tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1461700565722278823.post7803692844773392248..comments2024-02-27T14:44:07.868+01:00Comments on Greedy goblin: "To farm or not to farm" for casuals (and PLEX prices)Gevlonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07072766785893313616noreply@blogger.comBlogger32125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1461700565722278823.post-89254869354467624862014-05-18T17:43:53.341+02:002014-05-18T17:43:53.341+02:00CCP has implemented lots of measures to put plex o...CCP has implemented lots of measures to put plex out of the market.<br />- multiple character training<br />- convert plex to aurum<br />- "collector's" editions<br />- fanfest tickets<br />I am sure, someday I will be able to pay my rent with plex.... if I moved to Iceland...<br /><br />Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1461700565722278823.post-37779665125890759812014-05-17T02:15:05.959+02:002014-05-17T02:15:05.959+02:00@Arrendis: only traded PLEX affect the price. If y...@Arrendis: only traded PLEX affect the price. If you buy PLEX with your money to activate a second skill queue, you won't change the Jita PLEX price. So all the things you mentioned - while good news for CCP - is totally irrelevant in this discussion.<br /><br />Not so!<br /><br />Let's say I buy 20 GTC each month, and put them up on the market as PLEX. This is static... until I need to activate skill training on a second character on each of 10 accounts - I'm training up cyno alts, for example.<br /><br />Now, I <i>could</i> buy another 5 GTC, but see, I have a budget IRL. So, I just don't sell 10 PLEX - supply shrinks, and price goes up.<br /><br />The picture is far more complex than you ever make it out to be, Gevlon.Arrendisnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1461700565722278823.post-58063047779682316782014-05-17T02:02:46.338+02:002014-05-17T02:02:46.338+02:00Could someone explain how more miners gives more r...Could someone explain how more miners gives more return than simply one more miner?<br /><br />How is adding one miner to the group not just give you 1x more? <br /><br />One miner mines x, two miners should mine 2x. How is it not that case?<br /><br />Sorry for my ignorance....Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1461700565722278823.post-23418029350254832522014-05-16T22:14:11.761+02:002014-05-16T22:14:11.761+02:00Gevlon, I always wondered about the huge multi-acc...Gevlon, I always wondered about the huge multi-account people ever since a comment in the CSM minutes in Winter 2012. Here it is:<br /><br /><i>"UAxDEATH suggested a tangible benefit for players with multiple accounts would be discounts on subscription costs. He mentioned that at one time he had 90 accounts, but since becoming a CSM he has cut back to only 37, and asked “what would inspire me to [reactivate] those accounts?"</i><br /><br />I'm guessing you'd disagree with him.<br /><br />90 accounts = 270 characters ...Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1461700565722278823.post-57372881484756974692014-05-16T20:48:11.721+02:002014-05-16T20:48:11.721+02:00I am a casual PvE player and I don't need ISK....I am a casual PvE player and I don't need ISK. It comes in faster than I spend it.<br /><br />I run 3 accounts (for which I pay cause I don't need another job) and putter around.<br /><br />Some days I mission, some days I mine, sometimes I do industry. I even tried my hand at PI for a while, but it started to feel like a job, so I quit it when high sec POCOs showed up.<br /><br />The thing is, I don't really have any expenses. I can buy marauders, pirate BSes, BPOs, whatever. Guess what, they all seem to make more ISK for me!<br /><br />If I get war decced, I can just stop playing for a week and pick up where I left off after the war is over (or play a different alt.<br /><br />I have started buying plexes to train up some alts, but they get useful pretty quickly and I don't see me trying to maintain a steady alt training regime.<br /><br />To sum up: me, a casual PvE player, has no need for ISK as it comes in fast enough.Aelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10788190394672505925noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1461700565722278823.post-76359973875073027922014-05-16T20:37:03.375+02:002014-05-16T20:37:03.375+02:00hmm... although there might be some grain of truth...hmm... although there might be some grain of truth in it, limiting play time is ridiculous.<br />If so, EVERY action in EVE should become limited. or else everybody would sit in jite with a trading alt.<br />As long as people are able to make 50B a month without ever leaving the station no limitations should be implemented.<br />when afk mining/botting is no longer "profitable" then people will adapt and bot something else, like in Deklein...<br />maybe then there will be the exodus to null, where everybody will be ratting or grinding anoms 24/7<br />Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1461700565722278823.post-78204896655664615002014-05-16T20:05:52.543+02:002014-05-16T20:05:52.543+02:00they probably run virtual machines
