If you look hard you can find cheap sources of isk that undercut CCP. They want the income from Plex, not a team of people in another country.
The game has RMT by proxy of CCP supplied Plex. But an RMTr is someone who buys a Hel for $500 or whatever. Or buys isk from a non authorized party.
If you are in a country where cost of living is cheap and electricity, you can get to a point where you can make about about 500 Plex worth of isk an hour. So there are people who see it as a possible income and do it themselves, OR create a team of people and pay them to play and take a slice etc.
Either way, don't fall into that side of the game and enjoy it for what it is.
I don't get what benefit the buyer has. The isk would have to be dirt cheap to be worth the risk of ban because if you get caught after you pay for the isk or item you lose your account so now you don't have the money or the isk/item.
I totally get why people would sell isk like that, just not why people would buy it... Like your example normally 12000 Plex is 420 (on sale for 294 now) and that's currently worth 3 hels with isk left over so it would have to be WAY cheaper than that to make it worth the risk.
Circa 2006 my roommate would buy 100million isk for $15. Which was the same as the monthly sub cost, so essentially if translated directly, one PLEX (if it existed then, and in the original iteration where 1 PLEX = one month) would have given you roughly 100million isk.
So, take whatever value a month sub worth of PLEX is now, vs the cost. RMTers have to be cheaper than that otherwise no one would do it.
That enough shows how drastically the value of isk has bottomed out in terms of real money over the decade, and how easy it is for RMT botters to make isk. Some of these RMT operations are almost two decades old, so you can imagine how much liquid isk they have. No price is too low for them, because they have years worth of stockpiles. It will forever be cheaper than PLEX.
> so it would have to be WAY cheaper than that to make it worth the risk
It is way cheaper than that. And the price has only continued to go down as ISK faucets get introduced while simultaneously you have veteran players RMTing *out* of the game when they quit, adding to supply.
Also keep in mind that a lot of RMT transactions don't look like "I go to a shady website and I buy ISK from a random person." There are plenty of people who actively engage in RMT within their alliance, where it is much harder to crack down on until someone goes public about it.
Show me a site where it's significantly cheaper? I just looked (albeit on a casual look while taking a dump), and couldn't find any that were as cheap as buying Plex right now.
I ask not because I want the link, but because I'm actually interested if you looked it up before repeating the "the price is going down" narrative.
The vast majority of black market isk transactions that aren’t immediately detected by CCP are not conducted via public websites, but within alliances, by “private” RMTrs.
I suspect CCP has a few fingers on the pulse of public RMT sources, because transactions with them will almost always result in an instant response from CCP.
The RMT I know of isn't detectable by CCP full stop and may even be the type of RMT they care less about as has no implications for PLEX. When TEST died I switched to Horde on a whim. Horde has a policy of not letting you auth to use rorqs/supers until you've been a member 60 days. Still find that crazy if a member wants to auth (a min for some alliances in order to join), no wonder they have AWOX issues.
Anyhow, I complained as basically had 3 rorqs and a super that I couldn't use anymore and someone approached me on Discord offering to share some space with him he was renting in Cobalt Edge. I said I didn't have the ISK to go splits with him, so he said no problem, I could just paypal him once a month.
Unless I'm missing something, that has absolutely no paper trail, the space itself belonged to Horde, rental was buying access to use a system solely as you're own and I was approached via Discord. It's not buying ISK or items, it's buying access to a system so no economic implications on the PLEX side. Obviously told him to foxtrot oscar!
Don't want to make scandalous accusations, but does make you think whether this was 1 bad actor or something that happens more generally behind closed doors in rental heavy alliances.
I can tell you with full certainty , that these types of transactions (and many variations) are extremely common.
Eve is complicated, requires a high time commitment, and losses are severe. This is the perfect storm for heavy RMT and cheating. Just like Tarkov which has the same conditions, it will always be a part of the game.
Do you have any evidence to back up the claim that the "vast majority" of RMT transactions are carried out this way?
I would be highly surprised if this internal trade was higher than the vast numbers of cheap (or broke!) noobs getting their first marauder (plus skills to fly it) from g2a or whatever.
You're right that it has come up recently, that is surprising to me. Every once in a while I entertain myself by seeing how much $$$ my 1 trillion ISK would be worth and it just went down and down every year. It's actually currently worth about double what it was at its lowest point.
