I am in firm belief that anyone buying PLEX for real money is simply a bad player. My favorite example is that if I buy my way into heavyweight boxing, paying managers to let me fight the champions it won't make me a top boxer, just a moron paying money to be beaten up (I'm not talking about illegal buying wins, just buying the matches themselves).
However the bad players and supporters keep telling that they just "skip the grind" as it's more "time efficient" to get $15 with their real life job than 500M ISK in EVE.
Finally I found the proof why it's bullshit: EVE is not WoW. In WoW to level 85 and get full honor gear is just matter of time. Anyone who is not serious mental patient can reach the level cap. You have to be very skilled in the game to artificially create a gear/talent/rotation that cannot defeat monsters of your level. Random picking will still steamroll. I soloed 5-man leveling dungeons 4-5 levels above me. Getting honor gear is even easier, you can do it completely AFK, just create a keyboard macro that jumps every 3 minutes to prevent being kicked from the battleground.
"The grind" is defined as trivial but lengthy process that is created either due to bad design or to create content where morons and slackers can feel heroes. Skilled players hate the grind as it's just a waste of time. Leveling to 85 and getting full honor gear doesn't make you better in arenas or rated BGs at all and also it's impossible to fail in it, except for not having time to do it. One who buys a honor-geared character doesn't do anything that increases his chance to win in arenas, simply skips a timesink.
Getting ISK in EVE is anything but trivial. You cannot create a "do this and this and this" guide that provides you ISK without the chance of failing. Mining? Along came a Tornado and you are 350M behind in a second. Missioning providing 100M/hour? A scanner neut alt, 3 Tornados and your 1.5B Tengu is history. Trading can obviously go wrong. There is simply no way to make ISK without getting into trouble.
Saying that "I could make 500M if I'd have 5 hours" is just as true as "I could have a 3:2 kill:death if I'd have 5 hours". You must prove it to reliably claim it. You can only skip content without being cheater if everyone agrees that the mentioned content is trivial. No sane WoW player would claim that you couldn't level up yourself. However many-many players are broke in EVE and for this reason buy PLEX from real money. Maybe you are not among them. Maybe you really could gain ISK if you'd have the time. But making that claim without proof is empty bragging. Anecdotal evidence that "I once ran missions for 50M/hour so I could do it again" is just as good as "I killed a Hel (3% damage done), so I can kill supercaps regularly". Maybe you were just extremely lucky that one time. Or times have changed and the opponents got smarter over the years.
You can only skip grind. If you skip competitive elements, you are cheating. Skipping any competitive element is cheating. Otherwise you are on the slippery slope of "I just skip one more element" until the point of you skip it all and buy a pilot with top killboard stats and peacock around without actually killing anyting yourself. That's not against the ToS either.
There is one exception of the above: if the goal of the player is not competitive with the others. For example if your aim is to have a planetary colony in every planet of Lonetrek and you buy PLEX to start it up faster, you defeated nobody in the process, so just bought convenience for yourself. Unless of course there is a planetary community with third party sites running with benchmarks and you climbed high with your purchase. Then, you are a cheater.
A related topic: illegal ISK selling. Buying illegal ISK is cheaper than PLEX. So many of the above cheaters do it. They shouldn't as their illegal transactions are reversed and now they are with negative wallet. Seems CCP really fight ISK selling. I wrote several articles back then why do Blizzard openly tolerates goldselling. I even found a blatant goldfarmer and reported him with no effect. Why? How come that the small CCP can do something against ISK selling and Blizzard cannot. The answer is simple: according to the dev blog, 1268 accounts were banned and 4.2T ISK seized. By removing this ISK, the customers of the ISK sellers could get their ISK only from CCP, by buying 8400 PLEX-es (4.2T/500M). 8400 is much greater than 1268. So the solution is that by selling PLEX, CCP is a competitor of the ISK sellers, so motivated to stop them. Blizzard, and all other MMO developers who don't do RMT themselves can't care less. You'll see that in Diablo 3, where official RMT exists, the same Blizzard that was impotent to catch the obvious bot I reported magically will be able to catch botters.
EVE Business report: Tuesday morning 17.4B (2 PLEX behind for second account, 0.3B spent on Titan project)
Remember that you can participate in our EVE conversations on the "goblinworks" channel (60-80 people on peak time) and your UI suggestions are welcomed.
