Alice Katsuko
Terra Incognita
Intrepid Crossing
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Posted - 2011.03.01 13:30:00 -
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Edited by: Alice Katsuko on 01/03/2011 13:32:04
 Originally by: Montgomery Crabapple
I would have thought botting loses money for CCP. I'm sure someone has pointed it out in the previous 40 pages. The income can be used to but Plex... so these people are probably not paying for their game time anyway.
PLEX do not cost CCP any income. If PLEX really did allow players to play for 'free' in the grand scheme of things, CCP would not have implemented them.
To create a PLEX, a player first has to buy a game time code either from CCP or from a retailer. The player converts that game time code into into a PLEX in-game, and either stores it, sells it to another for ISK, or blows it up. If the player uses the PLEX he created, he effectively paid for his game time as though he had bought a 30-day subscription, and CCP loses nothing. If the player sells the PLEX for ISK, he just paid for the game time of the buyer [and got ISK in return for his real-world money], but now has to buy game time for his own account. If the player gets the PLEX blown up, he has thrown away the price of a 30-day subscription, basically giving CCP the price of a PLEX for free.
Either way, CCP has made at least the same amount it would have had it sold the game time code directly to the PLEX buyer. In fact, CCP makes more if players destroy PLEX, since a destroyed PLEX represents destroyed game time. PLEX also increases its income by allowing those who would not otherwise be able to afford multiple accounts, purchase GTC through proxies [aka anyone who sells PLEX in the game]. So arguably, botters actually increase revenue for CCP by increasing the demand for PLEX and thus for game time codes. It is a question of volume, not of price; CCPs profits are tied to volume of PLEX sold [and thus GTC converted], not to how much ISK a PLEX costs. This is why I posted elsewhere that CCP has zero financial incentive to deal with botters and macroers unless their users engage in RMT transactions.
One can of course argue that CCP has some sort of moral obligation to pursue those who violate the EULA or who simply 'cheat.' But even if the developers would like to eliminate botters and macroers from their game, CCP has limited resources to any single task. The amount of resources dedicated to something that might actually reduce CCP's income would understandably be small.
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