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Wednesday, 25 July 2012

Follow the PLEX-money!

Posted on 22:00 by Unknown
Whenever I wrote that PLEX is practically pay-to-cheat that bad players pay for remaining in ships, I got insane amount of disagreement. PLEX is an accepted form of playing and the common belief is that converting PLEX has zero effect on ones success rate.

Let's accept this view and see where it takes us. If not "losers" convert PLEX and not "winners" finance their account(s) from PLEX, who the hell does it? According to the canon "those who have more money than time". If I'd be naive I'd say if you hate the game so much that you'd rather pay than playing, just uninstall it. However I am neither, nor I'm trolling by pretending it. Those who pay consider PvE a "grind" and PvP "fun". We can agree that PvE is an ISK generator either directly as bounties and mission rewards or by creating ore and loot that others buy for ISK. PvP is an ISK sink as the total loot of the winner is about 20-50% of the loss of the loser, so the average PvP-er loses value.

I sometimes watch my girlfriend play. Her only ship is a terribly fit Rokh battleship. 3 rails, 3 blasters (I hear your cries), 1 salvager, 1 tractor beam. Luckily her tank is OK, 180K overheated EHP. She is doing L2 and L3 securities, mostly with drone DPS on the frig/destroyer rats (as drones are cute pets), L1, L2 mining missions and distribution missions, all with the Rokh. The point is that despite the obviously bad play and her extremely casual play-schedule (about 2-3 hours/week), she makes 2-300M/month. Her wealth just grows. If she'd play a bit more (but not any better), she could play for free. Now, even I don't assume that majority of the EVE players are worse than that. Anecdotic evidence aside, 30M/hour income is generally accepted for a "highsec bear". Assuming he does no PvP and PvE activity is "playing" for him, he generates wealth on the side of playing, so we can accept that the average "highsec bear" plays for free (at least partially), funding his activity from PLEX.

If we assume that there are no black holes (like CCP secretly destroying PLEX or selling ISK via bots), every PLEX someone sells is one that someone buys. So if we accepted that the average "highsec bear" is buying PLEX on the marketplace to play for free, we must also accept that someone, who is not a "highsec bear" must sell this PLEX on the marketplace.

Who is he? We don't know but there isn't much people left who are not "highsec bears". Namely: lowsec pirates, FW people, null and WH people. Currently FW sees little-to-none PvP and they spend their time orbiting buttons and converting LP. Living in WH is also generally accepted to be printing ISK (it doesn't make it true, but now we go with the crowd and see where we end up). This leaves nobody else but the remaining PvP people of low and null, proving my earlier point of low/null being an ISK-sink.

Of course I'm not saying that every single low/null players are poor. Not even that every single alliance is. Also not claiming that every single highsec player is swimming in ISK. But the average low/null player is keeping over the water by PLEX-to-ISK, while the average highsec player is constantly giving away ISK by playing for free.

Let me go further. PLEX is a reality and always will be, there is no MMO without RMT (legal or illegal) and botting. So if you want to somehow make nullsec life profitable, you must point to another group as PLEX producers. I mean someone must be poor and convert PLEX in order to let others (who do it better or differently) play for free. Imagine that nullsec people as a group are self-sufficient and profitable, importing PLEX-es to play for free. Who will produce the 100K PLEX/month (50T ISK/month)?

We can return to my original idea: PLEX is paid by idiot losers scattered in every aspect of the game equally, but according to the old comments, you don't want that! We must find an in-game demographics like "highsec bears" then. Do your really think that many people would pay significant amount of real money for the "privilege" to be a "highsec bear"?! I don't doubt that there are dumb ones who replace their 10th Hulk this month but are they a majority?

Low/NPC-null people maybe? If highsec PvE is profitable, lowsec PvE must be more profitable, as there are better rocks, rats, planets and missions. While lowsec costs are higher than highsec (mostly PvP losses) but they can just PvP less and PvE more.

No one else left. Someone must convert PLEX to ISK en masse and no other group has reason to do so. The average sov-null person (and WH person to a lesser extent) spends more money than he earns and fills it with PLEX. Of course I'm not saying that each of them, and tomorrow identify exactly who, along the theoretical idea why they must spend.

This result is extremely interesting and - yet again - turns upside down my plans. I mean I know that you are probably fed up with my crazy ideas, but this is how I learn: put in something "optimal" from the limited knowledge I have, make people argue (is it trolling?) and feed me with the information I need to see it's stupid. Then with the new information I can figure out something less stupid and it goes on until the point when the idea actually works. Come back and prove me wrong once again and you'll be richly rewarded by the result when everything is cleared up.

PS: K162space found some public TEST and Goon documents which shows that the "huge" income these alliances make are merely 5x and 15x bigger than my individual income. We are talking about 10K member alliances here.


Thursday morning report: 117.3B (2.5B spent on main accounts, 1.8 spent on Logi/Carrier, 1.5 on Ragnarok, 1.0 on Rorqual, 1.4 on Nyx, 1.3 on Avatar, 2.6B received as gift).
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