Jester wrote a very interesting piece on RMT. In short: while trading ISK for $ is forbidden, trading ISK for services is not, it's actually supported by devs and can be carried out on the official forum instead of some shady site. Of course CCP cannot see if there was another transaction: the service for $. His example was that the ISK buyer buys a web server, and then gives it to an alliance for ISK.
He asks if there is a way at all to stop such "clever ways" of RMT. I believe there is. CCP already made a great progress against RMT by introducing PLEX. PLEX allows someone with money to get ISK by buying PLEX from CCP and then selling it on Jita. Players who are good at the game can play for free by providing the ISK for PLEX that they use to subscribe their account or buy extra game services.
However illicit RMT-ers still exist, because they can sell ISK cheaper than the PLEX price. Why? Because the PLEX trade is limited by PLEX demand. If I'd trade all my wealth for PLEX-es, I'd have 500. What the hell would I do with them?! For this reason players who are really good in making ISK (or hiding bots) have more ISK than they could sell for PLEX, so they turn to the illicit traders, selling them their ISK for low price.
To see the solution, we must see why CCP allows PLEX trade, despite it is indeed RMT and damages the fairness of the game. Because PLEX-es turn into more accounts, probably also more players. While they don't pay money, they provide content for other players, making New Eden a more rich environment.
This aspect can be extended to every activity that enriches the game. For example Joe is a great FC. Many players enjoy his fleets and his departure would lead to loss of several players. His alliance rewards Joe with lot of ISK to keep him motivated. However Joe can't use the ISK for any other thing than playing for free besides vanity, like that titan pilot who never logs in, since Joe is busy FC-ing subcaps. If CCP agrees that Joe is good for the game and there are enough players who are ready to pay him for his in-game service, let Joe sell his FC-ing for real money. How?
Why should CCP give 80% of their PLEX income to a player? Because this player couldn't get a single PLEX without other players giving him for the positive gaming experience he provides. If Joe is a bad FC, he won't get people to pay him, so he won't have any PLEX to cash out. Every PLEX he cashes out is a PLEX existing only because some other player purchased it for the purpose of rewarding Joe for his FC-ing. If Joe would stop playing, that PLEX wouldn't be bought. This is actually better than the current PLEX where players pay for others farming, as CCP could sell ISK in the item shop, but they couldn't sell FC-ing.
This way people who can create worthy content (organizers, bloggers, streamers, artists, web designers) would flock to EVE to earn money. "Worthy content" would be decided by the players. CCP only rules out clearly worthless activities, it wouldn't be hard to get the status as an FC. Finding people who are ready to pay him for FC-ing would be much harder, and only those who are really providing worthy content could get money.
Of course one can turn to botting or farming to get PLEX-es to cash out but he signed a contract. If a normal player is found RMT selling, CCP can only ban his disposable bot accounts. If Joe is caught botting, he can be sued for serious damages. Actually this can even be prevented as his contract bans extensive non-botting farming, so when he gets the status, his accounts get limitations that makes him unable to rat or mine extensively, even without a bot.
He asks if there is a way at all to stop such "clever ways" of RMT. I believe there is. CCP already made a great progress against RMT by introducing PLEX. PLEX allows someone with money to get ISK by buying PLEX from CCP and then selling it on Jita. Players who are good at the game can play for free by providing the ISK for PLEX that they use to subscribe their account or buy extra game services.
However illicit RMT-ers still exist, because they can sell ISK cheaper than the PLEX price. Why? Because the PLEX trade is limited by PLEX demand. If I'd trade all my wealth for PLEX-es, I'd have 500. What the hell would I do with them?! For this reason players who are really good in making ISK (or hiding bots) have more ISK than they could sell for PLEX, so they turn to the illicit traders, selling them their ISK for low price.
To see the solution, we must see why CCP allows PLEX trade, despite it is indeed RMT and damages the fairness of the game. Because PLEX-es turn into more accounts, probably also more players. While they don't pay money, they provide content for other players, making New Eden a more rich environment.