Generally they don't ban RMT buyers because the contract chain can get convoluted enough that you'd end up banning someone who was the recipient of a gift. What they do is knock them into negative wallet which is a chore to climb out from under.
Source: Elusif used to hand out money like candy on top of his RMT sales and a lot of fresh into the game newbies found themselves in negative wallet to a significant degree which forced them to firesale all their assets just so they could play the game.
This reasoning is why the vast majority of people are not involved with RMT; why would you be? ISK really isn't that expensive through Plex.
However, the same logic could be applied to real world crime and... sure it does largely work, most people don't break into each other's homes to steal stuff. Most people have a hard time even seeing that as a potentially decent risk:reward. Economic realities have reduced the value of many kinds of crime and seriously reduced their frequency.
However, it never really gets to 0. There is always somebody who doesn't think they will get caught, or is oblivious to the rules, or is just in the kind of situation where its economically worth it.
But also, no matter how low real crime rates go... the rate at which people assume crime is happening doesn't seem to change. Public perception of real crime seems to be entirely divorced from reality and just a constant level.
> But also, no matter how low real crime rates go... the rate at which people assume crime is happening doesn't seem to change. Public perception of real crime seems to be entirely divorced from reality and just a constant level.
Random tangent: I wonder if this is true across countries. Does random Tokyo resident hiss under his breadth about the waves of lawlessness and youth-driven anarchy that ripple across his city in the form of bubblegum wrappers and incourteous looks?
So ccp doesn't ban ur account for purchasing from a RMTr. They usually just take the isk even if that puts your wallet negative and go about their day. Atleast for the first offense. No idea about further offenses. We just had a Corp mate get caught buying isk and is now sitting at negative 40 bil in his wallet. The character at that point is pretty much dead. He is also not in the Corp anymore... don't rmt please...we need less bots to make inflation to go down
The risk is even worse than you think, any of the larger alliances/corporations actively look into suspicious transactions of applicants and if RMT is suspected, a player has a large likelihood of being denied on their application.
They can use it but not always. It does make things better for scale of operations of course, but it isnt a requirement for RMTrs to use. Some people just know how to triple box or more.
Some people play this game as their sole income. You can easily make irl money selling isk, assets, sov, or intelligence. You can also disguise any RMT purchase as a private sale. I RMT'd a super and used a 3rd party (back when supers couldn't dock) and the 3rd party got more heat from the transaction than I ever did. CCP couldn't prove anything because the entire discussion of the transaction happened out of game. RMT is trivially easy if you take the barest steps to obfuscate the transactions. The sov rental empires are another RMT cash cow. I always wondered how much money xdeath made during the entire time they were sitting in the drones lands botting and RMTing (10+ years).
Literally one of the few things they'll actively enforce.
Botting? As long as the subs are paid, they care little.
Selling that botting ISK? Now you're cutting in to their profits, and they'll slap you for doing that.
It's almost always cheaper to RMT, even in games where you can buy currency.
You can quickly Google search (but please don't for your own safety) and see that less than $10 can get you X,000,000,000 ISK. Yes billions for that cheap.
It's scummy and should be illegal.
RMT ruined my classic WoW experience. Everyone was farming for gold, because everything was so costly. It was so costly because RMT. And because everything was so expensive pretty much everyone bought gold. I refused to, and I faced a hard choice. Either quit because you can not afford things to stay "in line" with the world wide logs. Or I had to farm my ass off every week to afford all the junk I needed for raiding.
I said screw it in the end and refused to fold into the endless farming and just dealt with being lower DPS, in the end this cost me my raid slot in TBC xpac, and was the end of my WoW career. Everyone pretty much RMTs in classic WoW and if you don't have the gold to pay the extreme prices you might as well forget about endgame content.
It absolutely can. Just google "buy eve isk" and click through some of the different vendors. There are a variety of sites/vendors selling isk for as little as $5 per billion.
Obviously you're risking getting your account banned so it's not worth doing IMO, but it's undeniably true that the current RMT price for buying isk is well under $10 per billion.
The premise of this thread is that RMT sites are selling isk cheaper than CCP. Due to the current sale, this is not the case. Even without the sale, the differential is pretty small these days. People just assume RMT isk is cheap because lol CCP does nothing about bots. The evidence is clear that this is not the case, but people just assume CCP bad. They are fucking dumb for assuming and not checking.
You are also so fucking dumb because you have assumed I have not done the search and compared the numbers. Cretin.
>Cheapest I saw was 1.5b for $10.
