Basically, you can pay ~$15 for an in-game PLEX, which when "used" adds 30 days of game-time to your account subscription. But this is an in-game item just like any other, which means it can be bought and sold in the in-game markets for the in-game currency (ISK).
Hence, it gives a legitimate way to purchase in-game currency with real-world money, without inflating the economy (because no ISK is generated and added to the economy at any time during this transaction, it simply changes hands until the item is "used" and therefore destroyed). In addition, it allows dedicated players that are cash-strapped an avenue to play for free by using currency acquired in-game to fund their subscription.
It also had the side-effect of giving an approximation of what the virtual exchange rate is between dollars and ISK, which makes for very attractive headlines when larger ships and assets get destroyed in the game.
People in EVE like to jokingly refer to having PLEX in your ship's cargohold while flying around as "PLEX armor". Never, ever carry it with you. Always leave it in a station, because you will get blown up. Especially if you're near the market hubs, as people are constantly scanning ships to see if there's a juicy-enough target to blow up.(even though they'll lose their own ship doing it)
I just read somewhere that their economist left in 2014.
Eyjolfur Gudmundsson
Rector at University of Akureyri
IcelandComputer Games
Current: University of Akureyri
Previous: CCP
https://is.linkedin.com/in/dreyjog
----- Dr. EyjoG felt an itch to apply some of the lessons he’d learned at Eve to the world of higher ed. So when Akureyri advertised for a new president in 2014, he once more found himself jumping industries.
It all depends how you want to make your isk, I don't know what the best way now is but before it used to be in nullsec running anomalies pretty sure you can start after 2-3 months training doing that with an average of 50mil an hour for beginners, one would need about 20-21 hours of spending making money to buy a plex
1 : https://eve-central.com/home/quicklook.html?typeid=29668
Has anyone set up automated currency exchanges in the game?
Instead of paying player characters to grind, and therefore have players consume game content, why aren't we paying players to create game content?
The real issue is some people could make that much cash in 30-90 min, but only really needed 1-3 plex per month, which kind of destabilized the system.
find this fact mind boggling!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sumZLwFXJqE
My solution for this will be "first-principles." Quite simply, I'm not going to let players print money.
I just spot checked the ships I used to fly and all of them are the same price or slightly cheaper than they used to be. Frankly, for a system where the only way to get most ships is to buy them for other players -- that's amazing! It's awesome to know I could log in and my savings is still enough to outfit the same kind of thing I could half a decade ago.
Eve heavily regulates a player's ability to print money. Most of the great faucets are not risk free endeavors, and efficiently exploiting them requires expensive ships that are completely* lost when you screw up or are murdered. For any "hardcore" players that play enough to screw up the economy in other games, it's much more lucrative to spend your time on arbitrage than suckling on the isk faucets. I'd call that as successful an economy as you could hope for in a post scarcity sci-fi universe.
* insurance is irrelevant when we're talking about an officer fit machariel.
One of the core problems with a simulated economy is that it can't ever really be a real economy as long as it has significant chunks of the economic transactions coming from programs rather than people. There's always a border between the humans and the machines, and I think a lot of the silliness of MMO economies comes from that border, and the way it can be exploited, rather than the economic issues themselves.
For instance, in the real world, there is no such thing as a fixed price. You can't wake up one day, harvest a bushel of apples, and take it down to the fruit stand down the street to sell for $5, regardless of all other economic conditions. That bends the economy. In the real world, you can't buy an unbounded number of apples for $10 a bushel. That bends the economy. In the real world, if you sell a bushel of apples, it doesn't essentially disappear from the Prime Material Plane, it has to be transported to someone else who wants it, without destroying the apples, before they go bad. That bends the economy.
The inaccuracies are fundamentally unfixable in some sense, but they could probably be mitigated by trying to put in a feedback loop where things get more expensive as more people buy them, and get cheaper as fewer people buy them. If done correctly, this would also prevent the problem where you have to explicitly create and manage sinks; you let the economy figure out the sinks for you.