This aspect can be extended to every activity that enriches the game. For example Joe is a great FC. Many players enjoy his fleets and his departure would lead to loss of several players. His alliance rewards Joe with lot of ISK to keep him motivated. However Joe can't use the ISK for any other thing than playing for free besides vanity, like that titan pilot who never logs in, since Joe is busy FC-ing subcaps. If CCP agrees that Joe is good for the game and there are enough players who are ready to pay him for his in-game service, let Joe sell his FC-ing for real money. How?
- Joe must apply for "CCP entertainer affiliate" status. The application costs 20 PLEX-es, both to pay for the time of the auditing employees and to deter every random idiot to flood CCP with applications.
- During an audit, Joe must tell CCP about every accounts he has, so CCP can determine what is he doing actually. Lying about accounts results in permaban.
- If CCP finds that Joe is enriching the game, he gets the "CCP entertainer affiliate" status. It is not automatic, as most legitimate in-game activities are not providing an enriching experience to other players. Suicide ganking is a good example, but rather farming L4s all alone is better.
- Joe and CCP sign a contract, I mean a real world contract between CCP Games and a real life person, enforcable at court and resulting real life money compensations if broken. In this contract CCP outlies what activities Joe is permitted to do in game. For example, as Joe got his status as FC, the contract says that he must not make significant money by other activities than FC-ing and also that he must maintain a non-abusive language in his fleets. If at some point Joe no longer want to comply, he can abandon his status and return to normal player, but as long as he has the status, he must abide or be sued for damages.
- Joe can now cash out PLEX-es for 80% CCP price. For CCP entertainer affiliates there is an extra option on PLEX to "Cash out". At the end of every month Joe gets $12 for every PLEX he turned in from CCP.
Why should CCP give 80% of their PLEX income to a player? Because this player couldn't get a single PLEX without other players giving him for the positive gaming experience he provides. If Joe is a bad FC, he won't get people to pay him, so he won't have any PLEX to cash out. Every PLEX he cashes out is a PLEX existing only because some other player purchased it for the purpose of rewarding Joe for his FC-ing. If Joe would stop playing, that PLEX wouldn't be bought. This is actually better than the current PLEX where players pay for others farming, as CCP could sell ISK in the item shop, but they couldn't sell FC-ing.
This way people who can create worthy content (organizers, bloggers, streamers, artists, web designers) would flock to EVE to earn money. "Worthy content" would be decided by the players. CCP only rules out clearly worthless activities, it wouldn't be hard to get the status as an FC. Finding people who are ready to pay him for FC-ing would be much harder, and only those who are really providing worthy content could get money.
Of course one can turn to botting or farming to get PLEX-es to cash out but he signed a contract. If a normal player is found RMT selling, CCP can only ban his disposable bot accounts. If Joe is caught botting, he can be sued for serious damages. Actually this can even be prevented as his contract bans extensive non-botting farming, so when he gets the status, his accounts get limitations that makes him unable to rat or mine extensively, even without a bot.
24 comments:
RMT = exchange of isk between players for real life money between players.
Plex works differently. Plex is an exchanage of isk between players for game time between players. The money flows to CCP.
Stopping RMT isn't about fairness, it is about ensuring that people do not make an income off of CCP's intellectual property. In the plex equation, the only entity making real world cash is CCP. Plex has a zero effect on the game. If plex didn't exist everyone would need to pay their monthly subscription. Plex allows people who are real world rich to pay the subscription for people who are in game rich. There is no exchange of real life currency between the parties here, thus plex isn't RMT.
As to the other idea, about organizations signing an agreement with CCP... well aside from the usual Gevlon Goblin complexity for the sake of complexity nonsense, the nuts of the idea are sensible. If Somer and CCP signed an agreement then it would do both parties a massive favor - Somer gets legitimacy in the eyes on players (any Somer scam is able to be handled) and CCP get a "trusted" 3rd party site to run competitions and what not through.
The worry of course is that this would erode immersion and risk in the game. One of the greatest things about eve is you can, within the confines of the rules of the game, run multi-year, multi-trillion isk scams, the equivalent of which would earn you a permaban in any other game. This is actually a very good thing and trying to alter that should be very carefully handled or left well enough alone.
