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United States43960 Posts
The people behind the botting program actively advertise that instead of using real money to buy isk off RMT sellers and getting in with all that shady shit you can instead buy a month to month subscription for a second account, leave it botting and use the isk from that which not only pays more but also avoids one type of shady shit (and starts another but they don't advertise that).
If the botting output isn't intended for the player running the bot but rather to be turned into real money then any plex he had, and there is no reason for him to ever have a stockpile because he ought to be selling constantly because that's the entire reason he has it, were bought off the market with illegally generated isk. These plex are no different to CCP creating a trillion isk and buying some off the market.
Neither has any reason to give CCP a stash of PLEX. The only people who have stashes of PLEX are guys like myself. It doesn't make sense.
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I think the issue is that the people in question don't think it through that carefully.
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United States43960 Posts
There's no part not to think through. If you're farming isk for self then you never have plex on it because you're using the isk to subsidise your navy battleship ratting in null losses or your "we're gonna be a legit alliance one day" roleplay. If you're farming isk for sale on it then you never have plex on it because you sold all your isk.
If we're talking about a stockpile of thousands of plex here, all of which would need to have been bought before the accounts got banned to avoid the equivalent of just generating isk out of thin air and buying plex, that needs some very large stockpiles to be :CCP:ed. Stealing 300b off that euni guy who was botting and using that to buy plex with isk and sell them back lower would work but it'd be completely pointless in terms of the economy, they don't need to steal isk from banned accounts, isk they have, plex are the limited resource.
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United States7481 Posts
I think they got most of their plex when they did their very first mass ban, the "unholy rage" or whatever they called it. Anything since then would be a mere trickle (partly because people smarten up).
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Observations:
1) You only have a massive stockpile of PLEX if you trade a lot of characters and buy the stuff when its cheap, or if you speculate with PLEX itself.
2) There is almost no difference between CCP spawning money out of thin air and buying up plex when it is cheap, and selling it when it is expensive, and CCP selling PLEX 'found' on banned accounts and selling that when its expensive. The Eve Central Bank could be a scam (buying up plex from market) and it wouldn't be any different. Both tricks are finite however and are a stable nor lasting 'cure' for PLEX price fluctuations.
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United States43960 Posts
Indeed.
CCP can of course simply create plex out of the air and feed them into the market. They're reluctant to do it but you have to ask yourself if there is any real difference between CCP doing a 20% discount on PLEX for a week and selling 25% more than they usually would during the sale (each plex is now worth .8 of its previous dollar value but the average customer is buying 1.25 of their usual purchase and therefore is spending the exact same amount (.8+.2)) or CCP not running the sale that week and just giving a CCP market alt an amount of PLEX out of thin air totalling 25% of the total PLEX sales that week. The same number of PLEX hit the market and the same number of $ hit CCP's wallet. Them right click selling PLEXs they made out of thin air is direct intervention but equally them giving people 25% more PLEX for their $ when they buy PLEX is creating PLEX out of thin air. All PLEX are created out of thin air, the only anchor is the $ value and when CCP manipulate that the difference becomes nothing more than word play.
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On May 24 2013 03:09 Vipsanius wrote:
2) There is almost no difference between CCP spawning money out of thin air and buying up plex when it is cheap, and selling it when it is expensive, and CCP selling PLEX 'found' on banned accounts and selling that when its expensive.
There is some difference, in that doing the first tends to establish a price floor for PLEX, while the second doesn't.
Edit: Neither of these involve creating PLEX out of thin air. CCP's need not to do that is probably fundamentally a matter of their own (real-world) accounting. Creating PLEX out of nothing and putting those into the market essentially amounts to giving away free game time, which is a cost for them.
Edit 2: The difference between a PLEX sale and seeding extra PLEX into the market is that they believe that a sale provokes enough additional PLEX purchases to increase their real-money revenue for that period. They're not doing this for in-game economic reasons, they're doing it to induce players to spend more money on the game.
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United States43960 Posts
On May 24 2013 03:22 Lysenko wrote:Show nested quote +On May 24 2013 03:09 Vipsanius wrote:
2) There is almost no difference between CCP spawning money out of thin air and buying up plex when it is cheap, and selling it when it is expensive, and CCP selling PLEX 'found' on banned accounts and selling that when its expensive.
