Yesterday CCP made public their intention to change PLEX, the in-game item that can be bought, sold, moved, blown up, redeemed for 30 days of Omega game time, and occasionally redeemed for Aurum or multiple character training.
This old screen shot may make PLEX look more expensive than reality soon
CCP wants to make PLEX the universal secondary currency so that you will only have ISK and PLEX… and LP if you’re into that, but that is a whole different thing. To do this CCP wants to break a single PLEX into 500 units of PLEX, in which capacity it will replace Aurum, the unloved New Eden Store currency.
CCP also plans to introduce the PLEX Vault, wherein you will deposit your PLEX to be used and where your PLEX will be accessible to any character on your account from any station or citadel location you can use in New Eden.
The Proposed PLEX Vault
Anybody who has a PLEX right now will end up with 500 PLEX when this change goes into effect, while anybody who has 1,000 Aurum or more will receive 1 PLEX for every 7 Aurum they hold.
The logic behind the 1,000 Aurum cut-off is in the questions at the end of their post:
Q: Why are you only converting Aurum balances above 1000?
A: A large portion of the total Aurum stockpile is in small balances left over from past giveaways and by not converting those small balances we mitigate risk of oversupply in the PLEX market
Basically, if you have less than 1,000 Aurum you probably got it from us for free, so screw you we’re taking it back now that it might have actual in-game ISK value. I will be interested to see if there is enough hew and cry about this to get CCP to relent on this front.
And, of course, the other big change here is that PLEX becomes a digital currency more akin to ISK, something that is in a wallet you can access where ever you go. I suppose that makes a bit of logical sense, as opposed to PLEX being a physical object in your inventory.
This potentially means no more PLEX-tanked frigates worth billions of ISK being blown up… remember the first big loss, involving a pilot who could have kept his account going for over six years if he hadn’t stuff 74 PLEX into an unfit Kestrel and undocked… if people are smart.
The thing is, people are not smart. That people, to this day, still move PLEX in rookie corvettes is proof of that. There is almost no need to do this, as you can activate PLEX remotely and buy it via contract from anywhere in New Eden. So I live in hope that stupid will out and that we will still see the occasional PLEX kill mail since CCP plans to leave in the physical aspect of PLEX if you want to take it out of the PLEX Vault.
And, if everybody does suddenly get smart, we still have skill injector losses.
So that is the plan. There is even a video with CCP Seagull explaining the plan.
There is no announced date for this change yet, and even the UI proposal is tagged as a work in progress, so there is still time to head to the forums and howl over any aspect of this you do not like. I fully expect CCP to relent on the 1,000 Aurum limit for conversion to the new PLEX, if only because some people will have residual balances less than that which they paid for.
But at some point in the future any PLEX you have… which could be worth as much as 1.2 billion ISK each… will go away, replaced by 500 new PLEX worth as much as 2.4 million each.
As somebody who doesn’t use PLEX, the only change for me will be a lack of comedy kill mails I suppose. But as somebody who has some Aurum and buys ship SKINs now and again, this will be a bit of a boon, since it will be easy enough just to buy new PLEX with ISK in the quantity I need for a given transaction. This might make the New Eden Store more viable.
This may be the biggest change to PLEX since it was introduced over eight years ago.
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