When will PLEX be removed?

Communications Center General Discussion
1

Alright, this has probably been asked before. Many times.

I´ve tried to get back to Eve a thousand times it feels like, and each time I drift away from it for the same reason.

I feel like PLEX and the systems that has come along side it has ruined the game for me, and I can´t be the only one feeling this way. I remember a time when CCP went hard on isk-making bots and there will always be people trying to cheat their way through games, but before plexes and all that; you actually had to work for your stuff.
Sure, try and buy money online was possible but with a chance that you would get caught and most likely banned for life on that account.
Sure buy a new account and try again, but we know that building a character in Eve means something; or at least it did.

Now days, I can´t help but feel that everything I see, meet, fight or converse with; is bought. I feel that the origins of CCP and their visions is long gone and has been replaced by, and excuse my terminology here; “new-age business suits”.
This is making the game more “modern” I suppose, and year after year I see Eve losing its unique feel.

Im guessing this will never change since its far too long gone now, PLEX has been in the game for years and systems built around them. But as a 30 year old guy who LOVED Eve for what it was and was going to be, I am truly dissapointed in the way it has been going.
There´s still stuff today that is so awesome and the game has some fricking cool things coming; but my thirst to play dies everytime I see the “buy this for that”-menus.

Did CCP get too big?
Did they get replaced by EA and no one noticed?
Has the userbase change so that this is actually what we want?

As mentioned above, I can´t be alone on this and I truly wish didn´t have these systems for just buying your way through everything and thus loosing all of its value in the process.

rant rant rant, Eve was better the first five years, pew pew pew, it even has lootboxes now (throws up…)

Best regards,
an Eve player who miss the good ol days.

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2

I dont understand your point, at all.

Either earn a PLEX, or buy a sub.

Nothing except the price of PLEX ingame has changed in that regard.

Come December, we can fly 20mil Alphas.

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Then you haven´t read my post at all.

I´m talking about a time before PLEX. When Eve felt better, if I may. I don´t want PLEX, and I don´t want the universe to be filled with people who has bought everything because it ruins the whole feel of accomplishment and pride behind what you´ve done, kind of.

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I’m confused here. If you worked hard and finally bought a Porche, would your accomplishment be diminished by your rich neighbor who comes from money being gifted 2 from a rich uncle? You still put the effort in. You still earned it the hard way while he didn’t, proving you have a better grasp of what hard work can accomplish. How is that different?

Will PLEX go away… I doubt it. Given the change to smaller units, the increase in uses for PLEX, the general decline of subscription based games on favor of micro transactions in the industry as a whole, PLEX are not going anywhere.

Also… Are you sure you are not looking at the past through the rose tinted lenses of nostalgia and turning a blind eye to the benefits PLEX brings to the game?

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Before we had plex you could still sell game time codes on the forums for isk, which is surely the same as plex now?

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6

Took you long enough to notice the blatant obvious.

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Eh what other people had never affected me, but to answer the question in your title, never

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The thing here is that real money - fictional money connection. Someone who has a lot of real world currency can just “get rich” in Eve, with no play time involved.

And no, my accomplishments are fine and Im not trying to say that only my accomplishments feel different today; but all.
Eve is Pay to Win, in a much greater sense than it was before. To a degree that I don´t really feel like playing it anymore.

As someone mentioned in another post here; people are using phrases like “get a PLEX and buy this and that” and so on; and this hurts my eyes and feel for the game.

And yeah, a lot of things are better in Eve today talking of mechanics and features, but my rose tinted lenses have some value in the point I´m trying to make here, although be it badly I see. My brain is really mushy and I just had to write this, get it off my chest, because today I tried starting it again and well… the totally supported play to win, or pay to advance structure, is really ruining the game for me.

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Felt this for years, just that I actually expressed myself on the forums for the first time. :slight_smile:

10

I believe Starwars Battlefront II can help with that.

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11

I remeber a time when CCP would look for unusual activity regarding ISK income and thus removing said ISK (or account) if any real money trading were involved. Now, it´s totally embedded in the game.

12

Haha, thanks for the laugh!

I feel like a grumpy old man when I think about the state of games these days. Humphf.

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13

How do you win a game that has no defined victory conditions? How can something be “Pay-to-win” if there really is no win?

If you define winning as simply having the biggest bank account, then yes, PLEX allows pay-to-win but what does that accomplish? You have more isk, but if I don’t define that bad my win condition, what does it matter?