There is some difference, in that doing the first tends to establish a price floor for PLEX, while the second doesn't. Edit: Neither of these involve creating PLEX out of thin air. CCP's need not to do that is probably fundamentally a matter of their own (real-world) accounting. Creating PLEX out of nothing and putting those into the market essentially amounts to giving away free game time, which is a cost for them.
They do it all the time as demonstrated in my above post.
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On May 24 2013 03:24 KwarK wrote:
They do it all the time as demonstrated in my above post.
Creating PLEX in response to a player paying $20 to CCP is not "creating a PLEX out of thin air." Creation of the PLEX is tied to the transaction. It's not the same as them simply saying "Let's make 10,000 PLEX today!" Also, read my edit about discounts being used as an inducement to cause players to spend more real money. That's NOT equivalent, from CCP's standpoint, to simply making extra PLEX and seeding the market with them, because that wouldn't serve as such an inducement.
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United States43960 Posts
On May 24 2013 03:27 Lysenko wrote:Show nested quote +On May 24 2013 03:24 KwarK wrote:
They do it all the time as demonstrated in my above post. Creating PLEX in response to a player paying $20 to CCP is not "creating a PLEX out of thin air." Creation of the PLEX is tied to the transaction. It's not the same as them simply saying "Let's make 10,000 PLEX today!"
Okay. I'll try and make it simpler for you.
Two scenarios.
A) CCP run a buy one get one free offer on PLEX for 24 hours. $20 will now get you two PLEX. CCP get the same number of $s but people selling PLEX in game have twice as many and thus the market for PLEX is flooded.
B) CCP doesn't run a buy one get one free offer on PLEX for 24 hours. Instead they simply count how many PLEX they sell in those 24 hours and then give a CCP market alt that number of PLEX out of thin air. The CCP market alt sells them and thus the market for PLEX is flooded.
In both A and B CCP get the same number of $. In both A and B CCP put the same number of PLEX in the game. In both A and B there is the same market impact.
A happens several times a month.
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On May 24 2013 03:31 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On May 24 2013 03:27 Lysenko wrote:On May 24 2013 03:24 KwarK wrote:
They do it all the time as demonstrated in my above post. Creating PLEX in response to a player paying $20 to CCP is not "creating a PLEX out of thin air." Creation of the PLEX is tied to the transaction. It's not the same as them simply saying "Let's make 10,000 PLEX today!" Okay. I'll try and make it simpler for you. Two scenarios. A) CCP run a buy one get one free offer on PLEX for 24 hours. $20 will now get you two PLEX. CCP get the same number of $s but people selling PLEX in game have twice as many and thus the market for PLEX is flooded. B) CCP doesn't run a buy one get one free offer on PLEX for 24 hours. Instead they simply count how many PLEX they sell in those 24 hours and then give a CCP market alt that number of PLEX out of thin air. The CCP market alt sells them and thus the market for PLEX is flooded. In both A and B CCP get the same number of $. In both A and B CCP put the same number of PLEX in the game. In both A and B there is the same market impact. A happens several times a month.
I'll stop editing my posts because you keep missing my response to that.
A sale is intended to induce the community of players to spend more real money on PLEX than they otherwise would for the duration of the sale, thus improving CCP's bottom line for that period. Scenario A does that, scenario B does not.
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Which is why they do A and not B.
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United States43960 Posts
So, you claim PLEX sales encourage the player base to spend more real money on EVE than they otherwise would.
Do they spend more money though? PLEX, even when discounted, are a considerably more expensive way of subscribing your account than direct payments. With this in mind the only reason ever to buy PLEX off of CCP is to sell them on the market. It's all about getting those iskies for $.
So, if they are running a hypothetical 20% discount then in real terms that means 25% more isk (assuming the isk value holds) for the same amount of $. For the buyer to want to spend the same amount of $ on buying PLEX during the sale as he would during not the sale you have to convince him that he actually wants 25% more isk than he'd usually have. He doesn't want it for the game time, PLEX are bad at subbing your own account, he wants that isk and he generally knows how much isk he wants.
