brought a skin or apparel, I haven’t felt the need to resculpt or transfer a character. I’ve never dual trained. As you can see I have no interest in the other features a plex offers, if I wanted to become a plex user I would be forced to pay for features of Eve I am in no way interested in.
Ultimately…If the way in which people pay for the game changes, then it really shouldn’t be a huge surprise that the amount of people who log on concurrently changes…
LOL, I couldn’t believe back in 2003 I went to the trouble of going to a bank to make an international payment to CCP just to play.
A plex is worth exactly as much as the market says it is worth.
you keep saying that a plex should be 350mil like it was “in the good old days” what you are completely ignoring is the VALUE of the plex. 1 oldplex or 500 nuplex has always been worth 30 days of game time, but the value of isk has dropped significantly since then.
if I am going to spend 20 dollars on a plex, then that plex needs to get me enough isk to be worth spending the money on.
with the current market/ratting/incursions etc it is joke easy to earn 100mil/hr. this means that at your proposed price point, those 20 dollars only equate to saving me 3.5-4 hrs of casual grinding thats easy enough to accomplish in an afternoon, why would I ever spend money on that?
at the current prices though, that 20 dollars equates to about 15 hours of grinding… thats like a full weekends gaming session. suddenly the value of plex seems a lot more reasonable.
even back in the “good old days” when I started (08) earning 100mil/hr was unheard of, even earning 50mil+/hr was something only possible for the most hardcore of the hardcore (incursions where not a thing yet, carriers where still to rare and expensive to use as ratting ships, and burner missions didn’t exist yet). 20-30mil was more reasonable for the casual player. so back in the good ol days, a 350mil isk plex, was worth about 12-15 hours of grinding. funny how that number seems surprisingly the same eh?
as isk/hr potential has increased, so has the price of plex. the only way we will ever get back to those plex prices are if ccp nerfed isk/hr into the ground across the board, and simultaneously drained the wallets of every single player above a set threshold. and ooooohooh I think I just heard the screams of outrage and rage quitting all the way from the mirror universe where they did that.
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You have to remember that for these 20k people to PLEX their account you need 20k people to buy a Plex in real life.
Where are these people?
You have to remember the other side of the transaction requires someone to get their credit card out and buy something with real money to feed your ISK paid account.
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What is dual training? It is a way to essentially have a second account without having an actual second account. As such dual training is really nothing more than paying for game time with PLEX, IMO.
Yes, and if there is a RL price differential then there is an arbitrage opportunity. If the IRL price is the same, but the IG price is the different then there is an arbitrage opportunity. For example,
Suppose X costs $5 and Y costs $10. If X is worth 1000 ISK and Y is worth 500 ISK it would make sense to buy X and sell it until it’s price is equal to 500 ISK.
That value is not cast in stone in terms of ISK. That is what I keep trying to say. Look suppose the median wage in a given country is $10. The value of game time in terms of PLEX is roughly 2 hours then (or $19.95). Now, if I am indifferent between working and earning $10 and playing EVE for 2 hours, then the price of game time in terms of ISK is how much ISK I can grind in 2 hours. If I can make say 100 million ISK grinding then my “reservation price” for PLEX is 200 million ISK. Now suppose I’m indifferent between 5 hours then my reservation price is 500 million ISK. So as the price of PLEX goes up it is going to price out those who do not want to spend larger numbers of hour grinding for ISK.
Lots of people have built up lots of ISK. As such the price of PLEX has been bid up and those “marginal” buyers of PLEX have been priced out. They either return to a RL currency sub or the quit. The latter sucks to be sure, but trying to fix this is not easy. Looking at what PLEX does right now even if we lop off dual training it is not clear it will increase PCU. Yeah, sure the price might go down and allow a guy with 1 account to sub, but now the guy who was dual training won’t and may no longer log in that account as it is alpha.
Yeah, that would be awesome, but complex adaptive processes do not care what you or I want. They are not going to move in ways that you can easily predict.
Depends, IMO. How old skool do you want? How about pre-internet days. Solves the PLEX problem is that EVE no longer exists and this argument disappears…
Again, my point is that the golden halcyon days of yore are often remembers with romanticism, but we simply can’t rewind the tape recorder here because it isn’t a tape recorder.
I am not “trying to complicate things” I am telling you “things are complicated”. In short you are pretty much shooting the messenger. You do not like what I am telling you and so you want to make me out to be a bad guy when all I am doing is the equivalent of saying, “Water is wet.”
