
The proposed changes are intended to simplify EVE‘s business model by merging PLEX with the microtransaction currency Aurum. Players will also be able to put their PLEX into invulnerable account-wide PLEX Vaults that are accessible at all times rather than having to move the valuable items manually by ship. There’s been significant backlash from the EVE community over the newfound invulnerability of PLEX, plans to delete some microtransaction currency from the game without compensation, and the possibility that someone leaked the announcement to friends early in order to make a profit. So what’s the deal with these PLEX changes, and why are some EVE players going nuts over them?
In this edition of EVE Evolved, I look at the upcoming changes to the safety of PLEX, the opportunities that more granular PLEX could have for EVE, and why players are up in arms over plans to delete Aurum from thousands of accounts.
PLEX ganks in the media
One of the unexpected effects of PLEX being introduced to EVE was that it gave us a rough way to calculate how much real-world money stuff in the EVE universe would cost to buy, establishing a kind of virtual exchange rate. Ever since an EVE player created a chart of the dollar values of ships in February 2010, we’ve been using PLEX conversion to roll out big dollar figures in headlines next to impressive events in EVE so that the average non-player gets a sense of the scale of the event.
CCP removed all restrictions on transporting PLEX in a ship’s cargo in July 2010, and it was just one month before the tale of one player losing over $1,000 worth of PLEX in a suicide gank made headlines across the world. That story was one of the highest traffic posts of all time on Massively-of-old, and since then a wide range of news outlets have been covering EVE stories using real-world valuations for context. PLEX conversions won’t go away with the introduction of a safe PLEX vault, but it’s still kind of sad to think that ganks like that one will probably be a thing of the past when these changes go through.
Are PLEX ganks mostly money laundering?
The changes as proposed will allow you to transport PLEX in complete safety by simply placing them into your secure PLEX vault and taking them back out once you reach the location you want to sell them at. While it’s still technically possible to put PLEX in your cargo and undock, there is now no need to do it at all for any reason. Part of the reason is that PLEX currently belong to a specific character and location while the Aurum they’re replacing is an account-wide currency.
Another sticking point is that dozens of ships per month are now ganked with PLEX in their cargo holds and some of it looks suspiciously like deliberate money-laundering. It’s tough to prove that the player who keeps losing cargo holds full of PLEX to suicide attacks is legitimately transporting them somewhere for trade rather than losing them as part of a real money trading scheme, but this change makes that easier to determine by removing all of the legitimate reasons to transport PLEX. If there is RMT money laundering going on, however, they can still use other high-value items such as skill injectors.
The granularity of PLEX
The obvious reason CCP is changing PLEX is just to simplify EVE‘s business model and make it easier to understand. PLEX used to be a single-purpose item that just granted 30 days of subscription time, but now it can activate other services such as multiple character training and character transfers between accounts. You can also convert one PLEX into 3,500 Aurum, the virtual currency used to buy things like cosmetic items and skill injectors in EVE‘s microtransaction store.
CCP wants to simplify this into one currency, turning each PLEX item into 500 new PLEX and converting Aurum on people’s accounts into new PLEX at a rate of 1 PLEX per 7 Aurum (or 500 PLEX for 3,500). There have been a number of comments on articles about the PLEX change praising CCP for increasing the granularity of PLEX and subscriptions, but you’ll actually still only be able to buy subscription time in one-month increments for 500 PLEX at a time so nothing’s changing there yet.
This does bode well for the future, however, as the system will at least be capable of more granularity. Some players have expressed an interest in shorter 7-day Omega subscription intervals, though CCP has said that there are no plans to do this at the moment. I’d personally love to see some entire new additions to the clone state system, not in the form of heavily tiered subscriptions but perhaps a one-off fee to upgrade your free Alpha clone to a Beta clone state with access to some additional skills.
Community backlash and corruption
The player response to the proposed PLEX changes has been pretty negative so far. People are understandably unhappy with the idea of an invulnerable PLEX vault that allows the items to be transported around the game risk-free as it goes against one of the core principles on which EVE was built. We’ll also have fewer funny incidents in which someone in a newbie frigate gets blown up with a cargo hold full of PLEX, though I still suspect that much of this is just money laundering anyway.
A lot of the backlash hits back at CCP’s plan to convert all Aurum on players accounts into PLEX, specifically because they’ll be ignoring all accounts with less than 1,000 Aurum. This cut-off point is there because CCP recently gave 300 free Aurum as a gift to all accounts logged in over Christmas, and converting all of that into PLEX would flood the market. To complicate matters, Aurum as a virtual currency may be considered to have no real world value after purchase but CCP counts unredeemed PLEX as deferred income against the company in its accounts. The 1000 Aurum limit was likely decided to limit the scale of increasing liability against the company when Aurum is turned back into deferred income. It’s unlikely that this part of the plan will be scrapped, but I suspect some form of compensation will be offered.
