When will PLEX be removed?

want more people to pve, swap sp to xp.

on the other note, I have 213m sp, a day 0 can kill me if they catch me at the right times in the right ship. now with plex, ive seen day 0 in t2 tengus and day 1s in capital ships so yeah.

I think these dudes just stuck in the past and will never want to move the game forward. that’s the main issue with eve… seems so many stuck on how it used to be than what it is today… ccp continues to strive moving forward and bring this game to the forefront of the mainsteam… it’ll never happen but they’ll keep trying…

I would much prefer for pve missions that give xp per kill… just cause its a normal thing to do… but don’t let these bittervets read it… they’ll frown upon it since their millions in sp makes them feel Uber.

I’m so confused by you calling my comment rubbish. You said you can name a dozen other games where a day 1 player can beat a 10 year vet…well that’s my entire point. People don’t want to play games where 10 year vets will always have a nearly insurmountable advantage. That isn’t fun. There are several, in fact most games allow for the gap to be closed.

The original post I was responding to is where you said that every game allows for vets to have more skill than newer players. Maybe I should clarify it further, I understand that on day 1 I will be outmatched, but after 6 months of playing a game and learning the mechanics I should be closing the gap.

It doesn’t take 6 months to learn to pvp well. So pretending like a 10 year vet has 10 more vital years of experience is silly. After a reasonable amount of time, like 6 months the playing field should be even. Then pure skill should come into play. After 6 months I’ve learned how to pvp, someone else can be better than me, but I know what I should do in each scenario.

I don’t understand the OP’s problem with PLEX, making claims that nowadays everything in the game feel “bought”.

PLEX on its own is useless and nobody can do anything about it. And it cost more money to PLEX your account monthly than buying a subscription.

There are 2 things that make PLEX unique.

1st, you can buy skill extractors with it to use on characters you want to extract skill-point and inject other characters. Useful if you characters got a bad history associated or its reputation is tarnished, but you don’t want to waste the skill-points accumulated.

2nd, you can buy skins. Unique skins which is rare and then you can boast about your ship to your friends and enemies alike.

Now people who sell PLEX for ISK is actually promoting the economy to even work harder, because now you have people who need to generate ISK through incursions, ratting, etc and people who is lazy, buying PLEX to sell it for ISK to buy ships, fittings, etc.

If CCP remove PLEX, you will cause the economy to go through a rapid change and then people will try to establish “exchanges” where they physically will take actual money to sell ISK. CCP decided to avoid these exchanges, they use PLEX as the tool and it is up to the players to decide what the value of PLEX for ISK ratio is.

If demand is high for PLEX, people will pay lots of ISK for PLEX. If supply is high, then the value of PLEX will fall on the market.

So, to say that buying PLEX will make the game pay2win doesn’t make sense, as everything in the game is player generated, not NPC. And PLEXing your account cost more than subscription.

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Are we arguing over different things? I’m not saying that a rookie should be able to beat a vet just because they fly the same ship. I’m saying that even if I learn how to fly a tier 1 frigate, just as well as vet, I still won’t be able to equip the same gear or stat modifiers that a vet.

Which is why I say that allowing PLEX to be purchased allows me to close the gap of gear and ships. If for example I start an entirely new account but I’m really good at pvp, I still won’t be able to beat a decent vet in the same ship because their ship layout can be vastly superior to mine, and it would take months and months to get anywhere near competitive with them unless I buy skill injectors, which PLEX allows me to do without engaging in other unwanted activities.

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No, I said the exact opposite of that.

Call of Duty is a game which uses the same skills as others of its genre, so its very very possible to be good at it from day one.

You said that my statement of “knowing wtf you are doing with a particular hull and your skills at finding like minded folk to share your adventure” wasnt even remotely true… and now you are saying the same thing.

Which is it?

Is EvE impossible to match players because you feel the older players have some other advantage other that new players dont, or is it that you agree with me that actual experience of playing is by and large the determining factor in how well you do compared to others, over and above Isk and SP?

Reading your most recent post, it seems to me that we are in agreement, and that we both agree that buying PLEX and SP and etc is not ruinging balance, but the opposite, its levelling a field whereby learning about how the game works becomes the next benchmark?

If so, then I think we simply misunderstood each others statements.

Yes, it appears that we are in agreement about skill being the determining factor and PLEX being vital.

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PLEX will be removed together with CCP.

/thread

What if CCP removed PLEX, so that the only 2 currencies were ISK and cash? That is, you either pay ISK generated in-game or cash for game time and items. Cash for subs/game time, ISK for game time and everything else.

CCP would lose the income from PLEX sales, but all they’d need to do is up the sub. Now that’s no light matter, but I’ve often wondered when it’ll come about. The current UK sub of £9.99 must be worth hardly anything compared with the salaries, etc., it would have funded when it was introduced.

The introduction of PLEX was also maybe to offset the need for sub increases.

It just seems to me that PLEX manipulation as an income-generating tool for CCP is becoming a bit complicated. Eventually, I can see some fragged-out Director of Finance throwing his hands up in frustration and saying ‘Goodness me, I’ve had just about enough of this; there must be another way!’ - (insert your own expletives)

I suppose better heads than mine have tried to sort it out though.