Perhaps then d...<i>they probably run virtual machines</i><br /><br />Perhaps then disallowing multiboxing per machine is not helpful. So I'll just focus on multiboxing per real-world person.<br /><br /><br /><i>they might multibox dreads in a sov battle</i><br /><br />In other words, you are concerned about "good" multiboxing being cut off, that is contentful multiboxing.<br /><br />This is certainly a risk of cutting off multiboxing. But seriously, how much content is created via, i.e., people running 10 dreads in big fights? I expect the amount created is trivial compared to the cost to the company of the people using multiboxing to farm.<br /><br />In any case, if this is deemed problematic then it should be possible to programmatically allow more or less multiboxing based on hull type. I.e., pods can do nothing by way of farming, so you should be allowed to multibox as many of them as you want. Same supers and dreads. By contrast mining ships are only useful for farming and among the least contentful multiboxes, so you might make the limit on them lower.<br /><br /><br /><i>You can increase the risk of an activity, but it will hurt the casual more.</i><br /><br />True. So the way to fight multiboxing indirectly is going to be to make it more clicky. This has its own problems; it makes boring activities less boring but also less fun. (Loot spew, anyone?) But it does work to cut off multiboxers.Von Keigaihttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14469707993470718130noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1461700565722278823.post-9138858713190452562014-05-16T18:47:04.111+02:002014-05-16T18:47:04.111+02:00Bear in mind, the changes to the NEX store that ar...Bear in mind, the changes to the NEX store that are upcoming will push plex prices even further.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1461700565722278823.post-7833326669159702632014-05-16T18:42:05.420+02:002014-05-16T18:42:05.420+02:00@Arrendis: only traded PLEX affect the price. If y...@Arrendis: only traded PLEX affect the price. If you buy PLEX with your money to activate a second skill queue, you won't change the Jita PLEX price. So all the things you mentioned - while good news for CCP - is totally irrelevant in this discussion.<br /><br />@Von Keigai: they probably run virtual machines. Also, they might multibox dreads in a sov battle.<br /><br />The main problem is that the multiboxer is always more profitable and more safe than the casual player. You can increase the risk of an activity, but it will hurt the casual more. Why? Because the multiboxer only runs that one activity, so optimizes it, while the casual runs many things, so he will probably be dumb. The harder you make it, the harder the casual will fail and only the multiboxer will prevail.Gevlonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07072766785893313616noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1461700565722278823.post-67948751338213752982014-05-16T17:55:54.950+02:002014-05-16T17:55:54.950+02:00Gevlon you are getting at a real problem here, but...Gevlon you are getting at a real problem here, but you don't quite see it.<br /><br />The problem is not players earning money per se. That's good. And there's no problem at all with PLEX. PLEX are always balanced by the market. People use PLEX as savings; as money. But that is fine.<br /><br />The problem is not multiboxers, either. It is anyone who PLEXes an account without creating significant content. We can look at EVE players as two types: those who pay their own money, and those who don't (i.e. who PLEX). The only reason to have the latter group is that, via the magic of the market in PLEX, they create enough content such that the "whales" buy more PLEX.<br /><br />Now, it is certainly true that multiboxers are probably among the worse players in creating very little content for what they get paid. But it happens all over the place. Every time I zip up my system, then run sleeper sites with essentially no risk, I am part of this problem. Of course, I'd be an idiot to leave my system unzipped just so that someone can gank me, even though it would make him very happy. <br /><br />In any case, the solution is not to stick on arbitrary play limits. If someone wants to mine veldspar for 10 hours a day, that's fine. The solution is to identify PVE that does not add significant content relative to its pay, and nerf it so that it does. The nerf can come in two ways: one is to raise the content value of the play style. The other is to reduce its pay. <br /><br />Thus, for example, removing the roundly-hated discovery scanner in wspace would help to re-introduce risk into sleeper-farming. Bad from the POV of my making ISK without risk, but good for CCP.