EVE Screen Shot Contest – First Entry September 18, 2010
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, EVE Online.Tags: contest, pictures, PLEX, Screen Shots
1 comment so far
Kirith Kodachi of the blog the Inner Sanctum of the Ninveah was the first person to enter the EVE Online Screen Shot Contest, which I announced yesterday.
A long time EVE player, the toughest part was, by his own admission, narrowing down his submission to just five pictures.
Here is one his submissions:
Wyvern at Battle
So, if nobody else enters the contest, Kirith stands to pick up two PLEX for his effort.
The contest runs until October 10th, 2010, so you still have plenty of time to enter.
The PLEX Story We’ve All Been Waiting For… August 9, 2010
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, EVE Online.Tags: PLEX, RMT
31 comments
PLEX, the in-game item you can buy from other players in EVE Online that lets you extend your subscription to the game by 30 day.
CCP recently unlocked the restrictions on PLEX in game. Previously, you could not move PLEX. It had to stay in a station where it was safe. Or at least safer.
Now, however, PLEX is an item like most everything else in New Eden. It can be moved, sold, shipped, and destroyed.
So I have been waiting for the first real big PLEX loss item to show up.
And now we have it.
Reported over at Massively, a player carrying 74 PLEX, worth nearly $1,300 in real life and over 22 billion ISK in-game, had his ship blow up in Jita.
Should have chosen something bigger than a Kestrel.
And all the PLEX was destroyed.
Poof.
Gone.
Welcome to EVE Online.
[Addendum - The EVE Player News posting about this is here, while the main forum thread appears to be here. Special thanks to Galo and his post here.]
PLEX! PLEX for Piracy! July 9, 2010
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, EVE Online.Tags: Piracy, PLEX, RMT
6 comments
Oh, I’ve been waiting for this one. This has drama, rage quit, and QQ written all over it.
CCP has announced that they will be removing the restrictions on PLEX.
I’ve written about PLEX before.
PLEX, or 30 day Pilot License EXtensions are in-game items that can be bought or sold and which extend your game subscription by 30 days. You buy them for real money and get them in-game.
However, up to this point, there have been some draconian restrictions on PLEX. Basically, you cannot move it. It sits in the space station in which you purchased it. You can sell it to somebody else at that station, but it is stuck there until somebody uses it.
Soon, however, new rules will apply. From their post:
- We will remove the restriction on undocking from a station with a PLEX in your cargo hold
- We will remove the restriction that PLEX cannot be put into courier contracts
- We will remove the restriction that items (including PLEX) can only be redeemed into NPC stations
- We will remove the restriction that items (including PLEX) can only be reverse-redeemed from NPC stations
- We will remove the restriction that ETC can only be converted into PLEX while inside an NPC station
PLEX will be set free. You can carry it around. You can sell people contracts to carry it for you.
And, of course, people can take it away from you.
And that is where the fun begins. Somebody scans your cargo, sees you’re carrying game time, and you are suddenly a high priority target.
This goes live Tuesday, July 13, 2010.
I cannot wait to see how this unfolds. I want to read tales of PLEX piracy.
This is soooo EVE Online.
The Joy of PLEX November 20, 2009
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, EVE Online.Tags: MMO Economy, PLEX, RMT
8 comments
The team at CCP dove fully into the in-game currency selling market with EVE Online a while back with their 30 day CONCORD Pilot License Extension program, or PLEX.
For $35 you can buy two PLEX which you can then sell to people in-game for somewhere between 250 and 400 million ISK. (Planning and patience can be worth 150 million ISK!) You get your ISK, another player gets 30 more days of play time without laying out any cash, everybody is happy.
But what I really like about this is that it gives people a baseline value for ISK and things bought and sold with ISK.
A friend dropped me a note about the game. He is starting off and while he likes the game, he is more interested in *pew* *pew* and less interested in the sometimes grindy acquisition of ISK. (I’ll admit, mining is an acquired taste, and all the more so when mineral prices are down.)