This is equivalent to paying Joe to provide content. The fact that he's selling ISK is irrelevant- as far as the company is concerned, he's getting money that would have otherwise gone to them, therefore they may as well just pay him.
The fact that they don't currently (publicly) pay players is an indication that it's probably not an optimal profit plan.
If they allowed players to "cash out", the real money value of their isk/plex would drop to a small fraction of what it currently is, because of a glut of supply hitting the market. It would all come at the expense of people paying the devs for access to the game.
"Money is fungible"
There is no way for CCP to determine whether players are giving Joe isk for valuable services or whether Joe is laundering isk for a bot-net.
Actually they can. They just have to check who is sending Joe the money. 200x 1B from people who flied with him: legit. 1x200B from random stranger: bot.
You realise that an out of game contract signed in that way would still mean absolutely zero right?
People like to think that a contract stating anything means the law will suddenly come crushing down upon you should you break its rules, but it doesn't. CCP would still need to prove loss of business in the same way the currently do against a regular RMTer should the contract be broken, and thats pretty much where every case against an RMTer breaks down, as loss of business in that way is tough to prove.
Take for example, I could get you to sign a contract, countersigned by a lawyer that states you must bark like a dog every time I called you "Spot". If you one day stopped doing that I would not be able to take you to court for breach of contract. In the same way, stating a strict set of rules for playing a game would only result in you being able to ban the player from the game.
Besides, why would CCP want to hand out cash. If you let them sell plex for 80%, that means every plex that is sold by the player results in 80% of that plex value being lost from the businesses profit. That's bad.
If an RMTer sells a plex however, that does not result in any direct loss in profit, only a loss of a potential buyer. This is why CCP crack down on RMTers, to stop that loss of a potential plex purchase. It would do them no good to replace that with a direct loss of profit.
Not to mention, what would stop me giving all my plex to the FC guy, who sells it then gives me 60% of that? I would be paying him in game for FC services, he would then be selling that plex for $, then giving me a cut out of game.
This has already happened, particularly among Russian alliances. Good FCs have been hired for real money and space has been rented for real money. You can't really stop it since in a lot of cases the money is cash and exchanged hand to hand.
Some guy in a Russian bar hands another guy some rubles to let him bot in X systems (and that guy RMTs the bot isk in the same way). The entire drone region economy was based on this when Solar was big.
@Lucas: absolutely not, if the contract itself contains the amount of compensation. If we sign a contract that for a $100/month I bark for you, and have to pay $1000 if I stop before the contract exist, you get the $1000. Even if there is no damage clause, for every service - in case of non-servicing - you can surely get a refund (the money you gave me for barking), so CCP could surely get the money paid to the guy back.
By this contract, the guy practically turn into a CCP employee. The legal coverage of employee-employer interaction is good, otherwise we'd hear employees stealing from companies left and right. Actually by purposefully damaging my company, I risk jail.
The reason why the EULA, which is a contract between a player and the developer cannot stop botting is that the developer retains so much rights (practically "I can do whatever I want with my game") that if there was a damage clause or anything that would allow the company to punish a player besides ban, no sane player would agree and play as they would be signing for a blank page.
What stops the guy from money laundering? Simple: he has to charge equally within his scope. Why should you give him 100B for his fleet when other guys are paying him 10M? Totally wouldn't be obvious.
Don't forget that as the payment comes from CCP, they can do checks on anything that is remotely suspicious BEFORE payment happens. I doubt if anyone would try to pull a stunt this way.
Blow up more bots!
Rrauwr.
But the issue of any system no matter how perfect it could be (and complex) is execution.
Mining fleets payouts buy sell from members is a perfect system. Execution lacks motivated foremans, stupid miners do not understand it and are afraid of it. Human nature.
A good FC is not by default a smart person (though usually is but not all community / client entertaining content needs smart people) so could be he does not understand or does not want to do it.
A system is new and complex will it work? Will CCP be able to find people to use it etc etc.
To them it is allot of work.