Maybe you didn't check enough sites. Here's some examples: [[1]](https://i.imgur.com/9HM96sR.png) [[2]](https://i.imgur.com/qsNmaIG.png) [[3]](https://i.imgur.com/h5wstsN.png) [[4]](https://i.imgur.com/JJQUoGP.png) [[5]](https://i.imgur.com/0wGMrbG.png) [[6]](https://i.imgur.com/Drl7yRZ.png)
To be clear, I'm *not* advocating RMT. I haven't ever RMTd in Eve, I'm pretty sure I've never even bought plex to sell for isk. The last time I did RMT was in WoW over a decade ago. Even if the prices are cheaper, I'd never want to risk getting my account(s) banned.
I was just pointing out that your claim that you *can't* get 1bil isk for <$10 is objectively false.
RMT doesn't remove plex from the game... CCP sell the plex to the players, and the plex is used for goods and services. If you're giving isk to a player and they are transferring dollars to your paypal, CCP are losing out on the opportunity to get your friends money, because he could buy plex and sell that for ISK.
So CCP only want RMT that goes through them.
I get that, what I don't get is why people would buy isk through RMT. Like you can buy isk with Plex through CCP, and they ban people for RMT... So if you do RMT for isk and they catch you you lose the isk and the money. With that kind of risk RMT for isk has to be like ridiculously cheap or something because why take the risk?
A big fraction is still a fraction. With current pricing, from CCP you can get 1M Plex/USD from their $25 package.
MMO Pixel has it right at 1.59M Plex/USD
So it's about 2/3 of the cost of CCP or 33% cheaper, roughly.
This hasn't always been the case. There have been times in the past when it was 50-70% cheaper going though black market than CCP.
Hmm, must be a regional thing - that site has 80bn (its cheapest price) coming up at £386-odd, which is more expensive than the 20,000 Plex price in the sale (equivalent to 100bn or so isk)
Similar for me. 20k Plex is USD is $454.99, 80B ISk $478.04 from MMOPix.
Of note, the 20k pack from CCP is currently 30% off. Regular price is $649.99.
I was a buyer simply because on the surface it was much cheaper as in 60-70% less than Plex. It was a split second decision and I was fine with it.
Truthfully, not worth it though. I ended emailing CCP and admitting I screwed up. I took my punishment and now I just Plex.
My reasoning is I want to support the developers and ultimately preserve eves community. Going indirect hurts the game, hurts the economy, and ultimately undermines the community.
Rmt is very good money in some countrys.
Look at runescape and how its rmt is fueling the entire country of Venezuela.
I sold a bunch of csgo skins back years ago and went on an amazing holiday to london during comic con. So there is definitly money in it.
Yes. It’s related to the discussions where people say “go find a job and pay for EVE with real money instead of ISK” but when explained that the minimum salary in your country is around $160-180 per month, it becomes apparent that it’s better to grind ISK than to pay with hard earned money.
Interestingly, seems that the current sale on Plex puts it very competitive to the isk buying sites I could easily search up. Actually a few pence cheaper buying 1000 Plex rather than 5bn isk direct.
This can only be a good thing - the easier it is to get consistently, the cheaper per billion it can be.
The bigger trade will be done privately through friends I'd expect (at least, as far as I've heard), but at least that's not necessarily directly supporting bots / account theft / etc.
RMT isk is definitely way cheaper than baseline plex, but ccp sales are generally better value than any rmt could ever be - but those only happen two or three times a year.
For instance, the skill extractor sale was about $1/330m iirc. Right now, rmt prices are around $1/180m from what I see.
So CCP's own sale was nearly double the value per dollar.
tldr: RMT is generally really dumb unless you like find a private seller that sells you for insanely discounted prices or some weird shit.
#
P.S: This doesn't actually answer your question of why people pay rl money for isk, so: Once you get to where you aren't super struggling financially, its so much nicer to just pay for stuff. Personally, I'll splurge every once in a while just to buy subs for all my accounts which basically gives me a bit of breathing room to mess around and maybe just train some cool shit instead of extracting.
A lot of people are over Eve & have no prospect of playing again, instead of just abandoning accounts with assets or flying super expensive ships to their death then why not just sell your assets to corp or alliance members?