Also… With or without PLEX, people will try to buy game currency for real world cash. It is a given and something we can’t seem to beat. It happens in pretty much every game. Yes people get banned for it, but it still happens constantly. Would you rather a came offer a way to do that legitimately that helps the company or would you rather it allow the illicit isk sellers to profit?

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15

Sure, let´s call it pay-to-advance then.

You can buy SP for Plex now even, or am I wrong on this one?

Yes it does happen to every game, so does cheating. Would you like other games to let you pay to have wallhack enabled?
No, you´d like the company to enforce the core of the game.
(Yeah I know cheating is perhaps not as bad as RMT, but still.)

In a game like Eve, one part of the core for me is the truly unique universe with its own market, production and so on. This loses value if anything can be bought with out-of-game currency.

Cheating, RMT and so on will always happen but as mentioned: CCP used to slam hard on these things and you would mostly never see hundreds of pilots with more ISK than they can spend, not knowing a thing about the game.
The integrety of the Eve universe and its collaborate systems fails on this problem, I think.

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V Sincerely feel like waiting months and months and months for something I could fly is senseless. Especially if I have a couple other characters, there is no quality of life enhancement that removing PLEX gives you, instead you kill a vital source of income for CCP and an easy way to fast track characters for those of us win disposable incomes.

I think fears of new players injecting into ships is wildly blown out of proportion. It makes more sense for experienced players with a good skill plan to use injectors than newbros but if anyone wants to help keep EVE alive, more power to them. If somebody wants to use that money on a super shiny ship, even better. It will eventually become a really shiny killmail.

This is a lot like hisec care bears, it isn’t really a problem until somebody jumps through some hoops to make it one,

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You’re crying about the option to exchange PLEX for ISK but you have nothing to say about the option to use PLEX for a 30-days sub! Tell me, do you know many games with a free-sub option through a game-item?
Have you any idea how much money CCP loses from all those multi-trillions Corps/Alliances who are able to plex multi-accounts without to pay not even 1 cent?

Just think about that and if you really like EvE adjust and move on, there is nothing to win or to lose.

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look OP…

ccp is never ever getting rid of plex ok… its their main cash faucet now, just due to their bait and switch tactics to boost their bottom line… POINT BLANK SIMPLE PERIOD!.

Asking ccp to remove Plex is like asking CCP Fozzie to come out with a real fix to AFK cloaking which aint ever happening…ever… you can forget it and bank on that buddy!!!

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19

CCP doesn’t lose any money there at all. In fact, they make more money selling PLEX because it’s cheaper to sub an account for 6 months than to buy PLEX and sub through that PLEX. Also PLEX (save for a small fraction given during Aurum conversion and during events) is only generated by people buying them from CCP (or a 3rd party seller which still pays CCP). So CCP isn’t losing money by people turning plex into game time.

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Things I like about plex : some rich yokel buys an expensive boats and blings it out thinking they are going to win eve only to lose it all in 2 secs because plex doesn’t equal skill in eve.

Things I don’t like about plex : some newbee comes into eve, and spends all his Christmas money that he got from his grandma on some ill fit ship which he then loses in spectacular fashion.

As far as I’m concerned new players should not be allowed to plex. And ccp’s encouragement of new players to plex is just wrong.

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Keep in mind that the gaming world isn’t the same as it was 10 years ago, the gaming player isn’t, the gaming technology isn’t.

If EVE doesn’t keep up with the moving target of ‘staying relevant as the years go by’, you get no Eve. You don’t get the ‘grand old Eve’ (that probably wasn’t half as grand for most players as you remember it). You get no EVE.

I’ve played Eve off and on for roughly 10 years now, and the long-term issue that keeps it ‘more off than on’ was the need to to buy (or GTC, or Plex) game time in 30 day chunks. When my ‘play time’ often came in chunks of a few days here and there, or a couple weekends a month. Or I might skip a couple months.

Back when Everquest was the only game I played, I kept the sub running even when I wasn’t able to play, Same deal with City of Heroes. But then came the wave of games for ‘casuals’ and F2P, and now I could play 15 different games, on any schedule I wanted, without paying a dime.

And that’s what every game in today’s MMO industry has to deal with… how to stay relevant when every gamer out there can switch to a F2P, decent quality game with 3 mouse clicks.

So it may not feel like it did ‘back in the day’, but if it still ran that way, Eve would be dead.

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