<br /><br />In the case of multiboxers, it seems like the easiest way to get at them is to disallow playing more than N instances of EVE from the same computer and/or the same owning real-world person. A reasonable N might be, for example, 4. Von Keigaihttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14469707993470718130noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1461700565722278823.post-33152933497805583672014-05-16T17:43:35.750+02:002014-05-16T17:43:35.750+02:00Mordis:
I'm just one person, but when the firs...Mordis:<br /><i>I'm just one person, but when the first dev blog re: refining changes was released, I resubbed a few of my accounts with PLEX to beginning training for ore processing 5. Then I later resubbed my entire mining fleet to get busy mining with the intent to have massive ore to compress when the expansion went live.</i><br /><br />Sure, and that accounts for part of it, but the sharp climb upward in prices starts well before those devblogs. So they can't be the root cause for the slope's climb.<br /><br />A contributing factor? Sure, but not the root cause. If you look at the price curve, there's a <i>very</i> clear shift from normal inflationary price increases to the sudden upswing we saw from ~Feb 1 to ~May 1.<br /><br />So what happened?<br /><br />First, I'd speculate - and unlike Gevlon, I'm openly stating this is <i>speculation</i>, while Gevlon presents his completely unfounded speculation as proven fact - that the initial shocks are a result of B-R5RB.<br /><br />It's my position that just needing to PLEX-activate accounts to get access to 'strategic reserves' of Titans and Supercarriers among PL, N3, SOLAR, and the CFC was enough of a one-time demand spike to deliver a shock to the system. A temporary one, but it doesn't take much to nudge a steady demand into a run on prices.<br /><br />Second, we've got CCP saying the number of PLEXs bought hasn't dropped at all. Trading volume's come down a little, but the number purchased hasn't dropped. So where are those untraded PLEXs going?<br /><br />As someone else has pointed out: Second Character Skill Training. That's the other thing that picks up after B-R5RB (27-28 Jan, <i>right</i> before the sharp uptick in prices starts): Training for Titans and Supercapitals. Sure, PL/N3 have them, but even they were in kind of a semi-complacent 'we've got 'em, we use 'em, suck it' mindset.<br /><br />After B-R, suddenly the biggest collection of nerds is willing to <i>use</i> their big ships. Now it's an <i>active</i> arms race, and one of the biggest things holding alliances back in that race is pilots who can fly the bloody things. In the CFC, the 'train for dreads' became 'train for a goddamned titan'.<br /><br />New accounts for SC training, new alts on existing accounts who'd need to train... all of this accounts for more demand - and PLEX bought, but <i>not</i> traded.<br /><br />Is this the complete picture? Probably not. But there's absolutely <i>no</i> evidence to support Gevlon's claim that the price of PLEX has risen due to multi-account farming.<br /><br />He can try to shift that around all he likes, but this is the statement I'm saying is patently wrong:<br /><br /><i>The near-infinite ISK coming from multi-account farming, combined with its high PLEX demand is skyrocketing the PLEX prices.</i><br /><br />If multi-account farming, and <i>its</i> high PLEX demand were the cause of the PLEX spike, then multi-account farming itself would've needed to see a similar spike in activity. And there's no evidence of that.Arrendisnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1461700565722278823.post-75172616775954130072014-05-16T17:42:38.396+02:002014-05-16T17:42:38.396+02:00Um... What other, recent feature was introduced to...Um... What other, recent feature was introduced to Eve that has an impact on plexes... You know, the one involving Aurum which is created by converting Plex in the Nobel Exchange? <br /><br />That's right... New ship hulls. How many colletors, traders, speculators, and such jumped on this? I'm not saying thousands of Plex lost to Aurum, but this happened right around March, shortly after B-R. <br /><br />This too would impact Plex prices as more were consumed on vanity items.<br />Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1461700565722278823.post-45893907393415813432014-05-16T14:56:48.472+02:002014-05-16T14:56:48.472+02:00@Gevlon
