You would have a point here if CCP sold ISK, or allowed players to redeem PLEX to NPCs for ISK. They don’t. Players trade PLEX for ISK from other players - no new game assets are being generated, wealth is just being moved around between wallets.
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Yeah, that’s true. The aspect of plex I don’t like is people paying real money for plex to get ISK. I don’t mind the flip side at all: people paying ISK to get free play time. I agree that is a useful feature. Also for young people whose parents won’t pay for their subscription.
You could theoretically separate them. Just sell a month of game time for some amount of ISK. Maybe.
PLEX isn’t seeded on the market however by CCP. its on the market by the players.
But then CCP isn’t making any money on their Game Time. There has to be real money backing up all Game Time for CCP to stay in business.
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Yeah, agreed. That’s why I am proposing they raise subscription fees. Or at least I would like to know how much they would need to raise them by to offset losing the revenue from plex and SP sales. They would need to raise more if they sold game time directly for ISK of course.
sub has been $15 USD for 17 years, no need to change it, especially with the way the economy has been going lately
Nobody would subscribe. Everyone would buy game time for ISK. They would have to nerf wallet balances and ISK generation into the ground and revoke the option to multibox to reduce income generation enough to keep everyone from just grinding ISK via bounties/missions to pay their subs.
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Not sure why more people would do that than do now. You can buy game time for ISK now, you just do it via plex.
and that plex was purchased with real money from players
Lots of people buy game time via ISK by buying PLEX - but first someone paid CCP cash for the PLEX.
Literally, PLEX is the same as buying a physical subscription card and trading it legally in-game for assets from another player so the card buyer gets assets and the asset seller gets game time.
CCP has sold a sub - via a time card - and both players are happy.
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See, I fear that part of the reason the economy is going the way it has been going lately is because CCP has a conflict of interest. If it makes it really hard to make ISK by playing, then more players turn to buying plex as a way to make ISK. If that’s the direction they’re going, IMO, the end result will be a lame game.
This is a flawed premise. CCP doesn’t sell ISK, and CCP does not set the exchange rate for PLEX to ISK trades between players.
If ISK becomes harder to generate from player activities, PLEX prices drop because the time required to produce ISK has increased.
If ISK generation is easier, PLEX prices rise because the time required to produce ISK has decreased.
CCP making ISK generation more difficult would lead to PLEX selling for less ISK, and if lots of players tried to sell PLEX at the same time, the prices would fall even further due to the supply exceeding the demand.
PLEX does not create ISK. The only in-game asset created with PLEX is skill extractors - which still require player-generated skill points to become valuable on the market. CCP does not allow premium currency redemption for anything that directly creates ISK.
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You’re making very thoughtful arguments. I appreciate that!
That does make sense- perhaps the number of plex people buy would stay the same regardless of how hard or easy it is to make ISK because really the value of plex is linked to the amount of time people are willing to farm for them. Good point. That might resolve my concern right there.
But that said, I still think it is a bad situation to have CCP have a real world financial stake in these things. It isn’t really as simple as that (ISK is either hard or easy to make for everybody). For example, if CCP makes it easy for group A to make ISK, but hard for group B, then group B has to buy plex to get ISK from group A. So, CCP would have an incentive to, for example, make life more profitable for null sec alliances or some other group, and less profitable for everybody else. I’d rather have a cleaner alignment of CCP’s interests with players’ interests, where CCP makes money solely by attracting and retaining players, and hence its entire incentive is to make the game fun.
But, that said, you have successfully convinced me that the problem is at least less bad than I was fearing.
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CCP needs the financial stake, otherwise they can’t pay the devs who keep the game up and running, or other services they are paying for that are in the game, like cloud services etc.
500 Plex is what it takes to trade for game time. Several years ago Plex was up to 1.9 Bil for 500 plex and i think it did manage to break 2 Bil… Not sure where it’s at now, but its dropped significantly after some isk printing changes made in nullsec.
According to EVEpraisal 500 plex has a buy value of 1.28B isk.
Thanks for taking the time to read response and think about them. I’m always happy to discuss the game and its nuances with players genuinely interested in exploring alternate viewpoints to build a better shared understanding of this weird world in which we play.
This is a completely valid concern to have. I think the visibility into CCP’d development processes that we have courtesy of the CSM can help with monitoring trends, as well as the knowledge that by and large the EVE playerbase is intelligent enough to stop playing if this kind of favoritism became evident. Given recent nerfs to null sec income streams, I believe CCP has clearly signaled that their focus is on a healthy game economy, not on encouraging PLEX sales - and beyond that, the theoretical favored players in you example would have to have a desire to have that much PLEX in the first place, and there’s not exactly a lot you can do with PLEX.
Edit to add: to expand on that - it doesn’t net CCP significantly more income if the favored group is able to PLEX their account subscriptions instead of buying as a direct Omega subscription; CCP is just changing which player is paying for the sub, not the total number of subs being bought.
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Having worked as a software developer for a long time, my default assumption is always that the developers are trying to do right, but that there is always some marketroid in the room that is convinced that the future of the game is in selling virtual pets.
To be fair, the marketroid isn’t wrong that cosmetic effects can be a fantastic income stream in most MMOs. And even CCP has leaned into this a little bit with the clothing and SKINs in the NES. They just haven’t gone at it with any serious intent, which makes for a truly lackluster experience for players who are willing to pay for non-game-impacting customizations.
As long as CCP does not ignore the game in favor of developing new clothing/SKINs, I say more power to them for giving their artists work to do during tiericide passes and bug fixing!
I’m not sure it’s fair to make such a claim without mentioning the actual value of 15 Dollars, aka corrected for inflation.
I mean, you’re right that the number still just 15, but those 15$ from 2003 don’t have the same value as nowadays.
Thanks to inflation the game actually got cheaper due to them never raising the number … at least not for us.
The game actually got more expensive for other parts of the world.
Oh and to add to another of your posts: PLEX at some point reached 4.2 Million, which adds up to 2.1 Billion ISK.
In my own currency the monthly eve cost has almost tripled in price since 2007 when I started. But yea I can imagine how nice it would be for a first world country with a stable economy.
but yea thats just retarded inflation.
this is a subject i really should keep my mouth shut on since i’m not well versed in inflation for other countries and such.
I remembered plex was almost 2 bil, couldn’t remember if it broke it or not…