If you think that sp = skill then you really need to find a new game. Just because someone has more sp doesn’t mean they are better but only that they have more access to different ships on that one account. Btw If you feel that you want to fly a titan as a one day old player well then you could always go out and buy a toon to do that. Don’t need injectors at all. That ccp has somehow convinced new players to buy injectors is a shame since all it does is rush new players into more expensive ships then they are ready for.

Make elaborate “gap”.

You appear to be very uneducated. That is okay. These “new age yahoos” with their 0.01 millisecond attention spans always had a hard time comprehending Kindergarten, so they were never able to complete primate school.
Anyhow, you didn’t look up the word “gap” in the dictionary like you were supposed to but fear not, I got you.

First, there is not “gap” in EVE. In fact the whole skill training idea was designed to not have any “gaps” and it does not matter when you join EVE.

Fact:

  • When you have completed frigate level 5, you cannot get any higher than that. Level 5 it is. Takes 3 days and a few hours. For lots of others and I it was a “little” longer than that to get there but once we did, another book got the attention- “gap” closed. The end.

Fact:

  • When you reach the age you consider your own offspring, you get protective of your little ones. Anything dangerous will be a big no, no for you. Then zee “economy” gives your baby princess a free motor cycle driver license and your baby princess at age 2 goes on a ride with a “free to drive” motorcycle.
    Proud father that you are, you should have known that your baby princess’ brain isn’t very far developed yet to consider all the other motorcycle babies and “veteran” car drivers on the fast lane and she gets hit by another baby motorcycle driver, who was age 3 at the time. Also with a “free to drive” motorcycle given out to all the newborns at childbirth.
    At the funeral of your baby princess you ask yourself, if it was a good idea to let your inpatient baby princess ride of into the sunset before she could even pronounce “dad”.

And why wouldn’t you start blaming the “veteran” car drives, who told you that letting your new born ride a motorcycle at age 2 was not a good idea?

Was “obviously” them “veterans” fault your baby princess dies at age 2 to another baby motorcycle driver (age 3). Them ebil “bitter veterans” man.

Panem!!!1111eleven

PLEX isn’t going anywhere. But the OP is right, EVE was better before PLEX.

To be more complete, EVE was better before 3 big things I can identify:

  • PLEX (created to combat RMT)

  • the “inflation” of in game rewards (30 mil isk per hour used to be the Gold Standard that was hard to achieve, before incursions and respawning null anomalies and burner missions and FW missions etc etc)

  • The overdone ‘safety’ mechanics (the safety toggles, the pop ups and notifications that appear if you start to do anything that might be considered interesting…)

Sure there were cheaters, the botters and RMTers and the idiots buying characters off Ebay, but that were pretty obvious. It seems like CCP legitimized a lot of it with plex, and while that was a shrewd move and probably one that needed to happen, it also came at a cost to the actual game.

The other 2 factors I mention just exacerbated the negative effects of plex, more safety and more rewards along with a cheap and easy way to just buy isk meant that losing stuff became less painful, which makes everything we do in the game less meaningful than it was.

Like I said, maybe this stuff had to happen, maybe it’s the cost of modernization, but yea, some very good, cool and IMO vital things were lost along the way.

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As I only started in 09, what sort of things did you used to do?

Just curious now.

For the most part, there are more things to do now. But that’s just the thing, back then you had to go find the fun, go find the wealth, and doing that made the actual rewards more…well…rewarding lol.

Take null sec isk making for example. The System Upgrades scheme wasn’t a thing when I 1st moved to null. if you wanted to do anomalies (havens and sanctums and hubs, the ‘named’ sits like forsaken hub didn’t exist yet), you had to go look for them, system after system. When you found a cluster of them it was like striking Oil. That meant something.

I started out in Omist with Atlas Alliance, and Omist was so poor and overcrowded that we had extra incentive to invade Red Alliance Space and take Insmother and Detorid from them.

Now, its just undock, warp to site, do site, rinse repeat. It’s good isk and a stable income, but there is no ‘magic’ to it any more. Why invade anyone? Our anomalies will never stop re-spawning.

A lot of the game is like that now. The safeties and pop ups prevent people in high and low sec from making certain mistakes, but those mistakes were the things that made the game both interesting and infuriating at the same time. PLEX made individual pvp loses less painful in a way that the old GTCs didn’t. And the ease of getting rewards cheapened the experience all around.

I’m not thinking of asking CCP to make an EVE version of Vanilla WoW lol. It wouldn’t be honest to pretend that current EVE isn’t cool. It is and it shouldn’t be taken for granted. But current/modern EVE does not hold the same kind of magic as the older, grittier EVE that made you claw and scrape for your rewards and didn’t protect you from your own stupidity…

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I just turn the warnings off and make sure I have as few friends as possible so every trip is exciting :slight_smile:

And I dont think I know any nullers at all.