"my point is exactly that someone run...@Gevlon<br />"my point is exactly that someone running 30 accounts isn't putting in more skill, real money or effort than the guy running one account in the same time."<br />I disagree. While it's not linearly scaled, running 30 accounts is considerably more effort than running 1. Even with multiboxing software the efficiency per character is considerably lower because being the most efficient needs you to respond in a timely manner to changes in circumstance.<br /><br />"CCP clearly said that 50% of the new players quit, 10% goes "diverse play" and 40% is "leveling his Raven". If he plays 2-3 hours a day and his buddy has a much better Raven from a pair of PLEX-es, he'll likely give up."<br />All that statistic they released shows is that of new people that come to the game, only 10% like it and stick about. I'm OK with that. It's a niche game, it's not a mainstream run of the mill MMO. Stripping away what EVE is just to make it mainstream so the average moron will come in and play it is a dumb idea.<br /><br />"sure, a 10 hours farmer could have 2-3 sets of farmalts to do the SAME job. However this would mean 2-3x more income to CCP for the same damage they do to the game."<br />Uh no, it wouldn't. Those accounts would be plexed. Them buying more plex wouldn't mean that more people would automatically buy plex, it just means the existing plex being brought into the game would be in higher demand, thus the plex price would skyrocket. Some people may even reduce their plex purchases as they can get more isk per plex and don't need infinite isk. Sure, overall they might get some more income, but it would be nowhere close to 2-3x more.Lucas Kellhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03969897349629783605noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1461700565722278823.post-55841634526320314922014-05-16T14:37:27.400+02:002014-05-16T14:37:27.400+02:00Arrendis said:
"there's no evidence of a...Arrendis said:<br /> "there's no evidence of a similar upswing - or any upswing - in the volume of mining products that would indicate that.<br /><br />Now, you can claim all those new multi-boxers are ratting - all of them - but that's a pretty ridiculous claim, and I think you know it."<br /><br />I'm just one person, but when the first dev blog re: refining changes was released, I resubbed a few of my accounts with PLEX to beginning training for ore processing 5. Then I later resubbed my entire mining fleet to get busy mining with the intent to have massive ore to compress when the expansion went live. Where is all that ore? Stored in XL arrays and stations. There is no consensus on what the premium will be for compressed ore over current refined mineral prices. So, it would appear that I have been very unproductive when that is not the case at all (you're welcome for the Geckos from mining volume). Now that the expansion has been pushed, I will unsub all the mining accounts and just leave the refiners to continue training all ores to level 5.<br /><br />So, don't be so quick to discount Gevlon's theory. Like most things, there are multiple reasons and I think his is a pretty valid one...this time.mordis mydaddyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07917167436312438744noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1461700565722278823.post-59426879784886796622014-05-16T14:03:53.533+02:002014-05-16T14:03:53.533+02:00@Lucas: my point is exactly that someone running 3...@Lucas: my point is exactly that someone running 30 accounts isn't putting in more skill, real money or effort than the guy running one account in the same time.<br /><br />CCP clearly said that 50% of the new players quit, 10% goes "diverse play" and 40% is "leveling his Raven". If he plays 2-3 hours a day and his buddy has a much better Raven from a pair of PLEX-es, he'll likely give up.<br /><br />About quotas: sure, a 10 hours farmer could have 2-3 sets of farmalts to do the SAME job. However this would mean 2-3x more income to CCP for the same damage they do to the game.Gevlonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07072766785893313616noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1461700565722278823.post-67391159245492340272014-05-16T13:44:31.234+02:002014-05-16T13:44:31.234+02:00blame the bots