That is just it…times have moved on. Going back to those “good” (not always the case) days just isn’t possible. This is not like a road trip where we just turn the car around. The car can only go forward in this case. You can try to get there, but the map you have is not valid either as the roads change and move. This is a complex adaptive process.
Calling it as
-3.25bil by New Year.
-3.5bil by July.
So 250mil by quarter.
People leave when the price gets too high.
Dual training is NOT basically the same as a second account.
Theres sooooo much more you can do with a handily placed alt.
Like Erkle.
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I dunno where CCPs threshold is in terms of sub/PLEX sales, but I dont think we are far off atm in terms of ever decreasing income vs ever decreasing investment into EVE by CCP.
Dear trinket friend. (EVE’s ex best advice column)
I have a dilemma, please could you help…
Should I do stuff(grind my ass off) for 2 days to make isk or work an extra hour and buy plex to do what I really love in EVE.
I am torn…
Please help…
I think you are complicating things Teckos, you seem very rigid in your approach to this subject. Why is the idea of a pure game time plex bad?
It was done back in 2008 and seemed to be a great way for people to play the game using in game currency, it also help many people who wanted a small and quick injection of isk straight away. CCP lead the way and showed other online games how to do it…
Not at all. Dual training is having the ability to train multiple chars. nothing more. You can’t compare this to having an actual second account. Someone could have a char in SOV and one in hi sec, dual trainng will allow both chars to train for their roles concurrently resulting in the account owner having the ability to switch activities with good earning potential for both.
ok lets say X = a 30 day game time only plex, and Y = a feature plex (All other plex features other than game time)
You’re incorrect here. X costs $5 and Y costs $10, so…the person buying the Y plex would want more isk due to it costing more RL money.
You’ve immediately valued X at a higher price than Y which is not realistic.
Lets just say my idea was implemented…if the price of X was set too high in isk terms then all that would happen is no one would buy it. By all means, one could go ahead and put up an X plex for 1.3 billion isk but you wouldnt get many sales due to the nature of the x plex being game time only. Sales will becme better with the X plex once the isk cost is reduced as it will become an affordable way to play Eve.
If my idea was implemented then the Y plex could command a great isk cost due to its nature being the purchaser will gain an advantage such as dual training, skins, injectors and apparel, it is also necessary for character transfer. Plex Y will be the one that is exciting to trade with, traders could command a strong price.
You might think people will be put off buying the X plex for real life cash and they probably will be, There are always people who don’t mind trading in something no one else wants to. We might even find that people will be happy to pay good isk for this type of plex due to there not being many RL cash buyers.
If you truly want “old school” game time purchases, then you would not want PLEX. You’d want to go back to the 30,60, and 90 gtc days where you were able to get 90 day GTCs for the high 400s mil a pop. If I am remembering it right, buying game time really started going up in price when they changed the system by adding PLEX to the market place. I say iirc as I do not remember exactly when PLEX got more than 1 use. Prior to PLEX, 90 days would fluctuate between 470 mil to 520 mil roughly and I maintain that if you paid over 500 mil you paid too much as it always came back down. You also had to purchase the 30, 60, and 90 gtc via the account management page which definitely seemed to keep the brake on price appreciation. As an aside, I never understood why anyone bought a 30 or 60 day as they were clearly not as good a deal as the 90 days.
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How is this different from what I have I written?
You, just don’t get it. Costs are only part of what determines price, it is not the only thing that determines price.
Yes, because value of something depends, at least in part, on the subjective value of the object in question. When it comes down to it what do you think people value more game time, or vanity items? Since vanity items only have value if you have game time, the former seems like the more valuable commodity.
Look…Aaron, I totally get where you are trying to go here with this idea. My objections are not based on me trying to be a dickhead/asshole. I see what you want to try and accomplish and part of me sees it as a good thing. The other part of me says, “You can’t get there from here.”
This is not me just being an argumentative dick. Really. It is taking my view of markets and economics and concluding that we can’t really go backwards in time. We can only go forwards and one of the problems is we can’t arrive at predetermined outcomes. It would be awesome if we could, but my view is we can’t.
As such I see your idea as simply not working. Not because I’m hostile towards the notion of bringing back players that have been priced out of the game, or something like that. I would love to bring those guys back. I truly would. But aside from doing something highly destructive to the in game market I just don’t see how it can be done.