MMO Fallout

CCP and the Eve Online community support pay to win. There I said it. For many of you this will hardly be a tantalizing discovery but it is something that needs to be said to the somewhat-in-denial Eve community: Eve Online is already pay to win, what the community is against are implementations that unbalance the game’s economy.

In Eve Online, for the unfamiliar, players are able to buy Pilot License Extensions as an in-game representation of a 30-day game code. The PLEX can then be sold to other players on the open market for ISK. This system makes it possible to play Eve Online without paying a dime out of your own pocket (CCP still gains the subscription fee), and likewise it allows someone with extra cash to buy ISK. A sanctioned form of real money trading.

In a grand majority of arguments I’ve seen where the idea of Eve having pay to win elements appears, players disassociate the PLEX from RMT by saying that the ships and ISK are still being generated in-game through farming and crafting by legitimate players rather than CCP simply waving their magic wand and shouting “allakhazazzle” and making the ISK appear. Sure a player can spend $90 on PLEX, sell it for whatever the market value is worth (380 million per PLEX as of this writing, approximately), and use it to buy ships/enhancements, but the Eve player’s response is that the ships and the ISK were generated by other players, and thus you don’t have the inflation effect that would occur had CCP just created it. This is a perfectly valid explanation.

Not having an effect on the economy, however, doesn’t do much to throw off the fact that a player is still paying real money to get an advantage over someone who would have had to actually play the game for that ISK. The fundamentals are still there: I have $100, I use it to spend on characters, SP, ships, standing, etc, I get an advantage over someone simply paying $15 a month in subscription costs.

Where the argument tunes in is in this: someone argued to me that it doesn’t matter if someone used real money to buy a ship, because the game is skill based. As they worded it, some random moron with an overloaded bank account can buy all the ships, enhancements, and ammunition he wants. Won’t make a bit of difference when he doesn’t have the skill to pilot or fight with it and ends up losing it in 0.0 space, or AKF-mining. In a way it’s like buying a very expensive gun to go to war with. Yes, your rifle is made of the finest material known to man but it will do you no good when you’re lying dead on the ground because you failed to check that room you passed.

And this brings us right around to the economy issue: Players are against CCP selling non-vanity items because doing so would affect the economy and not for the better. It would set static prices in a game that has built itself on the balance of supply and demand, lower the price of those items and flood the market. This is the same reason CCP is against gold farmers, because they flood the market with ISK, causing inflation and inversely raising the prices of everything, making the game harder for legitimate players.

I’ve said this plenty of times here at MMO Fallout: PLEX is one of the best responses to combat gold farming, because it indulges those who are going to buy currency regardless of what the developers do, but it doesn’t affect the economy as greatly as a cash shop or allowing gold farmers to flourish, it offers a safer avenue than trusting some shady company in China with your credit card, and it also gives the developers a little something-something on the side to line their pockets with. It is a rather unique system, and more importantly a system that works. CCP may not have eradicated gold farming on Eve, but they’ve offered a legitimate alternative.

Eve players (and CCP) are against the destabilization of the economy (in this case, mass inflation), a perfectly reasonable argument considering the health of Eve’s economy is vital to the game itself. Just don’t hide it behind the thin arguments of pay to win, because by the logic of the opposition such a system either already exists or cannot exist due to the nature of the game.

CCP and the Eve Online community support pay to win. There I said it. For many of you this will hardly be a tantalizing discovery but it is something that needs to be said to the somewhat-in-denial Eve community: Eve Online is already pay to win, what the community is against are implementations that unbalance the game’s economy.

In Eve Online, for the unfamiliar, players are able to buy Pilot License Extensions as an in-game representation of a 30-day game code. The PLEX can then be sold to other players on the open market for ISK. This system makes it possible to play Eve Online without paying a dime out of your own pocket (CCP still gains the subscription fee), and likewise it allows someone with extra cash to buy ISK. A sanctioned form of real money trading.

In a grand majority of arguments I’ve seen where the idea of Eve having pay to win elements appears, players disassociate the PLEX from RMT by saying that the ships and ISK are still being generated in-game through farming and crafting by legitimate players rather than CCP simply waving their magic wand and shouting “allakhazazzle” and making the ISK appear. Sure a player can spend $90 on PLEX, sell it for whatever the market value is worth (380 million per PLEX as of this writing, approximately), and use it to buy ships/enhancements, but the Eve player’s response is that the ships and the ISK were generated by other players, and thus you don’t have the inflation effect that would occur had CCP just created it. This is a perfectly valid explanation.

Not having an effect on the economy, however, doesn’t do much to throw off the fact that a player is still paying real money to get an advantage over someone who would have had to actually play the game for that ISK. The fundamentals are still there: I have $100, I use it to spend on characters, SP, ships, standing, etc, I get an advantage over someone simply paying $15 a month in subscription costs.

Where the argument tunes in is in this: someone argued to me that it doesn’t matter if someone used real money to buy a ship, because the game is skill based. As they worded it, some random moron with an overloaded bank account can buy all the ships, enhancements, and ammunition he wants. Won’t make a bit of difference when he doesn’t have the skill to pilot or fight with it and ends up losing it in 0.0 space, or AKF-mining. In a way it’s like buying a very expensive gun to go to war with. Yes, your rifle is made of the finest material known to man but it will do you no good when you’re lying dead on the ground because you failed to check that room you passed.

And this brings us right around to the economy issue: Players are against CCP selling non-vanity items because doing so would affect the economy and not for the better. It would set static prices in a game that has built itself on the balance of supply and demand, lower the price of those items and flood the market. This is the same reason CCP is against gold farmers, because they flood the market with ISK, causing inflation and inversely raising the prices of everything, making the game harder for legitimate players.

I’ve said this plenty of times here at MMO Fallout: PLEX is one of the best responses to combat gold farming, because it indulges those who are going to buy currency regardless of what the developers do, but it doesn’t affect the economy as greatly as a cash shop or allowing gold farmers to flourish, it offers a safer avenue than trusting some shady company in China with your credit card, and it also gives the developers a little something-something on the side to line their pockets with. It is a rather unique system, and more importantly a system that works. CCP may not have eradicated gold farming on Eve, but they’ve offered a legitimate alternative.

Eve players (and CCP) are against the destabilization of the economy (in this case, mass inflation), a perfectly reasonable argument considering the health of Eve’s economy is vital to the game itself. Just don’t hide it behind the thin arguments of pay to win, because by the logic of the opposition such a system either already exists or cannot exist due to the nature of the game.