minerals wouldnt be this cheap with...blame the bots<br />minerals wouldnt be this cheap without them<br />with 2 miners I can easily farm 100m/day in high sec (no boost), but without bots that could be 200ish<br />I need to mine at least 70m/day to buy PLEX's for both my miners and my Raven leveling carebear<br />70m a day and I have no profit at all, cant buy anything to do L4 faster or to fit some Manti to run FW missions (not in the militia atm)<br />how fun is that?<br />cant save enough money to buy a freighter and start trading or hauling<br /><br />but I dont blame the bots<br />they are part of the economy in every single MMO<br />they cant do anything in Eve, they are just mining and you can shoot them anytime :)<br />Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1461700565722278823.post-67711342536447215112014-05-16T12:07:22.190+02:002014-05-16T12:07:22.190+02:001) If PLEX hit 1.5b, that would be 50m/day...now, ...1) If PLEX hit 1.5b, that would be 50m/day...now, this may be an issue for a high sec miner mining veld solo at 10m/hr, but, you are seriously suggesting 50m/day is only in the reach of whales?<br /><br />2) What spike in plex demand? Did you watch FF at all?<br />Here is the graph for plex, across all regions: http://i.imgur.com/IlVnjll.png?1<br /><br />I see a spike in price, but no corresponding spike in volume<br /><br />3) If plex hit 1.5b, many more people would think that 1-3 hours of their RL time was worth trading in for 1.5b, and so would buy plex to sell for isk. What happens when say, 3* the amount of PLEX are available on the market, but demand for use as game time is the same?<br /><br />4) Never assume that someone who plays 30 hours a week has no job, that wasnt true in 2004, and it is even less true now. Someone who plays 90 hours a week may even have a job (Shocking, I know, but not everyone works in a factory or office where they cannot have a computer logged into a game)<br /><br />5) Eve lets you make money while you sleep (Especially as an EUTZ), even the most crappy trader can make 50m while sleeping every night. <br /><br />6) No-lifers? see point 4. Are we really still using that? Would most non-gamers not consider someone who writes a blog about internet pixels (and its readers) no-lifers?<br /><br />Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1461700565722278823.post-68658966596846312562014-05-16T11:30:40.818+02:002014-05-16T11:30:40.818+02:00@Gevlon
"someone putting in 10x more time, sh...@Gevlon<br />"someone putting in 10x more time, should get 10x more rewards. And not 300x more."<br />Well they are only getting 10x more. If you purely put in 10x more time, you get 10x more reward (or perhaps a marginal amount over for optimisation etc). Your 300x is coming from someone putting in 10x more time AND 30x more accounts. It's unreasonable to say that running 30 accounts and running 1 are equivalent if you play over X amount of hours per day.<br /><br />"It pushes out casual PvE players, since the rewards of their play (the ISK) is trivial compared to PLEX-ing a cup of coffee."<br />So in your mind a casual PVE player is doing it purely for the isk? What are they grinding isk for if they are a PVE player? Surely their enjoyment comes from the PVE if that's why they play. And honestly, there's no evidence that these people are being pushed out at all. Sure, EVE doesn't have a playerbase like WoW, but it's a niche game, so it won't reach that size.<br /><br />"Farming quotas hurt nobody besides nolifers."<br />Farming quotas wouldn't hurt them either. They'd simply run more accounts. As long as they can plex an account then earn income they can earn more than a casual. If a nolifer could run 30 accounts for 10 hours a day, but the quote meant they could only earn for 5 hours a day, they'd simply open 30 more accounts, play set one for 5 hours, then set 2 for 5 hours.<br /><br />At the end of the day, casuals will never earn as many in game rewards in any game as a nolifer, that's just the way it works. Whatever a casual can do in a game and nolifer could do multiple times over. The only way to prevent that would be to force single account restrictions, which would be the fastest way to destroy the number of subscriptions.<br /><br />Honestly though, I don't think this problem really exists at the scale you imagine it to. You'll always have people crying about plex prices, that's been going on since their introduction. The fact is, they will always go up, whether quotas are put in place or not, supply will always change so that the price doesn't drop, since players who got 700m last month for a plex wont be willing to spend the same amount of money and get 650m this month. Add onto that the fact that new ways to use plex are being added, like dual account training, and new items are being added to the nex store, where aurum is often converted from plex, and the price is destined to rise.Lucas Kellhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03969897349629783605noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1461700565722278823.post-75257061782610743362014-05-16T11:11:00.959+02:002014-05-16T11:11:00.959+02:00Just a thought: The economy panel at fanfest said ...Just a thought: The economy panel at fanfest said that the volume of PLEX traded was going down, but he strongly implied that the number of PLEX bought was the same or higher than before. To me this simply means more people are using PLEX for other things (character trading, re-sculpting, second skill queues) or are holding on to them for speculation, leading to the higher prices for the PLEX that are traded. If that's the case it's nothing at all to worry about.<br /><br />Also note that most casual players I would guess pay for their account without any real intention of PLEXing, so their PvE doesn't need to produce 700mil per month to be profitable, it just needs to produce more than they lose in PvP. Eventually they will reach a critical mass of ISK that they can make work for them in one of the many ways this game has.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1461700565722278823.post-35399335927285792172014-05-16T10:34:49.790+02:002014-05-16T10:34:49.790+02:00@Arrendis
