Very interesting Buddy Program Change

[RobinGBrown]

http://www.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=907

Basically CCP are going to offer a choice of 30 days gametime or a PLEX when inviting a player via the buddy program - they're also increasing the invite limit to ten per month

Lastly according to the article a quarter of all new players come in via the buddy program - thats a lot of alts by my estimation!

[Grondir]

It's a hell of a lot of alts......

And I think most of them are mine :)

Could be an interesting change as long as they don't limit the number of accounts an individual email address can have

[RobinGBrown]

Whats interesting to me is that you cna start an alt, give them a PLEX to pay for their first months gametime, and then you can get that PLEX back.

So it ups the 'free trial' time for an alt to 51 days - there must be some use for those short term pilots to multiboxers

[Grondir]

That's how I train my alts up on seperate accounts. Refer them then use the 51days from account activation to train and then transfer. Means I get alts that are semi-useful with basic skills I design them for, without having to pause training on my mains

[TheHatedOne]

Nice. I only need 6 accounts for my alts so it will defnetly be something I look into

[RobinGBrown]

That's how I train my alts up on seperate accounts. Refer them then use the 51days from account activation to train and then transfer. Means I get alts that are semi-useful with basic skills I design them for, without having to pause training on my mains

Yeah I've been doing the same, kind of as I've trained up some characters for another six months afterwards as well before transferring.

What I was thinking about was that 51 days gives you a useful combat pilot who can then be disposed of humanely. It's what to do with a small gang of low SP pilots that needs some thought.

[Gurblash]

If they are going to infuse PLEX into the market this way, I'd expect to see some price drops across the market, on well... just about everything. PLEX is the standard currency, not ISK lol.

[RobinGBrown]

Hmmm, good point, this will create more PLEX, in particular it will create more PLEX that are likely to be used for buying ISK rather than gametime.

Interesting that they would choose to do this. I wonder if they've got a new/increased ISK sink somewhere else to compensate?

It's funny but the one thing that would seem, to me, to increase PVP and provide an ISK sink would be to expand the actrivities on which corporate tax is paid. If miners in NPC corps had to pay tax on mining profits then they'd switch to PC corps and provide more targets for wardecs.

[Ughmahedhurtz]

I can't envision this making all that much difference. Are people really that hyped to create bunches of new accounts?

[Grondir]

That depends, it's cheaper for me to buy a new game at £9 than pay a monthly subscription of £13 but I'd be using them for game time anyway.

Also it costs around £35 to buy 2 PLEX but I could buy 4 games at £9 and get 4 PLEX for a similar price....

[RobinGBrown]

Where do you get it for £9?

[Grondir]

amazon :)

[Gurblash]

Give it time, but yea I'd expect to see a noticeable decrease in the value of pretty much everything. Last I played a PLEX would run 350m+/-. Once this goes full cycle I'd expect to see **shakes magic 8 ball** PLEX to be a good 50-100m cheaper.

Especially if you can get almost twice as many PLEXs as Grondir is stating from cheap account codes.

[RobinGBrown]

Odd, I was thinking about this in relation to inflation. When I started with EVE in 2008 a 30 day game time code was worth 200 mill (IIRC that is) and now 30 days of game time is worth 350 mill.

Seems like inflation is pretty bad in EVE?

[theios]

Having just started, I am unable to say for sure. But the discussions on the Eve MD forums seem to be saying that prices are starting to drop. Could be just cyclical fluctuations, over production of base materials, or could be because of recent changes by CCP to tinker with the ISK flow. They don't agree on why yet.

From looking at the market charts, it looks to be like there was a longish run up in prices over this past year, and now things are stating to cool off.

[Kromtor]

going from 14 to 18 accounts cause of this.. not sure if that's a good thing