this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2025
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I hope it doesn't affect EVE Online. As I remember it their system didn't involve any deception or confusion, even though there was in-game currency you could spend € on if you wanted to.
Well I mean there was plenty of deception and confusion among and between the players, but none from the game itself.
If the conversion rate isnt 1:1 or its not directly using € in the game then i would call that confusing or deceptive.
The interesting thing about EVE is that the economy is completely player driven. That means you can even sell PLEX (Im pretty sure I got my name before eve named their money that, and I definitely didn't know EVE back then!) and therefore even buy PLEX with in-game resources you 'worked' for.
Because of that, I agree that EVE is a special case. If that PLEX currency did not exist to be bought with real money, that means that the in-game items are no longer able to be traded for essentially real money. Though perhaps there is some smart way to do it better and with less real world capitalism
For real. We need to get rid of games where 10 Red coins = 2.2 mystic gems = 1256 diamonds = 1.56 flowers and you can only buy red coin and only spend flowers and each conversion has a 1 green coin processing fee and you have to convert in that order. It's predatory and so sad that people get duped by it.
As I remember it: It's an online game, so you need a monthly subscription to play. That is a set price in whatever real-world currency as normal. But you can buy as many months as you like in advance; and if you buy more than you need you can sell them in-game for whatever you can get on the open market which is controlled by players.
It was a long time ago, no idea if it still works that way. But it seemed to me like a good system, for a game in which in-game market trading between players is a big part of it.
P.S. Actually come to think of it I think they went free-to-play at some point. I wonder if my account still exists.
When I played, 1 plex = 1 month but they eventually converted it to 1000 plex = 1 month or something?
You can use ISK (in game currency) to buy plex and sell plex for ISK. The exchange rate of plex to ISK fluctuates depending on market demand so putting a hard real world currency equivalent value would be tough.
Just putting a reasonably-up-to-date real-world value estimate next to any price in parentheses would be a big step forward though.
Most people earn their currency in-game, which would make it awkward to have a real-world conversion attached to everything—especially when there's no way to pull it out so it's not really meaningful.
It's already hard enough getting people to undock and risk their internet spaceships, it'd be even harder if there were little real-world price estimates attached to everything.
A better solution would be to attach the prices only to PLEX (the premium currency), since that's what maps directly to real-world money and would be what you're spending your money on. They could also post the going exchange rate for euro to isk on the market itself without having to attach price tags to every individual item.
The first two principles for virtual currencies that they have listed are "Price indication should be clear and transparent" and "Practices obscuring the cost of in-game digital content and services should be avoided", so if EVE is honest and up front about it then it should be fine