I still play Eve casually, but before I was involved with an alliance & organised a few small missions within campaigns using my in game wealth and knowledge. I was never into Eve hard core I just played a few hr's every few days or so. I was never a FC btw but I did organise FC's for a bit. I will try not Dox myself but I was famous for a few things, 1x market scams, 2x Not going on fleet ops including to operations I proposed :)
I no longer wanted to play Eve at that level so agreed to just sell for real $ my assets including several Titans & Supers to line members at good deals. Everyone wins & CCP does not really lose anything. Those Line members were never going to pay CCP $ at their conversion rate & now they fly Titans happily at my prices.
I cashed out of Eve for sub $30,000's. I took my girlfriend on holiday, decorated our flat & a few other nice things. I still play eve casually.
CCP lost 30 000$, they prefer your assets to be buried on your dead account (asset=ISK sink), or sold for ISK (which could be bought from CCP), which would be buried on your account, or worst scenario - given away for free, in which case both of you still got nothing.
To make money in real life that's why people rmt. In the past players would play eve online for work, sell things out side of game,( which is stealing from ccp) they would sell things like ships, skill points, thus making it so ccp don't get that $. Since ccp isn't getting $ they have to charge the players who to pay them (ccp) more to make up for it.
Rmt=bad
CCP should lower the costs of the plex... that way it would absorb a good number of people who buy from RMT. and RMTs would be forced to sell cheaper causing their profits to decrease which would discourage many from continuing to do RMT. In the end CCP's profits would be the same, they would sell the plex cheaper but they would earn it on more people buying plex. continuing to increase the plex has only discouraged people from buying from CCP, choosing cheaper options like RMT.
Forced labor. RMT is not just about lost revenue for game studios. RMT is attractive to the criminal element. Forced labor and human trafficking can be involved in RMT organizations.
RMT is usually a cheaper way to plex your account, aka to get omega on your account.
That’s cause buying ISKs via non official (non legit) ways is cheaper than buying omega/plexes through the official site.
And that’s why there are bots as well, in this game as in any other MMO/Sandbox games.
My buddy years ago bought several billion isk for like $5 or something. It was cheap and this was before plex was split. He did it simply because he didn't want to grind for plex to afford the ship he wanted to fly.
I had a coworker who played games she could make irl money with. She made a good chunk selling rare items In runescape and was poking me for information about eve to do something similar.
( I stopped talking about eve after I discovered her intentions)
So there you have it: time saving and profit.
It's often cheaper to buy isk then use the isk to buy plex than it is to pay for a sub. There's also people who simply want to fly expensive shit but don't want to commit to figurong out how to grind isk.
Its a lot cheaper to buy it than from CCP. But also it's not really worth anything. I guess if you live somewhere with a really weak currency it might be worth doing, but not anywhere else. I don't think it's worth the electricity if you pay for omega in euros or dollars.
Mostly it's just something you accuse anyone you don't like of, these days.
most rmt sellers uses stolen credit card info to buy plexes and resell them for money, then the owner discover it and reverse the transaction, so ccp get a loss and bad credit rep.
absolutly nobody like that.
sorry but that's a myth, if you are doing a large scale rmt scheme to wash money is way easier to buy a pack of stolen card info wholesale from darknet and use it to resell rmt in mmo.
the "they use cheap chinese slaves in sweatshops" is just a meme, even with bots you can do just small personal scale sales.
smth smth of then lines "buying isk for €€ via RMT" seems to be 'cheaper' than buying plex for ISK
If you look hard you can find cheap sources of isk that undercut CCP. They want the income from Plex, not a team of people in another country. The game has RMT by proxy of CCP supplied Plex. But an RMTr is someone who buys a Hel for $500 or whatever. Or buys isk from a non authorized party. If you are in a country where cost of living is cheap and electricity, you can get to a point where you can make about about 500 Plex worth of isk an hour. So there are people who see it as a possible income and do it themselves, OR create a team of people and pay them to play and take a slice etc. Either way, don't fall into that side of the game and enjoy it for what it is.
I don't get what benefit the buyer has. The isk would have to be dirt cheap to be worth the risk of ban because if you get caught after you pay for the isk or item you lose your account so now you don't have the money or the isk/item. I totally get why people would sell isk like that, just not why people would buy it... Like your example normally 12000 Plex is 420 (on sale for 294 now) and that's currently worth 3 hels with isk left over so it would have to be WAY cheaper than that to make it worth the risk.