Human nature kicks in and lazy route is used. (Macks are human nature)
Also the FC might not enjoy the "job" so it should be treated as a job! He needs to make enough to allow to live of it and then requirement of a other job is bypassed. A second account or spare time is needed to remain "fun" and in touch with EvE. For some haveing EvE as a job will burn down the fun even on a total hidden seperate alt.
If this will be implemented they might aswell not act as being employee but really be an employee.
Good idea but allot of hard work put into "open community" recruitement. CCP will prefer to be in controll,I would want to be in controll of my payroll and employees, everyone would.
Soooo
Shoot bots!
It seems like you've got two separate concepts going here which you're randomly switching between:
A - Some players will engage in illicit RMT selling ISK for money
B - Some players provide sufficient services to some/all of the community which that community would be willing to compensate them for with ISK
What you're suggesting is an attempt to fix the existence of group A by giving group B the ability to legitimately cash out ISK into RL money.
The obvious problem with this is that Group B and Group A certainly don't share a perfect overlap, and honestly I doubt they share much overlap at all. How many people who are actually in a position that they could earn something equivalent to a "CCP Entertainer Affiliate" status are also currently engaged in illicit RMT? More to the point, how many RMTers are NOT in that category?
I could be wrong - RMT isn't exactly my area of expertise - but I believe the main group responsible for illicit RMT are people running bot farms, whether mining, missioning or running anomalies, not people generating content. Accusations are also frequently levelled at various alliance leaders, which may or may not be true, but even if so there simply are not that many people in positions to abuse alliance funds like that - it's hard to believe they're responsible for a majority of RMT supply.
Given that, your proposal wouldn't serve to "end all illicit RMT" as there's no way someone running 20+ anomaly running bots would qualify for "Entertainer Affiliate" status, so they would still be selling ISK illicitly. In which case it begs the question of why CCP would want to undermine their own profits (by giving back PLEX money to customers) as well as take on the additional legal costs of drawing up (and when necessary enforcing) the contracts and the costs of oversight to investigate potential "Entertainer Affiliates" and monitor those who are successful? Especially since those "Entertainer Affiliates" are currently content to offer their services without compensation. It seems that not paying them results in around the same content generation without the huge overhead of this kind of programme.
Finally, even ignoring all that there are a few obvious problems with your suggestion:
First, this seems open to abuse from people who are suitable as "Entertainment Affiliates" but also have significant personal ISK income. Imagine an FC who runs 2-4 hour fleets every day, but also spends 2-4 hours each day running a trading empire as well. Their income could be 50+ billion per month, completely legitimately, before any ISK they make performing their FCing services. That translates to approximately $1,000 per month that CCP is paying them out of their own profits, again on top of whatever the community values their services at.
Second, there's the issue of the effects this would have on the PLEX market. The sudden demand from approved "Entertainment Affiliates" able to cash out PLEX for RL money would push PLEX prices up significantly, which would potentially price out a lot of players who use PLEX to pay for their gametime. That means there would be less active subscriptions along with the benefits those accounts provided (typically mining, manufacturing and provision of deadspace/faction/officer mods etc) and a reduction in players overall, likely along with negative press for CCP facing a drop in subscriber numbers.
@Hivemind: what you cite as a problem is exactly the benefit. As content providers are cashing out PLEX-es, they indeed drive PLEX prices up. But this is how the RMT botter is killed. The higher the PLEX price, the more you can get for $15 legitimately. If PLEX prices are doubled, the income of the botter is halved (as he needs to get 2x more ISK for the same $), pricing him out.
Pricing out free players isn't a problem as they provide no content to others, besides suicide gankers. CCP doesn't have to face bad press if they increase revenues at the cost of losing free players.
The FC doing trade is simple case: his contract bans him from trading and there is a limit placed to his account to 10 market orders. That's enough to sell some odd stuff, but not to do trading.
Every game that has "send [currency]" will have RMT.
Every online game in the past 20 years had item and currency RMT. I don't know if the 80s mud era had RMT. SO no. even in games like WoW where you can't be possibly broke. even there you can RMT.
