PLEX is very expensive right now thread

Communications Center General Discussion
1119

LOL,

I dunno man, I have lots of RL experience in selling products so I understand product value and marketing. It is my opinion that lots of services have been loaded into the current plex in order to guarantee a level of sales.

Splitting the Plex into 2 different types of plex is for sure a much clearer way of presenting a product. Obviously CCP have looked at this and perhaps found the most effective way of earning money is putting all plex services into one type of plex. My view is different, I felt if there was a Game time only plex then the dynamic of the plex product changes so the isk value can be capped by pilots refusing to pay too much for plex game time.

The current plex price does warrant its current value, My view is that too many services are piled onto it giving it a combined value which happens to be too high for the dude who is only looking for isk for game time for example. so this is what I mean when I say plex is too high.

1120

I guess its all relative.

If a Game Time Only plex was available and put on the market at any isk cost the cost would be fixed because the people who buy plex for isk simply wouldnt be prepared to pay too high a price.

So yes you’re right they get sold anyway, CCP just have to be careful they are not missing game time only plex sales due to having all the services in one plex. I’m sure many people agree they would not buy the current plex for isk for game time purposes only. Ask them why and they will say it’s too high.

1121

Why would they not pay a high price? Do you assume the current PLEX users would not buy the game time token? Because if they do, then surely they are willing to pay up to the current PLEX price.

1122

@Frostys_Virpio I can see your view is that nobody left the game due to high plex prices for game time purposes. Is this correct?

If I go to any market to buy 10 apples then I want that product only. I do not want to be forced to buy a collection of fruits where the price is higher because apples are only sold in a collection of fruits, and then when I eat the apples all of the other fruits disappear because I was only allowed to have one fruit from the collection. LOL, a strange but true comparison to what the current plex is.

1123

I’m not saying nobody left, I’m saying everybody that left probably got replaced by another alt so the PLEX still get used. Stuff like SP farms account, AFK VNI ratting alts, …

1124

1- You have taken my comment to Ramona out of context.

2- Aarons math was based on the ridiculous premise that there would be 30k players simultaneously running exclusively this PLEX content. Not only would this mean ALL of players online at anytime would be running exclusively this content, but it would also mean they would all have to move out of LS/NS/WHs into HS inorder to do so.

His math was utter ■■■■■■■■. Surely you see that.

3- You have carried that spurious 30k figure and translated it into site completions, instead of players…

Fair enough, and something actually relevant. However that 30k figure on which you based your math, is completely still spurious and contrived (and btw, not a figure I myself ever introduced).

There are only 1090 HS systems.

According to your math, this site would have to cycle through 27 spawns in EACH HS system, throughout a 24hr period (downtime disregarded for now), to achieve that amount of PLEX introduction.

For a rough illustration, this would mean that for every hour, there would be atleast 1 of these sites IN EACH AND EVERY HS system.

Nobody is suggesting such an insane proliferation of these sites.
Nowhere near!

None of us have exact rates of sig/anomaly spawns in HS, but it is certain they are significantly less than 30k completions of any type in a day. The reason for this, is there is a far smaller constant figure of those sites spawndd than you are presuming would be the case for this type of site.

4- Even at the outrageous spawn/completion rate you used in your maths, you concede that it would likely NOT influence price of PLEX ingame, arleast significantly.

5- We all agree, that the price of PLEX ingame, is that which incentivizes PLEX purchase from CCP.

6- Ergo, if the rate of PLEX introduction from the this content does not change PLEX price, it will NOT significantly influence CCPs income by the rate of PLEX purchase from them.

7- On an individual basis, a player will have to run this content 250 times over, inorder to PLEX, at time invested of probably well upwards of 100hrs per month dedicated exclusively to this content. A player committed to doing that, is not a player that can/will buy a PLEX from CCP anyways, or else they wouldnt bother with this enormously effort/time intensive alternative.

8- On a game-wide basis, the rate of introduction to the market, or for personal use, as you yourself conceded even with your ludicrous spawn rate calculations, would largely be swallowed up by the overall volume of PLEX trade, and only marginally slow its growth in price.

9- Players that can afford to PLEX, or dont want to grind, will still buy PLEX. CCP is not “losing” income, because these players running this content, or those buying their small influx into the market are not players that are going to buy PLEX from CCP anyways, or else they wouldnt be buying it ingame with isk, or running the PLEX content themselves.

Its still as eminently preferable as ever before, to simply buy PLEX from CCP., and sell it, rather than grind for isk to buy it ingame, or spend the time required to complete 250 sites at an isk value of 6mil per site.

People buy PLEX from CCP so they dont have to grind. Period.
My proposal does not change that one whit.

