When it comes to addressing people who feel entitled to demand a game development company to change the game to meet their personal circumstances who refuse to take an objective look at their position and improve themselves? Yeah. I am particularly condescending.
I know several 2-3 week old newbros who are part of my alliance who have managed to make a good 500m ISK or so every 2 weeks as current Alpha characters. In another 2 weeks, they’ll probably have made another 500m ISK, all of it from just exploration and picking through Relic sites in wormholes. If a newbro can do it, so can all of you.
Yet you, and other posters in this thread, must constantly find something else to blame, some other issue that is beyond your control that is holding you down.
I’ve seen fresh new players get a handle of the game within their first few weeks, look online to find a bunch of guides and helpful strategies on how to maximize their income. Sure, most of them will not be able to PLEX their first month, but they can still participate in a vast majority of the activities as an Alpha. By the time their second month rolls around, they’re ready to go and can fund themselves with ISK earned through in-game activities.
So again, who do you want to listen to? A couple of whiners who are more than happy to throw around insults and personal attacks at people who can easily make that 2B+ ISK each month to afford the PLEX? Or the people actually doing it?
Please, do continue to make assumptions about my life. Unless you somehow draw a connection to how that particular idea influences your ability to make ISK in-game, and also your ability to purchase the 500 PLEX each month.
Alphas can earn enough to plex though, they just run relic sites in null; think it takes time but according to ocoo scoto everyone has the time to do that because he does.
How is your still blissfully unaware that plex is sub; its £££ for ccp either way - except when people leave the game of course…
Honestly, your failing to understand certain simplistic principles that are intrinsic to this issue.
There are any number of special cases that allow Alphas to earn a lot of ISK. Boosting by nullSec owners, trading, pure luck, etc. But that’s the nature of special cases: they do not make the general case wrong - they make it incomplete. Normally this is automatically assumed by the reader.
A PLEX isn’t a sub, and someone who uses a PLEX to pay for a month’s play generally isn’t a paying customer either. Paying customers are Subscribers and PLEX4Cash buyers. Obviously people who exchange PLEX for playing time are customers, but they’re not paying customers. Trying to apply words like “subscriber” to them is a bit misleading, because it suggests they pay cash to CCP.
You make sense much of the time, but not always
In this case you’re conflating two classes of player: Time4ISK buyers (via PLEX) and Time4cash buyers (subscribers). This matters because along the way it distracts from an important class of paying customer: PLEX4cash buyers. It feeds one of EVE players’ many illusions: that freeloaders drive CCP’s income from PLEX. In the end it’s really the PLEX4cash buyers that matter.
Another MMO I played, devs pretty much openly were only catering to their paying customer base, screwing “freeloaders” over. But you know, funny thing is that number of whales is almost always 1%, whether its 100k players or 100 players, and when playerbase shrinks theres no turning back.
Ask around in your corp how many do PLEX, imagine they’re all gone, would you stay, keep playing? Or would you lose interest, because EVE is people, they say.
I was paying sub for the first year, then I found my niche, and was able to PLEX since. I farm DED sites for mods, around 5-6 bil/month.
There’s still room before I’ll leave, but I will if it raises too high. An its not that I cant pay sub, I can. But I feel that I’m contributing to the economy, positively, and I earn my PLEX. Its my monthly goal, what keeps my playing.
On the other hand I think raw ISK VNI farms, SP farms are destroying the economy. But thats my opinion, devs should know better.
Everybody keep saying high PLEX price is good for CCP, but is it? 3 years back one had to pay roughly £100 for 5 bil Isk, now its 50£ how is it better for CCP?
I don’t see that high PLEX price means much to CCP. They don’t earn anything from the ISK (ISK income from e.g. taxes is meaningless to them).
One of the other posters made a case for high-ISK-income freeloaders adding something to the game. I haven’t tried to figure it out yet (and may not have enough data), but the candidates:
They could make interesting content for paying customers. IMO the current environment fails at this.
The resources they provide via mining may be an important element in providing something for the PLEX4cash buyers to buy in-game
It’s true that an MMO needs players. Each additional player contributes to a (modest) “network effect”. The question though, is whether (on average) ISK-rich nullSec players provide any social value to paying customers. The game is quite segregated in that respect, so the answer could well be no … but it’s possible they “pay their way” socially - AFAIK there’s no way to quantify it.
IMO - it would be CCP’s failure if the ISK-rich players don’t add any value to anyone else. Players do what they want to, or have to, do. If CCP has reduced synergy between different classes of player even more than “EVE normal”, it’s on them to address it.
Concerning OP I don’t think direct CCP intervention is necessary, as in PLEX sales, etc.
But there are ways CCP can influence this matter indirectly.
If there is mineral overproduction, and I think there is, you need to make professions that are attractive to your miner community, so that they feel incentive to switch from mining themselves. They keep using their ships and skills, but are not producing excess minerals. Something RW could do BTW, if rewards were right.
I cant think of a way to do that to bounty and SP farmers. I’m not accusing them RMT, but we know many of them do bot and RMT.
Take any useful deadspace module. It costs twice its price 5 years ago. Is it because higher demand? There are still the same number of players on average. Abyss? Yes, it clearly did influence. But much more players do combat exploration than 5 years ago, so supply is there to drive price down. Yet it doesn’t. ISK got cheaper. Twice cheaper if not more.
There are many assumptions here that make me believe you’re simply talking from a standpoint of feelings that rather than facts.
Why are you assuming that the value of ISK has remained constant across 3 years? Your argument does not really make sense because inflation already takes that into account with regards to the ISK value of PLEX in-game.