As far as I can see Gevlon never made t...@Arrendis<br /><br />As far as I can see Gevlon never made the claim that there was a spike in demand from farmers, simply that there was strong demand from them.<br /><br />If a farmer spends 1/8th of his farmed income on plexing the accounts and then plex rises by 40% he will have to spend ~1/6th of his farmed income on plex. It's still clearly profitable to farm so his plex demand remains constant.<br /><br />A casual who is funding his plex via non-optimal farming might have spent 26 hours plexing his two accounts before, but has to spend 36 after the 40% rise in plex prices. If the casual doesn't have that extra time he'll probably un-sub an account. There goes his scout, his cyno, his Jita alt. The scope of things that he can do shrinks. He has less motivation to log in so he lets his main lapse. His friend logs in and doesn't have anyone to talk to so he lets his account lapse to go play DOTA with the original casual. Such is the social death spiral.<br /><br />So if what we're seeing from lower PCU is that regular players are quitting then we'd expect plex prices to remain roughly constant (whales sell less plex, fewer casuals buy plex). However if the amount of farmers stays constant as the number of whales and casuals decrease then plex should go up as demand decreases more slowly than supply.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1461700565722278823.post-88548988120259321072014-05-16T10:03:45.826+02:002014-05-16T10:03:45.826+02:00@Lucas: someone putting in 10x more time, should g...@Lucas: someone putting in 10x more time, should get 10x more rewards. And not 300x more.<br /><br />The number of accounts matter because with quotas the farming power is decreased. If a new account gets you 5B/month with little extra effort, you will start it. If it earns you just 1B and have to pay 0.7B to upkeep it, you wont.<br /><br />Saturday casuals can be handled with pool+daily replenishment. If the quota is 2hrs/day and he didn't play all week, he can play 14 hours.<br /><br />High PLEX prices are indeed good for casual PvP-ers. It pushes out casual PvE players, since the rewards of their play (the ISK) is trivial compared to PLEX-ing a cup of coffee. You might don't care about them, but without them, there is no one left to kill.<br /><br />The people who are pushed out are those who don't want to spend INHUMAN amount of time. Please understand that multi-account farming isn't a problem without no-life. If you mine in highsec on 10 accounts, 2 hours a day, you can barely mine enough to PLEX those accounts. If you mine 10 hours a day, you suddenly have a supercarrier every month.<br /><br />Farming quotas hurt nobody besides nolifers. Casuals and PvP-ers wouldn't even notice the existence of quotas. It would hurt a 1% minority who are mostly botters anyway.Gevlonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07072766785893313616noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1461700565722278823.post-85765287843201946182014-05-16T09:53:39.904+02:002014-05-16T09:53:39.904+02:00I looked at the plex history in The Forge (Jita) a...I looked at the plex history in The Forge (Jita) and took a 30 day average of plex traded volume from a year ago and today (well actually ending 2 days ago as the last 48 hours are showing oddly low data.)<br /><br />30 Day average:<br />April/May 2013: 3403.83<br />April/May 2014: 2687.16<br /><br />On only 2 days were the number of plex traded greater in 2014 than 2013. The other 28 had higher volume in 2013.<br /><br />So we've essentially seen a 21% drop in plex traded volume in The Forge in the last year.<br /><br />No wonder CCP are sending out surveys asking what the percentage chance is that you'll still be playing Eve in 4 months...Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1461700565722278823.post-18600059986420380652014-05-16T09:50:30.102+02:002014-05-16T09:50:30.102+02:00@Gevlon