It would also almost certainly be dynamically unstable, with some things being under- or over-priced all the time in various cycle... but this can be seen as advantage for a game as much as it can be seen as a disadvantage. Some very clever thinking might even let you exert some control over the cycles and do things like try to ensure they don't all end up in sync (i.e., consider the equations for simple harmonic motion and how you can affect the "k" constant for different commodities).
The other thing I'd consider would be implementing storage fees (which themselves float) to prevent hoarding and gathering excessive wealth, probably structured as a progressive tax, too. Or at the very least, make it a knob you can crank and tell people it may change on a day-by-day basis.
It is not, however, an ISK sink. The only way to buy PLEX with ISK is to trade with someone who bought theirs with cash. That ISK remains in the economy and is not destroyed by the trade. The actual mechanism is hinted at early on in the article:
> The main way ISK is removed from the game this month was the purchase of skills from NPC corps on the market, with 13.602 trillion ISK sunk into skill books over the period.
This is wrong, based on the 2015 Vegas report: LP stores are also an ISK sink, exceeding - in 2015 - the skill books. Anyways, the above article links to:
https://web.archive.org/web/20150129024846/http://massively....
Which tries to explain this, but is filled with broken links to forum posts. I eventually found this post from 2012 that concisely indicates actual ISK sinks in the game in dollar amounts:
http://twostep4csm.blogspot.com/2012/03/its-econmony-stupid....
And their 2015 economy post includes a graph of ISK velocity ("the estimated number of times one isk is spent to buy goods each month, in this case a 30 day moving sum of total trade over total active isk each day") as well as the "total ISK" growth over time:
https://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/eve-economy-u...
And finally, it links to this chart, clearly showing the ISK sinks and faucets for September 2015:
http://content.eveonline.com/www/newssystem/media/68738/1/si...
In the sample month shown above, the amount of ISK in the economy increased from 870T to 876T (0.7%). This is not a significant level of currency printing - but currency printing isn't part of the definition of inflation, 'spending power' is. Fortunately, they also include the price of PLEX over time in this post:
http://content.eveonline.com/www/newssystem/media/68738/1/pl...
Estimating by visual inspection only, the price of ISK rose unusually quickly between June 2015 and October 2015, from 900M to 1200M, where it promptly flatlined. They decline to explain why this is - however, the current price today, over a year later, is 1300M:
http://www.eve-markets.net/detail?typeid=29668&limit=14#hist...
So whatever inflation occurred during that window of time has apparently returned to normal levels. Looking up the definition of hyperinflation on the Internet (I'm not an economist), the generally accepted definition seems to be a monthly inflation rate of 50% of the price of a given good, assuming a fixed spending power.
While it's impossible to say above with certainty that spending power remained constant, assuming that, the price of ISK would have had to increase from 900M to 1350M in one month to count as hyperinflation by the usual definition. There have been no indications that the EVE economy has reduced the spending power of its users, given their continuing efforts to feed users a steady trickle of additional ISK in the economy each month. So with the current price of PLEX one year later not yet having reached 1350M, it seems safe to hazard a guess that 'hyperinflation' - in PLEX, at least - is not applicable to their economy.
When I was playing Eve Online, ships didn't have collisions with anything but force field bubbles. (Planets were nothing but really huge force field bubbles. (Tower) You could still skillfully terminate a warp to get to the center of one, however. I never figured out how to exploit that.)
This video shows how grid bombing was done, sadly i don't play EVE anymore it's a great game lots of different Players/groups
I think they recently changed it to be mass-based though, so you can't really bump a Freighter with a Frigate.
It's actually quite nuanced. Bumping doesn't damage shops though.
In this case, I think it was simply a turn of phrase.
Edit: I think in an update you no longer warp inside the planet though (and get launched out of it), just to its edge or its designated warp point in lieu of landing inside. Its been forever since I played.
I think that's what I did. I discovered a pocket of near-stability in the center of planets. I had some sort of plan to try and anchor containers and things there, which I never finished.