I don't know why people RMT. therefor I have no clue to how to fix it.
Your idea certainly will help content creators but I doubt that it will ban all illicit RMT.
@Gevlon:
"Pricing out free players isn't a problem as they provide no content to others"
Individually, this is basically true - generally any player, even one with lots of accounts, is a drop in the ocean of miners, manufacturers, inventors etc. The problem is you're not talking about pricing out a few, you want to raise the ISK cost of playing for all players, which is going to have far more noticeable effects. Either a lot of miners and manufacturers would leave, resulting in a reduced supply for most goods and therefore price increasing, or they'd stay and immediately begin charging more for their services in order to meet the higher PLEX costs, which would also increase the price of most goods.
In turn that undermines your goal, since while ISK is now worth less RL money it's also worth less in terms of buying ingame goods, plus activities that generate ISK (particularly those that aren't actual ISK faucets) become more valuable. This would certainly inconvenience those relying on anomaly running to generate RMT ISK, but not so much for those cashing out LP or mining, at least once the market adjusts. In the meantime it will also inconvenience all the paying players, whose current ISK will be devalued and who will have to deal with what is effectively significant inflation going forwards.
"CCP doesn't have to face bad press if they increase revenues at the cost of losing free players."
But how are they increasing revenues when they're paying out thousands of dollars to these new "Entertainment Affiliates" as they liquidate their own ISK stockpiles into RL money? Sure, there's more demand for PLEX than there was before, but most of that demand is going to be for people to cash it out, meaning that those PLEX are only worth 20% of their normal value to CCP. Demand for PLEX at 100% of their value (IE PLEX converted to gametime, multiple character training or AUR) will actually drop, meaning their overall revenue drops.
More to the point, the gaming press and gamers themselves are fairly ambivalent on the subject of MMO developers revenue on its own, but they are very interested in their subscriber numbers. The news that most people will walk away with is "EVE subscriber numbers drop", regardless of how well CCP's finances are doing.
"The FC doing trade is simple case: his contract bans him from trading"
Sure, but that's just one example. What about the FC running 20 accounts AFK mining in hisec? Or multiboxing anomalies? Soloing incursions? Running recruitment scams? Infiltrating and robbing corps? Posting scam contracts?
Are you going to ban "Entertainment Affiliates" from any form of interaction with the game other than their specified form of providing entertainment? What if ISK making is an essential component of providing that entertainment - Incursion community FCs, for example, or Chribba's third party service?
a lot of complexity usually ends up being a lot of asdministration, or a lot of waste.
I think CCP can put their resources elsewhere, at least for the cost of this vice the amount of revenue they may be losing (not the amount RMT makes, because those are different numbers)
@Hivemind: you forget that ISK itself is a farmed item, it is created by anom runners. So if a bunch of highsec miners are priced out and mineral prices rise, the ISK/hour of mining will increase, so a bunch of anom runners will switch to mining, decreasing ISK and increasing mineral supplies.
The subscription numbers are always dubious in EVE as CCP has no way to tell how many players they have. They can only tell how many accounts are running. They had no problem introducing multiple character trading, so a feature that does not provide new accounts but eats PLEX-es is clearly good for them.
And yes, I would practically remove all ISK sources from affiliates, making them only able to provide content. You are right that as all EVE activity has ISK side (you can even loot in PvP), they can't be stopped from it. But there is a solution: affiliates are banned from multiboxing, aka "creating content for his own alts". The incursion FC can earn his share of the incursion, but he must create content for his fleet while doing so.
He can play with one account. He can have other accounts for cyno, scout, super or whatever, but these are completely unable to do PvE or trading. Nada. Doesn't receive bounties, can't do missions, can't mine, can't salvage, can't haul, can't have market orders, can't loot.
As the PvE income of one account is very limited outside of trading, he will be better off running fleets than AFK-mining with his one account.
@Gevlon:
"So if a bunch of highsec miners are priced out and mineral prices rise, the ISK/hour of mining will increase, so a bunch of anom runners will switch to mining, decreasing ISK and increasing mineral supplies."