"Casual PvE players want to make ISK ...@Gevlon<br />"Casual PvE players want to make ISK during their play and not paying $ to have ISK while NOT PLAYING AT ALL! PvP-ers need casual PvE players to kill. If they quit the game, or just don't play, there is no one to kill."<br />Surely if they are paying for isk, they can then use all of their time to play, rather than grind isk. What you are saying here is that someone who puts an hour a day into the game can grind less isk that someone who puts 10 hours in... Well, yeah, that's how it works. That's how it works everywhere. By the way, PI means you can plex an account with almost no effort and almost no time.<br /><br />If they put in quotas, multiboxers would just run more accounts all meeting their quotas every day, just doing 10 accounts this hour, 10 accounts next hour, etc. Since they pay for themselves, the number of accounts don't matter. A casual on the other hand, when he finds a block of time, say a suddenly free Saturday he can play loads, now he's tied down by a quota.<br /><br />Now you seem to think that plex prices going up would push out a causal player. I'm not sure why. It might push out a casual player who is determined to plex their game, but most causals will just pay for their sub. Plex prices going up means that when they do want to spend a few extra $ on a plex, they get MORE isk for their money.<br /><br />So basically the only people who are getting pushed out are people who don't want to spend time, money or effort on becoming space-rich. Anything you do to make them happy would simply make it easier for everyone else, the bar would be pushed up and we'd be right back to this situation, because the problem is they do nothing exceptional, nothing above average, so if you make average all you need to do to plex your game, people who do something above average (so spend more time, spend more money or spend more effort) will raise the bar.Lucas Kellhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03969897349629783605noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1461700565722278823.post-15009470739897757072014-05-16T08:38:43.226+02:002014-05-16T08:38:43.226+02:00hmmm, just so you know where I come from: I start...hmmm, just so you know where I come from: I started not long after you had completed your blog on mining last year. You are correct in that I am casual but with limits therefore my account is free but nothing else is. So I needed isk, I did not want to "farm" pve when I could pay 100% attention to the game I wanted to do "things" "play eve" "pew pew" and so forth but those cost isk. <br /><br />My solution was your mining mission posts, slightly modified. First some missions suck, and some factions suck, so I needed to eliminate them (the faction was easy, don't do caldari which you suggested) the second part was harder how to avoid crappy missions. Took awhile but I figured it out. I identifed three ore, two ice, and two gas missions that I could do AFK'ish. But that still left to many missions and declining them (as you suggest for the arkornor) can sap the afk time dry. The solution to that was: pick a system in highsec that had more than 1 lvl 4 agent, I found a system (.9) with many agents this let me nearly continuesly pick the good missions. So I ran them while working every half hour or hour I would alt tab back and dock up claim rewards. So now I had an isk faucet running durring a time when I couldn't 100% pay attention. That way my "real" play time I could focus on doing things I wanted to do. Eventually I stopped one of the gas missions and settled on 1 gas, 2 ice and 3 ore missions while I worked. I don't do that now because I found relic sites in null offer nearly as much gain for far less effort. As I was able to expand my "real" time to include an extra hour.<br /><br />Thought you should knowProvi Minernoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1461700565722278823.post-49035900427745600242014-05-16T08:01:10.695+02:002014-05-16T08:01:10.695+02:00Instead of putting time limits on farming, how abo...Instead of putting time limits on farming, how about rebuilding the isk-making activities under two seperate schools of thought: One which gives quick, good income PvE content that is simulated to be like low-level small gang PvP (NPCs switch targets, use logi, maybe even warp around grid to different beacons so you have to tackle them.) The second could be passive-style income that requires strategic planning and daily upkeep for best results (similar to PI,) Have a mix of the two of these and it will give the solo, strategic player something to do while also giving an incentive to get into small, coordinated groups to make lots of iskies. Incursions once promised a way for PvE pilots to ease into fleet combat/coordination, which would at least give them the skills they need if they decide they do want to join a group that shoots things. Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com