10- Whatever small loss to CCP from incidental purchases of PLEX from these players in the introducrion of this site, is offset by better PCU as players run this content/emergent content around it, and helping retain players in game as they can now fund their interests with in-game sourced PLEX as sold to the market. There is a tradeoff here that is equitable for all concerned.

11- As Ive stated over and over. If CCP was exclusively after quick profits, they would have raised the price of PLEX to match its demand/supply in-game. They have not done so. Infact, its the opposite. They offer discounts and have introduces PLEX ingame via events, There are more important concerns in keeping an MMO healthy, than just cash earned.

1 Like
1125

How long is the respawn on these sites?

1126

According to the current algorithms of site spawning overall in EVE as I understand them.

So pragmatically, the site would appear somewhere else in HS immediately after it is completed:
-The site would take 10mins to complete, regardless of efficiency. 15mins is fine too.
-The issue is not the respawn rate, which would follow the normal respawn system of all EVE sigs/anomalies, but rather how many concurrent spawns exist.

Teckos calculations assumed that pool of concurrent spawns would be sufficient to result in 30k site completions in a day. That would mean that the site would spawn, in a flat average, 27 times everyday in EVERY individual HS system.

I never suggested, inferred or side with such an enormous spawn pool.

My rough preference is the constant rate of concurrent sites would be somewhere along my experience of the pool of 4/10 DEDs in HS.

1127

No worries, it was just a point that I hadnt thought of.

1128

It was a good question.

As far as I have been able to gather, site spawning (except for escalation), accords to the following arrangement:
-When any site is completed, it immediately respawns elsewhere where that site can occur.
-The number of sites of any one given type remains constant, throughout.
-There is speculation that the algorithm tries primarily to spawn the next site, after completion of the previous, in nearby systems.
-This is supported by incidental evidence that some sites end up stacked in dead-end systems or islands.
-I myself have anecdotally experienced that after completion of a specific DED, I can occasionally find it again spawned in an adjacent system, and on, to a maximum of 3 consecutive adjacent spawns in a particular isolated/interconnected constellation I operated in.
-Their is speculation that these sites prefer to spawn further and further from the galactic center, rather than migrating back towards it, until sites completed on the outside periphery respawn again closer to the galactic center.

1129

No, not quite. Because you don’t have “skins only PLEX” left in the end.

You could either buy your monthly supply of 10 apples with 15 pennies in cash. Or you could get an apple flat rate that grants you 10 apples at a discounted rate for 3/6/12 months. Or you could buy a fruit voucher with 500 fruit points on it you can spend on all kinds of fruit you fancy. One option would be to spend the whole voucher on apples with no points left to get your monthly supply again.

Now some fruit lovers won’t/can’t pay for apples or fruit vouchers with pennies, so they collect scrap metal, old papers and other stuff to trade it in for vouchers. But still the voucher is valid for whatever fruit you want to get and you won’t be stuck with any fruit points you can’t spend on apples in the end. What you claim is that the new exotics fruits you can’t afford made the junk collection more tedious because the fruit vouchers got more expensive for those without pennies. I hate wrong over-simplifications buy the way. Those make the stupid believe even more stupid things.

1 Like
1130

I took it to be 30,000 just doing it. I saw nothing about simultaneously, that was something you have read in later.

No, I don’t. Average PCU is around 20,000 or so. 20,000 *24 = 480,000. Saying 30,000 people would do it is not crazy it is less than 10%

See the above. Nowhere did I say it was 30,000 doing it at the same time. Nor do I see where Aaron said that.

On average how many anomaly haven spawns are there? How many level 5 missions?

Then they’ll do nothing. No really. Adding just under 3,300 PLEX to the game every day will have little impact on the PLEX price given the vast number already on the market. And it will cost CCP $63,000 in revenue.

Really? Based on what? Your own desires for it not to be true? So in looking at the MER for October my BoE calculations suggest there could be as many as 39,000 spawns daily.

I took the ISK from bounties, 61.273 trillion ISK. I then divided it by 31 days. Then I assumed the total payout was 50 million. That says there are 39,530 spawns.

Granted, that is making some pretty silly assumptions…but those assumptions provide a lower bound. My payout is woefully high, most likely. And all of those bounties are due in part to mission spawns. So if we were to look at anomaly and mission spawns directly I bet the number would be far higher.

So, no I don’t see the 30,000 being out of whack.

Yes, in short your idea would do pretty much nothing, but cost CCP revenue…why is lowering the company’s revenue a good thing?

I already gave you the numbers. Every PLEX dropped as loot would have to come out of CCPs pocket. Even just 3,270/day would cost them $63,000 annually.

I am not looking at the individual, but the effects of many individuals.