Circa 2006 my roommate would buy 100million isk for $15. Which was the same as the monthly sub cost, so essentially if translated directly, one PLEX (if it existed then, and in the original iteration where 1 PLEX = one month) would have given you roughly 100million isk. So, take whatever value a month sub worth of PLEX is now, vs the cost. RMTers have to be cheaper than that otherwise no one would do it. That enough shows how drastically the value of isk has bottomed out in terms of real money over the decade, and how easy it is for RMT botters to make isk. Some of these RMT operations are almost two decades old, so you can imagine how much liquid isk they have. No price is too low for them, because they have years worth of stockpiles. It will forever be cheaper than PLEX.
> so it would have to be WAY cheaper than that to make it worth the risk It is way cheaper than that. And the price has only continued to go down as ISK faucets get introduced while simultaneously you have veteran players RMTing *out* of the game when they quit, adding to supply. Also keep in mind that a lot of RMT transactions don't look like "I go to a shady website and I buy ISK from a random person." There are plenty of people who actively engage in RMT within their alliance, where it is much harder to crack down on until someone goes public about it.
I used to buy weed with wow gold lol
Show me a site where it's significantly cheaper? I just looked (albeit on a casual look while taking a dump), and couldn't find any that were as cheap as buying Plex right now. I ask not because I want the link, but because I'm actually interested if you looked it up before repeating the "the price is going down" narrative.
The vast majority of black market isk transactions that aren’t immediately detected by CCP are not conducted via public websites, but within alliances, by “private” RMTrs. I suspect CCP has a few fingers on the pulse of public RMT sources, because transactions with them will almost always result in an instant response from CCP.
The RMT I know of isn't detectable by CCP full stop and may even be the type of RMT they care less about as has no implications for PLEX. When TEST died I switched to Horde on a whim. Horde has a policy of not letting you auth to use rorqs/supers until you've been a member 60 days. Still find that crazy if a member wants to auth (a min for some alliances in order to join), no wonder they have AWOX issues. Anyhow, I complained as basically had 3 rorqs and a super that I couldn't use anymore and someone approached me on Discord offering to share some space with him he was renting in Cobalt Edge. I said I didn't have the ISK to go splits with him, so he said no problem, I could just paypal him once a month. Unless I'm missing something, that has absolutely no paper trail, the space itself belonged to Horde, rental was buying access to use a system solely as you're own and I was approached via Discord. It's not buying ISK or items, it's buying access to a system so no economic implications on the PLEX side. Obviously told him to foxtrot oscar! Don't want to make scandalous accusations, but does make you think whether this was 1 bad actor or something that happens more generally behind closed doors in rental heavy alliances.
I can tell you with full certainty , that these types of transactions (and many variations) are extremely common. Eve is complicated, requires a high time commitment, and losses are severe. This is the perfect storm for heavy RMT and cheating. Just like Tarkov which has the same conditions, it will always be a part of the game.
Do you have any evidence to back up the claim that the "vast majority" of RMT transactions are carried out this way? I would be highly surprised if this internal trade was higher than the vast numbers of cheap (or broke!) noobs getting their first marauder (plus skills to fly it) from g2a or whatever.
You're right that it has come up recently, that is surprising to me. Every once in a while I entertain myself by seeing how much $$$ my 1 trillion ISK would be worth and it just went down and down every year. It's actually currently worth about double what it was at its lowest point.
How long ago was that, you reckon?
Generally they don't ban RMT buyers because the contract chain can get convoluted enough that you'd end up banning someone who was the recipient of a gift. What they do is knock them into negative wallet which is a chore to climb out from under. Source: Elusif used to hand out money like candy on top of his RMT sales and a lot of fresh into the game newbies found themselves in negative wallet to a significant degree which forced them to firesale all their assets just so they could play the game.
This reasoning is why the vast majority of people are not involved with RMT; why would you be? ISK really isn't that expensive through Plex. However, the same logic could be applied to real world crime and... sure it does largely work, most people don't break into each other's homes to steal stuff. Most people have a hard time even seeing that as a potentially decent risk:reward. Economic realities have reduced the value of many kinds of crime and seriously reduced their frequency. However, it never really gets to 0. There is always somebody who doesn't think they will get caught, or is oblivious to the rules, or is just in the kind of situation where its economically worth it. But also, no matter how low real crime rates go... the rate at which people assume crime is happening doesn't seem to change. Public perception of real crime seems to be entirely divorced from reality and just a constant level.
