There are 1 million to 2.5 million units of plex traded every day in the forge market.
Salvos initial idea was to have combat sites/missions pay out plex for completing the site , Even with 30k plex generated by his idea daily Salvos still cannot see that amount wont make any difference due to the sold amounts more times that being traded in Forge on a daily basis.
Then he went on to claim that hundreds of thousands of plex were seized from banned accounts and they should be used. Again, it wont make a difference, 900k of plex will only cover 1 days trade in the forge market, What happens after this 900k of seized plex is sold and consumed?
I am happy that folks like Teckos and Ramona are here to counter his points because I know that some people tend to listen to people like Salvos and get the wrong impression of the game.
Salvos has a poor understanding of how CCP works and how a virtual economy maintains itself, he also has a poor understanding of marketing and business.
If you applied the same laser-focus to the detail of what I was implying as you do to the arguments so far put forth, youâd realise that the action of kissing one butt has the effect of offering another - in a time-honoured and well-known (but rather rude) indication of summary rejection.
Salvos, lighten up a bit (I donât use âmanâ). Weâre all friends here, arenât we?
Beside the point. CCP recieved some cash and âswitched onâ someoneâs Omega status, at the same time a PLEX was injected into the economy via the buddy reward. If you try to remember that âturning on someoneâs Omegaâ costs nothing, what youâre left with is that CCP recieved a months worth of sub money and gave out a PLEX.
The practical upshot is the same as if the guy giving out the trial had just bought a PLEX / Months sub and not invited anyone into the game, except that there is 1 less person playing.
Arguing over the âall plex are paid forâ bit is already getting old and is in fact completely irrelevant to the discussion. People are going for semantics. The VAAAAAAAST majority of PLEX are paid for and thatâs enough to make a prediction, if thatâs what someone is trying to do.
It is very relevant, as it ties centrally into what is happening with PLEX.
There are two myths that need to be dropped:
-1) It is not true, or demonstrably so, that all PLEX is paid for.
-2) We have no evidence to prove rhe assumption that the higher the value of PLEX in isk, the more people will buy more PLEX from CCP.
These two assumptions need to burn in fire before we can progress in understanding what PLEX is, isnt, and has become.
Then we can start discussing WHY people buy PLEX, which I already set the groundwork out on as below:
For sub, MCT and extractors, its cheaper to buy them directly with cash, than with cash bought PLEX. (Excluding discounts offered by CCP). So we can assume that if someone rational wants one of those services, they will pay for those directly, rather than x PLEX for cash.
We know people buy PLEX just to re-sale them ingame, whether now or later, for isk. We also know, that to achieve the same isk value in re-sale, you now have to buy less PLEX from CCP than ever before.
That leaves only skins, apparel and re-sculpt as PLEX based services from NES for which there is no cheaper direct cash alternative. (But can also be bought with isk based PLEX purchase ingame).
So we know:
-Someone will pay cash for sub/mct/extractors, if they want those, rather than PLEX.
-People buy PLEX inorder to re-sell ingame for isk, and need to buy less of them than before.
-That leaves the only remaining reason to buy PLEX from CCP, past the above, as skins/apparel/re-sculpt. (Which can be bought with isk sourced PLEX, as well).
As to skins/apparel, my casual perusal of the current market prices shows almost all of them as selling at below their current direct PLEX/isk translation value, as bought from NES. They are being sold at a loss, and turnover is very low. In other words, if you want skin/apparel, you are better off buying them from the market for isk than from NES for PLEX, when some fool thought they could earn on it but didnt do the math beforehand.
TLDR:
-People buy PLEX to sell for isk. They now have to buy less, for the same isk return.
-People may buy PLEX for skin/apparel/re-sculpt, but they take a loss in re-sale, few do buy them, demand is small and they can be bought with someone elses PLEX bought with isk.
-Nobody rational would buy PLEX from CCP in cash, instead of a sub/MCT/extractor for cash, if those services are what they want.
That is succinctly and correctly put, Ramona. Itâs my approach too.
Narrow bigoted intransigence is often disguised as âstanding up for what I believe inâ, and peddled as some kind of virtue, when in reality it is the ownerâs unwillingness to be reasonable and rational in acting as you say.
No doubt Iâll be accused of b***-kissing again, but at least I know an when I smell one.
That doesnât have to be dropped because (currently) it is not enough of a deviation to noticeably effect any calculation based upon it. Itâs a straw man argument at best and not as important as youâre making out.
We actually have LOADS of evidence that making something more cost effective makes more people want to do it. Itâs such an obvious statement and backed up by so much real world evidence that nobody is going to go to the trouble of proving to you that it is happening. Just have faith, the more ISK you give someone in return for a PLEX the more people will find it a good enough trade off to make the purchase. Obviously
Yet people keep perpetuating and re-iterating this busted myth.
âAll PLEX is paid forâ is false.
Period.
As I have stated repeatedly, the higher the value of PLEX in isk, the less units of PLEX people need to buy from CCP for cash to reach their isk targets. The cost efficiency runs counter to people buying more PLEX, when they can achieve their isk goals by buying less PLEX from CCP, than before.
The myth, that âPeople buy more PLEX the higher its price in iskâ is false.
People buy less PLEX from CCP the higher the price of PLEX in isk, because they dont need as many to gain the isk they wanted.
The rest of rational PLEX purchase from CCP is covered in my post above.
It covers subs/MCT/PLEX/extractors/skins/apparel/resculpt, as compared to cash payment vs PLEX.