Yes, CCP doesn’t like bots and RMT, but it’s not because RMT is some poison that is destroying the game, it’s because RMT is CCP’s competition. And seeing as CCP owns everything related to Eve, they don’t like other people making real world money with their stuff, and they have that right.

Short anwser.

NO.

For the most part, there are more things to do now. But that’s just the thing, back then you had to go find the fun, go find the wealth, and doing that made the actual rewards more…well…rewarding lol.

Take null sec isk making for example. The System Upgrades scheme wasn’t a thing when I 1st moved to null. if you wanted to do anomalies (havens and sanctums and hubs, the ‘named’ sits like forsaken hub didn’t exist yet), you had to go look for them, system after system. When you found a cluster of them it was like striking Oil. That meant something.

I started out in Omist with Atlas Alliance, and Omist was so poor and overcrowded that we had extra incentive to invade Red Alliance Space and take Insmother and Detorid from them.

Now, its just undock, warp to site, do site, rinse repeat. It’s good isk and a stable income, but there is no ‘magic’ to it any more. Why invade anyone? Our anomalies will never stop re-spawning.

A lot of the game is like that now. The safeties and pop ups prevent people in high and low sec from making certain mistakes, but those mistakes were the things that made the game both interesting and infuriating at the same time. PLEX made individual pvp loses less painful in a way that the old GTCs didn’t. And the ease of getting rewards cheapened the experience all around.

I’m not thinking of asking CCP to make an EVE version of Vanilla WoW lol. It wouldn’t be honest to pretend that current EVE isn’t cool. It is and it shouldn’t be taken for granted. But current/modern EVE does not hold the same kind of magic as the older, grittier EVE that made you claw and scrape for your rewards and didn’t protect you from your own stupidity…

If the game had remained the way it did, it wouldn’t have gone far in time.

Back when it started, MMO’s were still and mostly comprised of that specific kind of grindfest culture/hardcore population that is now mostly gone (Everquest, Lineage, Swg, Uo…) due to age, loss of interest and/or new priorities in ones life, and new generations of gamers too.

I think it safe to say that today most people wouldn’t care less to grind or work hard for their stuff inside a game. Video games are treated lightly by most people nowadays, dumbed down to being just cheap distractions, and “simulation” games generally don’t have a good track-record in holding enough people’s attention over time, and in a huge game like Eve where population is a big factor to stay alive, it’s had to find ways to retain it, no matter what the costs.

Hopefully though, big projects like Star Citizen, that make everything you do feel like gameplay interaction, as in as simple as landing safely, hauling your car back into your ship’s hold, exploring wrecks in first person, should bring back the hype of simulation games into the fold, and one could hope, maybe raise expectations for an Eve 2.0 ?

Injectors are nice if you’ve got a lot of disposable income to get all the skills, but not so nice if you… well, don’t.

Which is where we get into the “selling mechanical advantages for real money” rabbit hole gaming has found itself is in today: you can sell things in game for ludicrous amounts of real money, or you can have a playing field someone without ludicrous amounts of money feels competitive in, and there’s been a lot of research thrown at trying to have that cake and eat it too. Stuff like the current skill extractor/injector mechanic makes EVE seem like a rich kid’s game.
Star Citizen has a similar problem. It’s quite literally still selling ships in the cash shop, which is a huge, screaming STAY AWAY sign, at least to me. It looks to be a very mechanically complex game with a lot of room to just play around with different ship fits, but it has “whale trap” written all over the cash shop.

If it’s a well-designed catch-up mechanic and doesn’t cost insane amounts of real money, it’s not going to make too many people mad.* If it really is just cosmetic, it will again not make too many people mad (though a distracting enough outfit would be very useful for a blops hunter toon). But, everything the devs put into the cash shop as a reason to throw money at the game is something the devs probably didn’t seed in the game universe as a reason to explore it.

If you want to look at what EVE would have had to be if it had stayed subscription-only and never come up with PLEX, it would have been a lot more like Vendetta Online. It’s another sandboxy space game, played mostly in the first person, but it never tried to go as big or as wide as EVE, doesn’t look anywhere near as pretty, and will scream bloody murder if it tries to have a fleet fight even a tenth as big as the kind EVE is famous for. I think it’s got something like 4 devs and a userbase that’s dwindling like EVE’s is. It’s even about the same age.

And another random thought: subscription-based MMOs should really look at Netflix’s business model and consider doing something similar. Instead of $15/month for each, maybe $20/month for all of them would make for a better value to the end user, with the money being divided up by play time. The value to the end user of Netflix is the sheer variety of stuff you can just browse through and watch whenever you want, commercial-free, for a low price. Publishers seem to think they have enough of their own content to run their own streaming service, but… at $10 apeice with their own stupid bait-and-switch games, 10 of them don’t look nearly as attractive to viewers as Netflix is. Or maybe it would be a niche product because most people don’t play even one MMO, never mind more than one.

*Except they rarely get mad any more. Years and years of this has made everyone just apathetic. Mostly people just shake their heads and move on. EAFront II is the notable exception right now.

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yes you can, ive seen Anno online sell buildings to boost population in a limited at $100. not to mention games that sell you small things for $20-30 usd just for cosmetics.