PS: Comment on Hulkageddon from my girlfriend: "it's overrated"
However the bad players and supporters keep telling that they just "skip the grind" as it's more "time efficient" to get $15 with their real life job than 500M ISK in EVE.
Finally I found the proof why it's bullshit: EVE is not WoW. In WoW to level 85 and get full honor gear is just matter of time. Anyone who is not serious mental patient can reach the level cap. You have to be very skilled in the game to artificially create a gear/talent/rotation that cannot defeat monsters of your level. Random picking will still steamroll. I soloed 5-man leveling dungeons 4-5 levels above me. Getting honor gear is even easier, you can do it completely AFK, just create a keyboard macro that jumps every 3 minutes to prevent being kicked from the battleground.
"The grind" is defined as trivial but lengthy process that is created either due to bad design or to create content where morons and slackers can feel heroes. Skilled players hate the grind as it's just a waste of time. Leveling to 85 and getting full honor gear doesn't make you better in arenas or rated BGs at all and also it's impossible to fail in it, except for not having time to do it. One who buys a honor-geared character doesn't do anything that increases his chance to win in arenas, simply skips a timesink.
Getting ISK in EVE is anything but trivial. You cannot create a "do this and this and this" guide that provides you ISK without the chance of failing. Mining? Along came a Tornado and you are 350M behind in a second. Missioning providing 100M/hour? A scanner neut alt, 3 Tornados and your 1.5B Tengu is history. Trading can obviously go wrong. There is simply no way to make ISK without getting into trouble.
Saying that "I could make 500M if I'd have 5 hours" is just as true as "I could have a 3:2 kill:death if I'd have 5 hours". You must prove it to reliably claim it. You can only skip content without being cheater if everyone agrees that the mentioned content is trivial. No sane WoW player would claim that you couldn't level up yourself. However many-many players are broke in EVE and for this reason buy PLEX from real money. Maybe you are not among them. Maybe you really could gain ISK if you'd have the time. But making that claim without proof is empty bragging. Anecdotal evidence that "I once ran missions for 50M/hour so I could do it again" is just as good as "I killed a Hel (3% damage done), so I can kill supercaps regularly". Maybe you were just extremely lucky that one time. Or times have changed and the opponents got smarter over the years.
You can only skip grind. If you skip competitive elements, you are cheating. Skipping any competitive element is cheating. Otherwise you are on the slippery slope of "I just skip one more element" until the point of you skip it all and buy a pilot with top killboard stats and peacock around without actually killing anyting yourself. That's not against the ToS either.
There is one exception of the above: if the goal of the player is not competitive with the others. For example if your aim is to have a planetary colony in every planet of Lonetrek and you buy PLEX to start it up faster, you defeated nobody in the process, so just bought convenience for yourself. Unless of course there is a planetary community with third party sites running with benchmarks and you climbed high with your purchase. Then, you are a cheater.
A related topic: illegal ISK selling. Buying illegal ISK is cheaper than PLEX. So many of the above cheaters do it. They shouldn't as their illegal transactions are reversed and now they are with negative wallet. Seems CCP really fight ISK selling. I wrote several articles back then why do Blizzard openly tolerates goldselling. I even found a blatant goldfarmer and reported him with no effect. Why? How come that the small CCP can do something against ISK selling and Blizzard cannot. The answer is simple: according to the dev blog, 1268 accounts were banned and 4.2T ISK seized. By removing this ISK, the customers of the ISK sellers could get their ISK only from CCP, by buying 8400 PLEX-es (4.2T/500M). 8400 is much greater than 1268. So the solution is that by selling PLEX, CCP is a competitor of the ISK sellers, so motivated to stop them. Blizzard, and all other MMO developers who don't do RMT themselves can't care less. You'll see that in Diablo 3, where official RMT exists, the same Blizzard that was impotent to catch the obvious bot I reported magically will be able to catch botters.
EVE Business report: Tuesday morning 17.4B (2 PLEX behind for second account, 0.3B spent on Titan project)
Remember that you can participate in our EVE conversations on the "goblinworks" channel (60-80 people on peak time) and your UI suggestions are welcomed.
PS: Comment on Hulkageddon from my girlfriend: "it's overrated"