Yes, but the thing is that because Anom running generates a fixed amount of ISK regardless of economic conditions we can use it to estimate how much things would need to change for this. Let's be generous and say that hisec mining pays 25 mil/hour while anom running pays 50 mil/hour. In order for anom runners to switch to mining, mining needs to be worth twice as much. That means the prices for minerals have to double, which in turn will mean the prices for anything made from those minerals will have to double. That's every T1 ship in the game, and it will naturally have a knock-on effect on T2 production as the value of their T1 components rises.
If anom runners switch to mining en masse and drive the price down below 50 mil/hour then they can switch back to anom running, because again how much ISK you get from an anomaly is fixed regardless of how bad inflation is at any given point.
Please don't tell me that doubling the price of raw minerals is only going to have a negligible effect on EVE's economy.
"They had no problem introducing multiple character trading, so a feature that does not provide new accounts but eats PLEX-es is clearly good for them."
There's a big difference between these systems, though. Consider that CCP's main expenses can basically be summed up as "Providing access to EVE online". Cashing out PLEXes for game time affects that, as more accounts = more players in space = higher bandwidth, hardware and electrical costs. Cashing out PLEXes for AUR or multiple character training has no or almost no effect, but has the same value for them. Cashing out PLEXes for... cash has a very definite cost, though - it costs CCP 80% of the value of the PLEX.
Further, Multiple Character Training is a very niche feature - there is only a relatively small % of the playerbase using it and, crucially, those players are not buying up huge amounts of it at once. In comparison if "Entertainment Affiliates" are able to get RL money from their PLEX it seems pretty likely that they'll cash out as much of their ISK as they can as soon as they get approved, which would likely result in something of a run on PLEXes.
Finally, again, PLEXes that end up being cashed out as RL cash are only worth 20% of their normal value to CCP, whereas PLEXes that are cashed out as gametime are worth 100% of their normal value to CCP. If they're substituting demand for PLEX-as-gametime with demand for PLEX-as-RL-cash then this negatively affects their bottom line, because even if more PLEX are being bought they get to keep less of their value.
"He can play with one account. He can have other accounts for cyno, scout, super or whatever, but these are completely unable to do PvE or trading."
It seems like this is leading to a situation where "content creators" who think they'd be able to qualify as an "Entertainment Affiliate" simply amass a large stockpile of ISK, sign up to the programme, cash out all of that ISK stockpile and then turn around to CCP and say they want to go back to being a normal player so they aren't hamstrung by these requirements.
Also, how does this affect players whose ISK comes from more unorthodox sources, such as corporate thefts, third party trades or even just "Being an alliance leader with access to alliance wallets"? What would stop, say, Elo Knight from taking 10% of Black Legion's income as his "pay" for running the alliance and FCing their fleets, then cashing that out into RL money?
@Gvelon
"If we sign a contract that for a $100/month I bark for you, and have to pay $1000 if I stop before the contract exist, you get the $1000"
Not necessarily. At most I would be entitled to a partial refund of my money paid plus any losses I would have suffered from losing your barking service prematurely. Most contract clauses have to be realistic to be enforceable in a court, an even then, the contract only shows that you understood the obligation. They don't actually mean you are legally forced to do something. With CCP, since it's a game and in-game activities, your find it hard to find a court that would enforce a contract of this nature, even before you take into account that it would be international.
"By this contract, the guy practically turn into a CCP employee. The legal coverage of employee-employer interaction is good, otherwise we'd hear employees stealing from companies left and right. Actually by purposefully damaging my company, I risk jail."
Ah, but it's not an employee contract. An employee contract comes with a LOT of other clauses and would require you to be registered with the company as an employee and a whole bunch of other stuff. That said, even as an employee, you'd not be legally accountable for anything more than damages. If a GM abuses his power, at most he will get fired. No court in the world would try for a conviction for an in-game action.