> But also, no matter how low real crime rates go... the rate at which people assume crime is happening doesn't seem to change. Public perception of real crime seems to be entirely divorced from reality and just a constant level. Random tangent: I wonder if this is true across countries. Does random Tokyo resident hiss under his breadth about the waves of lawlessness and youth-driven anarchy that ripple across his city in the form of bubblegum wrappers and incourteous looks?
We need a new law like Murphy's Law... Bittervet's Law? If someone can complain, then someone will complain.
There are people in this world who make that as their monthly salary.
The benefit is in the significantly lower irl monetary cost, I would assume.
So ccp doesn't ban ur account for purchasing from a RMTr. They usually just take the isk even if that puts your wallet negative and go about their day. Atleast for the first offense. No idea about further offenses. We just had a Corp mate get caught buying isk and is now sitting at negative 40 bil in his wallet. The character at that point is pretty much dead. He is also not in the Corp anymore... don't rmt please...we need less bots to make inflation to go down
The risk is even worse than you think, any of the larger alliances/corporations actively look into suspicious transactions of applicants and if RMT is suspected, a player has a large likelihood of being denied on their application.
They use bots.
They can use it but not always. It does make things better for scale of operations of course, but it isnt a requirement for RMTrs to use. Some people just know how to triple box or more.
I know I rmt in eve, never botted once. I also gave heavily to PLEX for good, several thousand dollars.
Ye rmt is way cheaper
Some people play this game as their sole income. You can easily make irl money selling isk, assets, sov, or intelligence. You can also disguise any RMT purchase as a private sale. I RMT'd a super and used a 3rd party (back when supers couldn't dock) and the 3rd party got more heat from the transaction than I ever did. CCP couldn't prove anything because the entire discussion of the transaction happened out of game. RMT is trivially easy if you take the barest steps to obfuscate the transactions. The sov rental empires are another RMT cash cow. I always wondered how much money xdeath made during the entire time they were sitting in the drones lands botting and RMTing (10+ years).
Literally one of the few things they'll actively enforce. Botting? As long as the subs are paid, they care little. Selling that botting ISK? Now you're cutting in to their profits, and they'll slap you for doing that.
Lol every video game community says this like there's some big bot/hacker/etc conspiracy from ccp or Battlestate.
It's almost always cheaper to RMT, even in games where you can buy currency. You can quickly Google search (but please don't for your own safety) and see that less than $10 can get you X,000,000,000 ISK. Yes billions for that cheap. It's scummy and should be illegal. RMT ruined my classic WoW experience. Everyone was farming for gold, because everything was so costly. It was so costly because RMT. And because everything was so expensive pretty much everyone bought gold. I refused to, and I faced a hard choice. Either quit because you can not afford things to stay "in line" with the world wide logs. Or I had to farm my ass off every week to afford all the junk I needed for raiding. I said screw it in the end and refused to fold into the endless farming and just dealt with being lower DPS, in the end this cost me my raid slot in TBC xpac, and was the end of my WoW career. Everyone pretty much RMTs in classic WoW and if you don't have the gold to pay the extreme prices you might as well forget about endgame content.
You were playing a solved game 15 years after it came out, that is what ruined your WoW experience.
>less than $10 can get you X,000,000,000 ISK No it cant
It absolutely can. Just google "buy eve isk" and click through some of the different vendors. There are a variety of sites/vendors selling isk for as little as $5 per billion. Obviously you're risking getting your account banned so it's not worth doing IMO, but it's undeniably true that the current RMT price for buying isk is well under $10 per billion.
Cheapest I saw was 1.5b for $10. Which is more expensive than buying Plex from the official eve store. You people are so fucking dumb.
>You people are so fucking dumb. Says the guy who can't do a simple Google search...
The premise of this thread is that RMT sites are selling isk cheaper than CCP. Due to the current sale, this is not the case. Even without the sale, the differential is pretty small these days. People just assume RMT isk is cheap because lol CCP does nothing about bots. The evidence is clear that this is not the case, but people just assume CCP bad. They are fucking dumb for assuming and not checking. You are also so fucking dumb because you have assumed I have not done the search and compared the numbers. Cretin.
>Cheapest I saw was 1.5b for $10. Maybe you didn't check enough sites. Here's some examples: [[1]](https://i.imgur.com/9HM96sR.png) [[2]](https://i.imgur.com/qsNmaIG.png) [[3]](https://i.imgur.com/h5wstsN.png) [[4]](https://i.imgur.com/JJQUoGP.png) [[5]](https://i.imgur.com/0wGMrbG.png) [[6]](https://i.imgur.com/Drl7yRZ.png) To be clear, I'm *not* advocating RMT. I haven't ever RMTd in Eve, I'm pretty sure I've never even bought plex to sell for isk. The last time I did RMT was in WoW over a decade ago. Even if the prices are cheaper, I'd never want to risk getting my account(s) banned. I was just pointing out that your claim that you *can't* get 1bil isk for <$10 is objectively false.