But why cost CCP nearly $900,000? Is it your desire to punish them and get people laid off?

Now do some math based on this…

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1131

No. I was assuming 30,000 of these “events” done per day. Or 1,250/hour. Your assumption of simultaneity is your assumption, not mine.

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1132

So let me provide a re-cap of where we are now with Salvos’ idea.

  1. The “free” PLEX drops will be severely limited. No more than 1/HS system.
  2. They’ll take at least 10 minutes to do, maybe longer.’
  3. The net effect is to drop a minuscule number of PLEX in game relative to what is one the market.
  4. The net result would be to have a minuscule impact on the PLEX price.
  5. Take revenues out of CCP’s wallet.

So…in the end, it will not accomplish it’s goal (lowering the PLEX price) and simply cost CCP money.

1133

1- Aarons math was predicated on 30k characters running the content simultaneously.
So basically the entirety of EVEs online characters at any given time running this content endlessly, with perfect efficiency, for 24hrs, days on en, in HS. Utterly ludicrous premise. Furthermore, there would not be enough instances for 30k completions per day, as I have specifically explained earlier and in this post.

2- It is, because you (fallaciously) assume that there would be that volume of sites to complete in a 24hr period. Also, 30k people running content of this type would entail everyone dropping what they are doing what they are doing, head to HS, and only run this content.

3- I specifically said that the 30k figure, regardless of how you apply it, is a spurious and contrived figure not of my introduction. There will not be 30k accounts/individuals running this content, nor will there be enough spawns to result in 30k completions per day.

4-
A) Havens dont reward PLEX. It doesnt matter how many Haven spawns there are, in any given form depending on Pirate type. Nobody knows the figures, but heuristically it can be deduced it is far less than 30k per day, per type in those regions where they spawn.
B) Lvl 5 missions are spawned by players action with an agent, not by the game environment.

5- In other words, they wont reduce CCPs income from PLEX purchases, as was your premise.

6- Spawns of what, exactly?

7- It wont reduce CCPS income as:
A) PLEX price is not significantly decreased.
B) These players are not PLEX purchasers at this time anyways.
C) Its still more convenient to buy PLEX, than grind for it, as is the entire logic behind PLEX.

8- False. I know this is difficult to wrap your head around, but there is a distinction between PLEX ingame, and the incentive for players to buy PLEX, instead of buying it/earning it ingame from others that have bought it from CCP. CCP doesnt “lose” revenue by introducing PLEX ingame., because that PLEX would never have been bought from CCP in the first place.

8- I was explaining the result of an individual. The game population is by lowest common denominator, comprised of individuals. The next point was deliberately to cover that of many individuals acting together.

9- It wont cost CCP that amount, as these players are not ones that would have bought PLEX as is, anyways. You cant lose money that would not have been spent in the first place. You seem to have this ridiculous notion that anyone that wants PLEX would automatically buy one from CCP. They wont, if they cant or dont want to. This is not lost lost revenue.

1134

I specifically stated that there will not be enough spawns in HS, to allow for 30k completions per day.

Inorder for 30k completions to occur per day, as was YOUR premise, there would have to be a ludicrously large spawn pool that would average out as 27 spawns of this site in a day in EACH AND EVERY HS SYSTEM, so +1 per hour in EACH AND EVERY HS SYSTEM.

That was your ludicrous premise, not mine

No single sig/anomaly in HS or elsewhere, has anywhere near that kind of ridiculous rate of spawns as you seem to propose for this system.

Wtt are you smoking to even suggest this?

1135

There are 1,090 HS systems. That means that over the course of an hour there would need to be 1,250 spawns. That is not crazy.

Just because you say something does not make it true. I could say you are a hippopotamus…but that does not make you hippopotamus.

So it is even more worthless.

Look…just drop it.

Oh FFS…

Yes, they will. Every PLEX drop is revenue out of CCP’s wallet. Even if it is just 1. Now 1 is minimal and CCP would be fine. But you aren’t talking about 1 are you? No. You want to lower the PLEX price, but not have a substantial impact on CCP’s revenues. You have set your self two goals that work against each other.

Every PLEX that drops in game is a PLEX somebody did not have to buy from CCP. Ergo, CCP’s income drops.

You are literally contradicting yourself. You are assuming that a small amount at one level will not aggregate up into a much larger value.

How much do you pay for electricity/kWh? I bet it is probably something like $0.10-$0.15/kWh. Why your electrical bill must be tiny, right? Well if you use 400 kWh your electric bill is no $40-$60…suddenly not so small. And if you use 4,000 it is $400 to $600. You are suffering from a severe blindness to the fallacy of composition.

Back tracking noted.