There is also another assumption that only the same people from 3 years ago are looking to purchase PLEX for the purpose of selling it on the market. This is a poor assumption, however. You are ignoring the new players who join the game ready to purchase PLEX to give their accounts a little kickstart.
Additionally, there’s this weird assumption that people are only buying PLEX to sell for ISK for the purpose of reaching 5 billion and then no more. And that for some reason this individual will never purchase PLEX from CCP ever again. I don’t even know where you are getting this idea from.
In fact, even assuming your position is true, I would still say that it is vastly better for CCP. Going by your numbers, I would reckon there are more people who are willing to spend 50 pounds, compared to people who would spend 100 pounds in one go on a video game. This is just a fact, because the lower cost to reach 5 billion ISK today means that it’s more affordable for a wider group, because it would include members of the community who would not have purchased it at 100 pounds.
No, these are underlying premises that your based your question on. I’m aware that you did not actually say these, this is because that’s kind of how premises work if you do not state them.
Please do explain the premise(s) of your hypothetical question if I have gotten wrong. Why do you believe your question (about 5 billion ISK being 100 pounds three years ago and only being 50 pounds now) supports your stance?
Also, I’m not going to comment on your second reply about randomly adding different incentives and deadspace modules because that is off topic the issue of CCP intervening in the price of PLEX.
Median price of PLEX on 1, apr 2016 - 2092843 ISK, in order to buy 5 bil ISK you’d need 2500 PLEX - 100 $ / €
Median price of PLEX on 29, apr 2019 - 4536595 ISK, to buy 5 bil ISK you’d need 1102 PLEX - 44 $ / €
My feelings must have made it happen.
Its free forum, you’re free to comment on anything you like.
But for discussion to be productive it’s better if you ask if you don’t see connection in statements. So I’ll elaborate. Modules get destroyed, of any type deadspace, meta or built by production, so do ships. PLEX gets consumed, gametime, SKINs, extractors, whatever.
ISK gets hoarded in trillions, monthly. Do ISKs get consumed at comparable rate with PLEX or mods? I don’t think so.
If the volume of PLEX sold is more or less constant, does that not mean your argument is incorrect?
You suggested that CCP will benefit less due to this inflation because a person can make 5b ISK by purchasing only 50 pounds worth of PLEX from CCP, compared to 100 pounds worth of PLEX.
But if the volume of PLEX being traded is “more of less constant” that means the flow of PLEX (from people purchasing out of game and selling it in-game for purposes of ISK) has also been “more or less constant”.
Also factoring in that PLEX as an in-game item is consumed when someone extends their game time, or purchases a Multiple Character Training certificate with 485 PLEX.
All of this seems to point that CCP is still benefiting from people purchasing PLEX. This also supports my arguments that your underlying premises are faulty. The EVE Online community, as a whole, still has a high demand for PLEX, and there is a “more or less” stable influx in the volume of PLEX being purchased from CCP.
At the end of the day, all that your numbers are telling me is that your argument of “because it is cheaper to buy 5B ISK worth of PLEX now than it was 3 years ago, this is worse for CCP” is very weak.
People are still buying PLEX, CCP is still receiving money from people.
Actually anyone with enough smarts and an acceptable wallet say over30-50bil isk would be foolish to stockpile isk so instead people stockpile Plex for various reasons or rare ships,rare materials.
He’s using MER info which doesn’t show actual amounts purchased from CCP monthly.PLEX moving on the market can be mostly stockpiles sold on price spikes and rebought on price plummet by the very same people.
This is why I keep saying the influx of actual NEW PLEX seems to have dropped lower and competition over acquiring PLEX stockpiles went up as more people accessed higher income sources like supercap ratting
It could mean that there is a pretty much constant number of whales with constant volume of money dedicated for EVE in form of PLEX bought monthly.
We’re both interpretting data and without data on PLEX influx and consumption, your interpretation is as good as mine.
It may be healthy alright. But from my prospective PLEX price doubling every 2-3 years is an issue. I will keep PLEXing, cause mods I farm are also doubling in price, so it wont affect me as far as I can see.
Potentially. But most of the people I know who have over 10,000 PLEX stocked up have simply not touched the market. There is no benefit to them messing with this level of inflation since the higher it goes, the more their stockpiles are worth.
Perhaps a handful have been benefiting from the ups and downs, but a vast majority of the stockpiles were built up last year during the multiple successive Galaxy Pack sales.
I don’t believe this is an issue because it’s getting easier and easier for people to make ISK in-game. If a player’s ability to make ISK was being outpaced by the inflation of PLEX, that may be an issue. But as I see it, it’s more than feasible to keep up with the price of PLEX, even on a single Omega account with a single dedicated character.
Thats the way I play, single Omega character. As I said it is not an issue for me, not now, not in observable future.
Banal as it may sound, but think of newbros. Raising PLEX makes SP and VNI farms a necessity for some. Is that healthy for the game?
Omega L4 mission runner, miners, PI, other professions will become unsustainable at some point, should they also start ratting or sp farm?
You mentioned that you’re quite successful at trading, imagine a hundred more people start trading to support themselves, a thousand, several thousands. You credit yourself for your success, maybe you deserve it, and maybe you just found a niche noone yet tapped into, that may change.
That other mmo I played, I’ve seen similar comments, “I’m good at auction house trading, anyone can do it”. But they didnt think that 4 people fulfil whole servers demand, what if 10 more start doing exactly what you do, what if 100 more?