Now, maybe he'll take advantage of the sale to buy twice as many PLEX this month as he normally would because next month there might not be a sale. That has zero impact long term because he doesn't buy any PLEX next month. For the sale to do anything other than increase the number of PLEX in game for the same number of $ what it needs to do is convince the player that not only does he want to buy more isk than he usually does, not only does he want to buy 25% more isk than he usually does for the same price, not only does he want to use this opportunity to stock up on buying isk, he actually wants to increase the amount of isk he buys by a factor of greater than 25%.
Also you need more people doing that than you have going "well, I normally buy 2b isk/month so I'll just buy the same number but spend 20% less while the sale lasts because all I need is 2b/month". If more people continue their usual in game habits or inflate their in game spending by under 25% during the sale than inflate their in game spending by over 25% during the sale the net outcome is that CCP have less $. Furthermore the knowledge that CCP run regular sales is likely to itself act as a depressor on regular PLEX purchases because your rational consumer will know to stock up when they run a sale and then wait until the next one rather than making a weekly purchase. A spike in sales coinciding with a predictable discount does not necessarily represent extra sales but rather normal sales concentrated into one day by consumers aware that a non perishable good that takes zero storage space should always be bought at a discount.
In short, the argument that PLEX discounts create sufficient extra sales to both counterract the loss of revenue represented by the discount and represent a real increase in profit is not made, nor is it rational.
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On May 24 2013 03:40 KwarK wrote:
So, you claim PLEX sales encourage the player base to spend more real money on EVE than they otherwise would.
That's the motivation behind all sales in the marketing world. People have a tendency to spend more money in total when they think they're getting a good deal. Often, they'll spend a LOT more money.
The J.C. Penney retail chain recently fired their CEO, whom they'd recruited from Apple's retail organization at great expense, because he pushed for them to stop offering constant "sales" and instead establish consistent pricing. Their revenue dropped by 25% in his first year, because their customers liked the impression that they were "saving money" and thus would spend more.
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Also, no, such behavior is neither rational nor optimal, but it's a well-established fixed point of human behavior that marketers regularly exploit.
Edit: I agree that the impact on the in-game economy is similar between your two scenarios. I was simply explaining why CCP doesn't pursue one of them.
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United States43960 Posts
So you think the primary motivation for buying eve isk through PLEX is saving money and not wanting to buy eve stuff?
If a dude wants to buy a 1b isk tengu he's selling 2 plex and all a buy one get one free offer does is halves his expense, he doesn't take the opportunity to buy 2 tengus.
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United States7481 Posts
or maybe it makes him buy 1 plex and get the other for free instead of buying none and full clearing 100 l4 missions to buy the tengu
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On May 24 2013 03:50 KwarK wrote:
So you think the primary motivation for buying eve isk through PLEX is saving money and not wanting to buy eve stuff?
I don't think how much money a person spends on PLEX at a time is necessarily that closely connected to their actual in-game money needs. The thought process for most people who buy PLEX almost certainly starts with how much real money they're willing to spend, not how much in-game money they need.
Why? Because (at current PLEX prices and item values) there will always be something desirable in-game that's out of reach at any reasonable PLEX expenditure.
Edit: I'd also go so far as to say that most EVE players have no idea how much in-game money they actually go through in any period of time.
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United States43960 Posts
Well the point is that all plex are out of thin air, it's a virtual good, the only thing that anchors them even slightly to something real is that they are purchased at a $ value. When CCP starts fucking around with that $ value and the only constraint upon supply is $ people are willing to spend then CCP is choosing to create more/less out of thin air.
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United States43960 Posts
On May 24 2013 03:53 Antoine wrote:
or maybe it makes him buy 1 plex and get the other for free instead of buying none and full clearing 100 l4 missions to buy the tengu
Yep, I covered the extra sales. I didn't say that sales that wouldn't otherwise have happened didn't exist, I said that you need to have more people deciding they want more isk than they usually would have bought than people deciding they want the same amount of isk as they usually would have bought for whom the discount represents free money.
Given that CCP run sales like clockwork I imagine a fairly large amount of their regular PLEX purchasers stock up each sale because why not. You need more extra sales than people for whom you are simply discounting what they were going to do anyway.
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EPT