"The reason why the EULA, which is a contract between a player and the developer cannot stop botting is that the developer retains so much rights"
Not at all. The EULA is as legally binding as any other contract. By placing it in a position that requires you to double acknowledge in able to gain access (the tickbox and agree, or scroll down then agree), it's as good as a signed piece of paper. But like all contracts the EULA can only be enforceable to certain degrees. If you were to break the EULA in such a way that you caused a severe level of provable damage to CCP, and they were not accountable (so it wasn't a bug or an exposed exploit, etc), they could take you to court for those damages. Again though, it would have to be substantial for it to be actually taken forward as it would be an international case.
Simply put, a contract would not stop people from performing illicit RMT. All this change would do is open up an easy way for larger groups to launder isk to RMT, and cost CCP huge amounts of cash. What they should do instead is crack down harder on bots and ISK buyers. It's impossible to stop someone making an ISK selling website, but if you can shut down their supply, and put the players off of buying, then their websites can't operate.
Hazus I read that and my thought was, who the heck is joe? Why would I pay Joe jack? If joe leaves his loss their are ten others willing to step up and step in some will fail some will be ok and maybe one or two will be as good or better then joe.
Honestly rewarding people/organizations for providing content is stupid. Again the whole somer issue: Reward people/organization that is already making a profit while 62,000 other content providers are not rewarded? Does it seem just to reward Tim (a somer employee) who recieves isk in exchange for servies. While Tom and 61,999 other peopel pay to provide content. Doesn't make sense to me
@Hivemind: the ISK/effort of mining and anom running is equal. The ISK/hour is not, because anom ratting needs more effort. Otherwise miners would switch to anom ratting now. The reason why they don't is that it doesn't worth it.
So the mineral:ISK ratio is fixed and unrelated to PLEX.
The affiliate "being smart" and cash out anything can be prevented by manually checking him before OK-ing his payout. So he gets a ban instead of a payout.
Pricing out free players isn't a problem as they provide no content to others
This is false. You assert it in every thread about PLEX, and I shoot it down.
Players are the content that sells EVE. It is not the L4 missions or mining, but EVE's amazing AIs that people pay for. They pay for PVP; for dominance and submission. They pay for comaraderie and social ties: to be a part of the ape-band; to do things with their friends and for chatting with strangers over spaceships.
And free players generate this content disproportionately. (How do we know? Because they have ISK. Value for value. Economics 101, oh greedy one.) Do you think The Mittani pays a subscription? Chribba? Do you think that any FC who runs fleets of over a dozen ships does? (Probably; EVE is weird. But quite rare I expect.)
Here is an interesting question: who is most "contentful" EVE player you know of, who is not PLEXing his or her accounts?
Just wanted to add:
You also have to remember that while this would mean that FC's and other "content creators" would be able to cash out, your average player wouldn't. So your average player who used to grind isk and sell it to an RMTer still would, and people would still buy it as it would be cheaper than plex.
The only way to stop RMT is to cut off either supply or demand (preferably both). Adding an "official" competitor would not really do the trick.
Hello Mr. Goblin, my question is simple;
Why not just open RMT for everyone?
Im not suggesting this, but looking for different point of view.
In my humble and noobish opnion PLEX is the problem here, the way it is just makes easy for the ISK - Money trade, creating an official real money reference.
@Anonymous: http://greedygoblin.blogspot.com/2013/02/whats-wrong-with-rmt.html
The problem with both this post and the linked one (other than the obvious control issues and legal issues, and the issue that CCP would be broke inside a month) is that they both assume the market would remain static. They both seems to list it like 600m would always be the price of a plex. I guarantee that if you starting dumping plex to CCP in the volumes that some of the "content generating" players could the prices would rocket. You realise that plex aren't seeded right? They are only on the market because someone bought them and chose to stick them on the market. As "content generating" players would need plex to trade in they would compete with each other for buying them, and the price of plex would go up. I doubt very much that you would see the purchases of plex keep up with the sales to CCP.
By the way, you state this like you would be one of these players, so you would be able to RMT your net worth. But at the same time you have stated that the "content generators" would have to be blocked from farming/trading/mining/etc. So people like you could cash out once, then you'd have no isk, and no source of income. Nobody in game would pay you for your blog.
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