Imagine CCP sitting around a table discussing these myths:
1 âAll PLEX is paid forâ
-A: Omg we are getting rich!
-B: How so?
-A: Everyone is buying a PLEX when they sub via Buddy Program!
-B: âChecks book-keepingâ Ehm, nope. Just seeing a sub being paid and us losing a PLEX.
-A:
2 âThe higher the isk value of PLEX, the more people will buy more PLEXâ
-A: Omg we are getting rich!
-B: How so?
-A: Everyone is buying more PLEX from us, cos they get more isk for it!
-B: âChecks book-keepingâ Ehm, nope. They are buying less PLEX, cos they get the same isk for it as before, for less PLEX from us.
-A:
Actually I do believe Salvos once said he is some kind of nurse or trainee nurse or something, so he probably has his own credit card now. His advice on business practices and customer behavior are of course way off the mark but that seems understandable because he is not involved in the field
Buddy plex is paid for, its just part of a discount package.
It is as free as a âfreeâ phone when getting a telephone subscription of 50$ a month.
This leaves the grand amount of plex given away in events as the only Plex not paid for. This amount was pretty pathetic in virtually every event I have seen.
bounty should be a fixed percentage of (500) plex per kill, but in isk. so a beltrat earns you, example, one 1000th of 500 plex, so youâd need to shoot 1000 beltrats to buy a sub with isk. ccp can scale the bounty according to the rising and falling price of plex. automatically. a sub then has an obvious relation to ingame activity, which can be balanced more easily. people will figure it out themselves and communicate it to others. it allows a nice additional layer of crowd control.
plex are way too cheap in my eyes, btw. not sure i mentioned it.
No, Salvos. I wanto buy plex, now, to change them to isk, so i can use it. i pay, i receive, i use. i donât want to buy plex NOW an let it sit, because then iâd be dropping my money into something i am not using, and plex arenât gold or cryptocoins!
youâd be right if it was, but plex doesnât have any value beyond our imagination, unless we rmt isk.
My take is this. For some PLEX can be seen as âvery expensiveâ these people do not value the game time at that degree of ISK which represents, at least in part, a time commitment. That is, these players grind for ISK to PLEX and that burden has gotten âtoo largeâ relative to their subjective value of game time.
However, for others this is not the case. Everyone selling PLEX would disagree with this assessment. Example, @yellow_parasol.
My âEcon101â argument is that Salvosâ arguments are invalid in that they have hidden assumptions where the conclusions are nothing more than the assumptions themselves.
Namely: Assume people are buying PLEX to obtain a fixed amount of ISK. Therefore they buy less PLEX as the price goes up. Of course this is true.
However, people may be doing:
Buying PLEX to obtain a fixed amount of PLEX.
Buying a fixed RL currency amount of PLEX.
Buying PLEX at the higher in game price where at a lower price they would not be buying.
Some combination of 1, 2, and 3.
Given that the forge has about 1.5 million PLEX on the market and has had pretty much the same amount of PLEX on the market for the last 12 monthsâŚIâm going to guess 4 is most likely correct.
Further, Salvos seems confused about why prices change. The price changes because either supply or demand increases. But what is the supply curve? It is the locus of points representing price-quantity pairs of PLEX various people are willing to provide in game. It looks like this:
Note that as the price increases we move along the supply curve moving upwardsâi.e. from left-to-right. As the price increases we see supply increase.
So how can we move along the supply curve where the supply goes down? We have to shift the demand curve.
Typically a demand curve is written as,
Where p is the price, y is income, and alpha is a vector of prices that represent things like tastes/preferences and also other prices, say for compliments and substitutes. To shift the demand curve in the above graph we have to change either, y, or an element of alpha. Those are typically referred to as shift parameters.
Getting really into the nitty gritty hereâŚ
Note that the graph is only in the (p,q) space which is really just the positive quadrant of the the space R^2âi.e. a two dimensional space where each dimension is comprised of real numbers. In other words, the graphs, as they are typically shown suppress the dimension regarding income and the dimensions regarding taste/preferences and other prices. Typically a demand function would exist in an n-dimensional space. Now asking me to âdrawâ such a demand curve is not possible as at most we can kinda-sort fake drawing a three dimensional space (paper, computer screens, black boards, etc. are 2-dimensional spaces). So donât even bother asking. I canât. This is also why we have things like multivariate calculusâŚso that we can handle n-dimensional cases without having to draw them.
So, back to the issue. We want to move along the supply curve such that the quantity supplied decreases. To do so we must shift the demand curve thusly,
But this does not work for Salvos as the price goes up. And we canât shift the demand outwards because then the quantity goes up. The only way for price to go up and quantity to go down is to shift the supply curve inwards, but that would mean that either income went down, or some other factor other than price changed like tastes, the price of substitutes, etc. But we have seen nothing here to believe that.
In fact, Salvos wants to argue that the price increases is shifting the supply function, IMO, and that is not what is happening. Changing the price moves us along the supply curve it does not move the supply curve.
There is, as far as I can see, no way to make the concepts of supply and demand work in such a way as to fit Salvosâ story. None.
Iâm grateful for the work you put in and the patience youâve shown in demonstrating your point of view, Teckos.
Alas, I am only able to grasp your conclusions; your method is too much for my rudimentary knowledge of the subject. Which is why I donât cross swords with people unless Iâm on fairly firm ground. What would be the point? No one learns by âtalkingâ.
One thing. Does the lack of comprehensive data from CCP represent a significant challenge in forming reliable conclusions where the recent discussions are concerned?
when I smell one.