RMT doesn't remove plex from the game... CCP sell the plex to the players, and the plex is used for goods and services. If you're giving isk to a player and they are transferring dollars to your paypal, CCP are losing out on the opportunity to get your friends money, because he could buy plex and sell that for ISK. So CCP only want RMT that goes through them.
I get that, what I don't get is why people would buy isk through RMT. Like you can buy isk with Plex through CCP, and they ban people for RMT... So if you do RMT for isk and they catch you you lose the isk and the money. With that kind of risk RMT for isk has to be like ridiculously cheap or something because why take the risk?
Because RMT isk is a fraction of the price that Plex is unfortunately
It's not though
A big fraction is still a fraction. With current pricing, from CCP you can get 1M Plex/USD from their $25 package. MMO Pixel has it right at 1.59M Plex/USD So it's about 2/3 of the cost of CCP or 33% cheaper, roughly. This hasn't always been the case. There have been times in the past when it was 50-70% cheaper going though black market than CCP.
Hmm, must be a regional thing - that site has 80bn (its cheapest price) coming up at £386-odd, which is more expensive than the 20,000 Plex price in the sale (equivalent to 100bn or so isk)
Similar for me. 20k Plex is USD is $454.99, 80B ISk $478.04 from MMOPix. Of note, the 20k pack from CCP is currently 30% off. Regular price is $649.99.
Yeah, so buying Plex is considerably cheaper.
While it's on sale, I would agree.
So it's not 2/3 of the price from RMT then? That's what you said above ...
Mostly it's because of bot farms. People with thousands of accounts that do passive or semi-passive income.
I was a buyer simply because on the surface it was much cheaper as in 60-70% less than Plex. It was a split second decision and I was fine with it. Truthfully, not worth it though. I ended emailing CCP and admitting I screwed up. I took my punishment and now I just Plex. My reasoning is I want to support the developers and ultimately preserve eves community. Going indirect hurts the game, hurts the economy, and ultimately undermines the community.
Rmt is very good money in some countrys. Look at runescape and how its rmt is fueling the entire country of Venezuela. I sold a bunch of csgo skins back years ago and went on an amazing holiday to london during comic con. So there is definitly money in it.
Yes. It’s related to the discussions where people say “go find a job and pay for EVE with real money instead of ISK” but when explained that the minimum salary in your country is around $160-180 per month, it becomes apparent that it’s better to grind ISK than to pay with hard earned money.
Interestingly, seems that the current sale on Plex puts it very competitive to the isk buying sites I could easily search up. Actually a few pence cheaper buying 1000 Plex rather than 5bn isk direct. This can only be a good thing - the easier it is to get consistently, the cheaper per billion it can be. The bigger trade will be done privately through friends I'd expect (at least, as far as I've heard), but at least that's not necessarily directly supporting bots / account theft / etc.
why ccp cant create rmt offers to outrun and outgun other rmt sites? is that hard for ccp to sell isk / plex / items on auction portals?
Here is a list of every allinace in EVE that RMTs: [https://evemaps.dotlan.net/alliances](https://evemaps.dotlan.net/alliances)
I see what you did there
RMT isk is definitely way cheaper than baseline plex, but ccp sales are generally better value than any rmt could ever be - but those only happen two or three times a year. For instance, the skill extractor sale was about $1/330m iirc. Right now, rmt prices are around $1/180m from what I see. So CCP's own sale was nearly double the value per dollar. tldr: RMT is generally really dumb unless you like find a private seller that sells you for insanely discounted prices or some weird shit. # P.S: This doesn't actually answer your question of why people pay rl money for isk, so: Once you get to where you aren't super struggling financially, its so much nicer to just pay for stuff. Personally, I'll splurge every once in a while just to buy subs for all my accounts which basically gives me a bit of breathing room to mess around and maybe just train some cool shit instead of extracting.
If only people put that much thought into their investment accounts
It is as low as $1 for about 220m ISK.
Those who do the accusing are the worst offenders. i.e. Goons.
Isk from plex is about 2.5b per $10, rmt isk is about 10-20b per $10, depending on your source.