He was wondering about buying ISK. He had looked around and found some 3rd party seller looking to unload ISK at a rate of $70 per billion. There is the wonder of EVE again, where 10,000 ISK and 1,000,000,000 can both be meaningful and meaningless in the right context.
Anyway, I pointed out that if you get caught buying from such a source, CCP will take it away from you. That and a warning seems to be the standard for a first offense.
But I also did the math.
Even as a quick, low end sale, $35 buys you two PLEX which will get you 500 million ISK, so $70 would get you a billion and it would be risk free. Potentially though, played right, that $35 gets you pretty close to the billion mark. So the best case scenario would be paying the same price for a greatly increased risk.
That pretty much cleared up the situation for him on that front.
Then later I was IM’ing with another friend who mentioned that a corp mate sold one of his characters. This is also legal in EVE Online. You can sell a character for ISK. You cannot sell your account however, nor can you sell your character for real world currency under the rules of the game. But transferring a character for ISK is perfectly acceptable and CCP has a process that protects both buyer and seller.
Anyway, the selling price for the character in question was 8 billion ISK, which seems like a lot. Just a billion of anything is a lot to me.
But then I did the calculation. 8 billion ISK buys you 26 months of game play, using the safe middle ground number of 300 million ISK per PLEX. 26 months of play is, at most, if you pay by the month, around $390. And if you pay by the quarter like I do, it is down closer to $340. That isn’t enough for me to want to sell either of my long term characters, assuming that I could even get that much money for any of them.
Not that you can actually cash out, because you end up with ISK or game time, but it gives you a sense of the monetary value of that transaction or really any transaction in the game, including making 3rd party ISK sellers look a bit silly at time. You may view that as a good thing or a bad thing, a real measurement you can bring home or a breaking of immersion, but there it is.
Now the whole PLEX thing works in EVE Online with its single server (but regional markets and no instant delivery) and economy where everything can be bought for ISK, but where ISK is not really a measure of success.
But then you wonder, what other games could support something similar to PLEX?
Which economies are robust enough to support that sort of thing? You’d think with the constant talk about illicit gold buying, (and how it will never go away) that there would be some games with enough currency flow to be able to practically implement something like PLEX.
ISK – Even Easier To Buy February 7, 2009
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, EVE Online.Tags: CCP, ISK, PLEX, RMT
1 comment so far
CCP has introduced PLEX, the 30 day Pilot License EXtension.
It is essentially a 30 Day EVE Online game time card that has a physical manifestation in the game. (Or a virtual physical manifestation, I guess.)
That means you can buy and sell them on the standard market place, create contracts involving them, and get yourself scammed out of them.
You think I’m kidding about that last part? Go read the PLEX entry on EVElopedia, the official EVE Online Wiki. CCP says, and I quote:
Warning: ‘CCP has not made any special exceptions for the PLEX items. They are treated as regular in-game items with regards to market orders and contracts. Scams are easily avoidable by careful scrutiny of market orders and contracts and we urge anyone to be alert when dealing in PLEXes.
Welcome to EVE Online.
They cost $34.95 for two, which is the minimum quantity you are allowed to purchase. At that price they are not a viable alternative to a regular subscription, which I suspect was quite deliberate.
Currently, around Amarr space, PLEX seem to be running around 300 million ISK, which seems a bit steep to me. My whole fortune would get me 7 months of play, so I will probably pass on that until the price drops.
The only thing that disappoints me about the whole thing is that CCP wimped out a bit, in my opinion, in making PLEX non-transportable. Once you buy them and claim them, they are locked into the station where you are currently docked.
While this will no doubt reduce the number of people getting their PLEX taken away from them, it will remove some potential drama from the game. There won’t be any tales of PLEX convoys in 0.0 getting betrayed and destroyed by rival alliances or blogs dedicated to low sec PLEX pirates.
And while is sucks to be on the losing end of such stories, I think they are still the best recruiting tool CCP has. Things like the latest Goonswarm adventure, destroying the BoB alliance by intrigue, bring people to the game just to see what kind of oline environment lets you get away with such things.
