Well, first, neither mining, nor salvage, generate ISK. They simply move ISK around between players.
Second, yes, ratting generates ISK. However, I question your math of ‘it is currently very easy to get 500 plex through a few hours’. Usually, this kind of assertion is based on the ‘600M/hr’ that CCP Quant put on reddit a couple of years ago, but that was based on literally the highest single tick ever, and was never a sustainable amount generated. The guy got lucky w/titan spawns in multiple anomalies, so he got 200M on one tick, and Quant based his whole premise around that one tick that was never repeated, much less consistent.
Next, 500 PLEX right now is 1.398b, but let’s call it 1.4 for simplicity. To get that in 3 hours, you need ticks of 155 million ISK. 2 years ago, that wasn’t impossible, but it’s still pretty well above average. In the last two years, we’ve had a slew of changes to reduce the amount of ISK you make. We’ve had anomaly respawn nerfs, anomaly number nerfs, fighters being less effective, the dynamic bounty system + ess cutting down the bounties you’re getting… I’d be pretty surprised to hear people are consistently getting 100M a tick, now. If they’re even ratting in their supers.
In most of null, supercapital ratting is pretty dead. It’s only in ‘safe’ regions like Oasa where there’s no easy way to stage dreadbombs that it continues in any amount. Instead, people have moved to subcapital ratting, and there… good luck hitting a 50M ISK tick these days.
It’s not ‘fraudlent logic’, it’s literally the logic behind CCP’s entire microtransaction model: people who have more money than time IRL can subsidize people who have more time than money. It doesn’t matter to CCP who they get the money from. Either way, CCP still gets paid. In fact, they get paid more for PLEX sales than they do for subscriptions, because people subscribing tend to use the longest-term, lowest-price option, while a lot of PLEX sales are ‘I need ISK, lemme buy 1000 PLEX’ at full price.