The announcement has caused uncertainty and volatility in the PLEX market as some traders pull their stocks from sale, and this has led to another pretty serious complaint from players. It seems that some market speculators acted on the announcement several days before it was actually published. Either someone has managed to invent a time machine and is using it for the incredibly limited opportunity of manipulating a virtual game market, or this information was leaked by a member of the Council of Stellar Management who signed a non-disclosure agreement. This potential corruption comes at a bad time for the CSM as voting is currently open for the next year of representatives.

None of the parts I wanted to follow up on had source links. How does the suicide ganking RMT work? Who got tipped off with insider info? :(
Nobody actually knows who got tipped off with insider info, all we know is that the PLEX market was totally stable and saw an unexpected price increase (which looks like a drop of supply to the market) a few days before the announcement. Any announcement of PLEX changes would cause market volatility, so if you got inside info then you’d probably stop trading in PLEX temporarily. As the info was known to the CSM before publication, the possibility exists that one of them leaked it — It wouldn’t be the first time this happened.
The RMT ganking isn’t a single incident but something the community discusses any time someone loses a newbie ship filled with PLEX or skill injectors. The kills are public knowledge because there are player-run killboards linked to the EVE API that show all kills in the game, and they happen with alarming frequency. The assumption among players is that it’s an attempt to launder ill-gotten ISK or cash through what appears to be normal EVE gameplay in order to prevent CCP from tracking an RMT trade, the same way money laundering works in real life.
For example, say someone uses a stolen credit card to buy PLEX on a throwaway account and then “gets ganked” and drops them as loot, and the ganker or a third party then loots and sells them and spends the ISK. The illegal PLEX are now in the hands of a legitimate player who did nothing wrong and was just buying them on the market, and how do you track where the ISK went? It’s scattered all over the economy by this point, and CCP won’t want to punish dozens of innocent players for doing nothing wrong. Nobody knows if this is legitimately going on or if we’re all just paranoid about it, but there’s a new gank like this every month and they’re highly suspicious.
Ignoring accounts with 1000 aurum or less is shady as hell.
If you try to cash in aurum into items, the market for those cheap items will crash making your investment lose serious value. What they want to push is people buying a PLEX now and cashing it in to avoid losing the ‘gift’ Aurum (or their 900-ish balance). Basically the good old fashioned ‘spend more or walk out losing everything’ gambling mind games.
I guess it’s all about those $$$.
Or it’s actually about the massive liability they’d be hitting themselves with, and they’ll find an alternate form of compensation.
Their current idea is to run sales on the Aurum store to let people use up their remaining Aurum buying cosmetics, but I really think they need to find an alternate form of compensation as people may miss that if they aren’t playing currently. They could replace every 100 Aur with a lucky bag item that gives a random skin worth at least 100 Aur, for example, or create a new discount coupon system for the store and give that value in coupons.
EDIT: Interestingly, they changed their minds and be converting sub-1000 aur balances 3 months later. Seems they actually aren’t concerned about the liability created within the accounts.
I doubt this decision was designed to push people into buying a PLEX now to hit the threshold and avoid losing their 300 gift Aurum, that seems very contrived and ineffective. It’s obvious that CCP wants to prevent the truckload of free Aurum they gave out from being used to buy game time after the change, because that would make a sizeable liability appear in the company’s financial accounts overnight.
They do need to give some proper compensation to those who lose their Aurum in this change, though.
EDIT: Looks like I was wrong, the new plan is to convert all the Aurum below 1000 3 months later to prevent the market flooding.
Oh wow, the lockbox part of the initial announcement totally slipped by me.
As an outside observer (because I keep procrastinating on booting it up -_-), that gets rid of a source of some of the fantastic stories that I get to read about involving major heists/PLEX destruction. Not surprised it’s pretty unpopular with folks playing the game, either.
Oh well, hopefully it turns out better than the immediate reaction indicates.
The sub-1,000 aurum deletion may actually be illegal, so they are likely setting themselves up for a class-action lawsuit. Other than that, the changes sound promising, though I wager it will all be done to secretly increase the prices of things, given how CCP’s motto is “greed is good”.
I’m pretty certain the TOS players agree to when starting the game state CCP has the right to change the game play and game play mechanics as they see fit. EVE IS a game, not a required service – so if you don’t like a change you have the option to quit and stop paying/playing.
This is 100% what I’ve been waiting for. As an Industrial based character, EVE’s Alpha Clones are basically a useless, endless trial. My ideal solution is the number of skills that lead up to the Tech 1 variants of most game features be made available for individual purchase. So this means I could get Mining Barges, but not Exhumers. Battleships but not Marauders. Etc.
#1 reason I stopped playing last time was I got tired of the monthly pressure to produce enough money for a PLEX. Letting me play my way while without having that looming over my head would be a no brainer.
TY for the article. This covered most of my initial reactions:
going from two currencies to one seems like a welcome simplification.
The < 1000 issue is annoying; in general, IMO, just deleting something paid for with RL$ and making it go away is quite sleazy for a developer.