So you’ll make it even less effective. Noted.

Why should we waste Dev time doing something pointless and that will likely get one of those Devs fired in the end?

Yes, an you said that they’d be run in 10 minutes and then instantly respawn somewhere else. Could there be enough people looking for and doing these so that they are largely always being done? If so how many would that be?

Let’s say we have 1 system. And it takes 10 minutes to do a spawn. And when done a new one spawns. That would imply there would be 6/hour. Lets say 5 because hey…people might have to find them. So if this were true for all 1,090 HS systems then we’d have 5 * 1,090 * 24 = 130,800 spawns. Yes?

Now you say, “NO! I won’t allow that many (as if you were a Dev).” Fine. So lets say it is 1 spawn/HS system/hour. Again how many is that? 1,090/hour no? That is now 26,160 Spawns. Again still too high? Maybe we’ll only allow 1 spawn/10 HS systems…now we are down to just no effect on the in game price. And since each PLEX dropped is a PLEX not bought from CCP it is money out of CCP’s wallet.

You have literally shot yourself out of the saddle here.

1136

1- Lolwat? Why should there need to be a pool of 1250 spawns of this instance per hour?

-2 Same can be said of you. I never introduced the 30k figure. That is a fact.

3- It means there wont be 30k spawns per day, as is/was the false premise behind your math.

4- Fact Havens, of a any type, do not reward PLEX.
Your attempt to roll all Pirate Havens of every type together, rather than that they are separated by pirate type as well as spawning only in NS which has far more systems than HS, is duly noted and speaks to your dishonesty.

5- Thats where guys like you dont understand how MMOs have changed, nor the imperative of retaining customers that otherwise at this time dont have the means/desire to purchase a service with cash, but may so in future.

-6 You agreed, that the influx of PLEX from this content, even in your ludicrous example of 30k completions per day, which far outstrips reason and is your own contrived conjecture, would not significantly influence PLEX price. You also agree, that PLEX price incentivizes PLEX purchase. Ergo: PLEX price isnt significantly changed = PLEX sales will not be significantly effected.

The purpose of a PLEX purchase, is so you dont have to grind.
Nothing in my proposal changes any of that.

1137

Okay, I am going to explain why even 1 PLEX dropped in game is money out of CCP’s pocket.

First lets assume these PLEX drops are not from banned accounts with PLEX–i.e. CCP is creating a PLEX in game that was not bought with RL money.

That PLEX drops and Salvos is our lucky recipient.

Salvo says, “Yahoo!” and then decides he’ll PLEX his account. Normally he’d have to guy buy 500 PLEX off the market with ISK (lets assume Salvos has a super fat wallet). But now he only has to buy 499. So, he is buying 1 less PLEX. So this means that CCP is out the revenue for that 1 PLEX.

Now you say, “But somebody else will buy it.” Sure, but that means there will still be 1 PLEX left on the market when the market clears. Granted, the market never clears, but the point is that because Salvos got 1 PLEX as a drop he does not have to buy 1 from somebody who does buy PLEX from CCP.

It is much like the broken window fallacy. Yes, the cobbler is spending 5 francs getting the window fixed…but now he is not spending his 5 francs on dinner, or a new tool, or more leather, or whatever. There is no net gain for society, in fact wealth has been destroyed and there is actually a net loss.

Pretty much the same thing here. One PLEX entering the game is one less PLEX that is not bought from CCP. That means less revenue for CCP.

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1138

This is false, antiquated and lacks comprehension of MMO markets imperative to retain as many potential service purchasers as possible.

  1. The players that run this content, will need to dedicate over 100hrs, at a site value of 6mil, to complete 250 such sites to earn 500 PLEX. They wouldnt do that, if they had the means to earn more isk by other means, or simply buy a PLEX from CCP.

  2. CCP doesnt lose money on issuing a currency they alone can issue, as PLEX. They create/introduce that PLEX at zero cost to themselves. It costs CCP nothing to produce PLEX.

  3. PLEX as introduced as an ingame reward, is akin to a sample of yoghurt you can enjoy in a supermarket. Sure, you can go back to the stall, over and over, and pour all the sample cups into a larger carton and tell yourself that you saved money, or the yoghurt producer can think they are losing income as this person, instead of buying a full litre of yoghurt, instead helped themself off the free samples, but in either case, they DID NOT LOSE MONEY, as that person was not going to buy a full carton anyways. But, since they like that yoghurt so much, they may be a future paying customer.

  4. It has been demonstrated, for over a decade, that people that want PLEX instead of grinding it, will buy it from CCP.

  5. It has been demonstrated, for over a decade, that people will buy PLEX from CCP even at a fraction of its current ingame value in isk.