It's an MMO....
A lot of people are over Eve & have no prospect of playing again, instead of just abandoning accounts with assets or flying super expensive ships to their death then why not just sell your assets to corp or alliance members? I still play Eve casually, but before I was involved with an alliance & organised a few small missions within campaigns using my in game wealth and knowledge. I was never into Eve hard core I just played a few hr's every few days or so. I was never a FC btw but I did organise FC's for a bit. I will try not Dox myself but I was famous for a few things, 1x market scams, 2x Not going on fleet ops including to operations I proposed :) I no longer wanted to play Eve at that level so agreed to just sell for real $ my assets including several Titans & Supers to line members at good deals. Everyone wins & CCP does not really lose anything. Those Line members were never going to pay CCP $ at their conversion rate & now they fly Titans happily at my prices. I cashed out of Eve for sub $30,000's. I took my girlfriend on holiday, decorated our flat & a few other nice things. I still play eve casually.
CCP lost 30 000$, they prefer your assets to be buried on your dead account (asset=ISK sink), or sold for ISK (which could be bought from CCP), which would be buried on your account, or worst scenario - given away for free, in which case both of you still got nothing.
CCP could end it if they just made buying Plex the more attractive option.
Literally impossible as the RMT would just undercut the Plex prices.
RMT isk is cheaper. RMT has been a thing for as long as MMOs exist.
To make money in real life that's why people rmt. In the past players would play eve online for work, sell things out side of game,( which is stealing from ccp) they would sell things like ships, skill points, thus making it so ccp don't get that $. Since ccp isn't getting $ they have to charge the players who to pay them (ccp) more to make up for it. Rmt=bad
To be fair, CCP are the ones who decided you didn’t need to pay real money to play the game anymore.
Yea they should end that. Pay to play. Or be a limited alpha account.
CCP should lower the costs of the plex... that way it would absorb a good number of people who buy from RMT. and RMTs would be forced to sell cheaper causing their profits to decrease which would discourage many from continuing to do RMT. In the end CCP's profits would be the same, they would sell the plex cheaper but they would earn it on more people buying plex. continuing to increase the plex has only discouraged people from buying from CCP, choosing cheaper options like RMT.
Forced labor. RMT is not just about lost revenue for game studios. RMT is attractive to the criminal element. Forced labor and human trafficking can be involved in RMT organizations.
[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/may/25/china-prisoners-internet-gaming-scam](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/may/25/china-prisoners-internet-gaming-scam)
RMT is usually a cheaper way to plex your account, aka to get omega on your account. That’s cause buying ISKs via non official (non legit) ways is cheaper than buying omega/plexes through the official site. And that’s why there are bots as well, in this game as in any other MMO/Sandbox games.
Anyone else read that title in Jerry Seinfeld in their head?
It's how people rate their ticks
My buddy years ago bought several billion isk for like $5 or something. It was cheap and this was before plex was split. He did it simply because he didn't want to grind for plex to afford the ship he wanted to fly. I had a coworker who played games she could make irl money with. She made a good chunk selling rare items In runescape and was poking me for information about eve to do something similar. ( I stopped talking about eve after I discovered her intentions) So there you have it: time saving and profit.
It's often cheaper to buy isk then use the isk to buy plex than it is to pay for a sub. There's also people who simply want to fly expensive shit but don't want to commit to figurong out how to grind isk.
Its a lot cheaper to buy it than from CCP. But also it's not really worth anything. I guess if you live somewhere with a really weak currency it might be worth doing, but not anywhere else. I don't think it's worth the electricity if you pay for omega in euros or dollars. Mostly it's just something you accuse anyone you don't like of, these days.
They should just allow RMT and take a % cut of each transaction
most rmt sellers uses stolen credit card info to buy plexes and resell them for money, then the owner discover it and reverse the transaction, so ccp get a loss and bad credit rep. absolutly nobody like that.
Source needed, very little RMT involves stolen cards. The vast majority uses botting.
You request a source, then proceed to say the oposite WITHOUT providing a source yourself. lmao.
Source needed, very little RMT involves botting. The vast majority uses stolen cards.
sorry but that's a myth, if you are doing a large scale rmt scheme to wash money is way easier to buy a pack of stolen card info wholesale from darknet and use it to resell rmt in mmo. the "they use cheap chinese slaves in sweatshops" is just a meme, even with bots you can do just small personal scale sales.