on PLEXes

http://www.gocomics.com/foxtrot/2006/07/13/

I really hate PLEXes.

I mean I love them.

I mean…. Well, let’s go with I hate RMTing.

No, because I’m enjoying paying with PLEXes.

OK, I hate the PEOPLE who are on the other side of all the PLEX transactions I go through each month.

Only… I don’t hate them, I just think they’re idiots to the point that…… OK, I hate them.

Let’s start over. I’m working at a seasonal job in the service industry, and between using “sir” every other sentence and constantly smiling, I pulled in about 100$ for eight hours of labor on Sunday. That’s about what, 2.5 bil in PLEXes?

I really hate that. I hate that I press buttons, over and over, to make what can readily be compared to pennies in IRL cash while I am in fact actively making money to cover both the regular subscriptions of my accounts and enough PLEXes to fund my carriers come Christmas day. I’ve got a stigma, you see.

I started out Eve, as most players did a few years ago, completely effing lost. After about three weeks of stubbornly refusing to use the tutorial out of principle I manned up, read the three paragraphs it consisted of at that time (with lots of clicking in between sentences accompanied by “ooh, I can do that?”) and started mining. In a Navitas.

I mined, for a stupidly long time, with a few lasers and a frigate’s cargohold, until I could afford an Exequeror. I mined in that until I could afford a brutix, then till I could afford a retriever, covetor, and finally a hulk. The entire time I had been staring at those damn pieces of veldspar I’d be tabbed out, reading halada’s guide to mining and drooling over the hulk’s yield/hour and all the shiny things I could do to improve it.

It’s been about two years since then. I’ve lost a heck of a lot of hulks. As well as other ships. But, in any case, I lost them and worked to get them back, blood, sweat, gore, etcetera.

Now I’m to understand that someone can throw down 70 US dollars and have a hulk and a hulk pilot instantly in the char bazaar.

Now, what I hated about WoW was that mainly, you’d spend a month or five on the dungeon of the month, running it, dying it, and getting slightly shinier gear to run slightly harder dungeons.

Then, about once every three months, blizzard would hand everyone on the server the shiniest possible gear while simultaneously unveiling the next hardest dungeon which was doable using the gear that you had either spent the last three months, five hours every night obtaining and/or picked up off the street. It’s easy to parallel this to Eve and someone dropping five thousand dollars and getting a supercarrier for their troubles. I think the main reason that I tolerate this is that the Eve person isn’t someone playing in a parallel world that I can never touch, accepting the free hand up while I pound on the glass with bloody fists.

In Eve, that person? He’s a target. He’s used his money to get a leg up, but I can reach up with a hand crafted through sleepless nights of losses and kills (mostly losses), wrap around his neck and drag him back down.

It’s a nice feeling.

So hey, keep buying those plexes. I’ll be here, slowly paying my subs with isk and gaining friends and equipment. And when you try to cyno out of my interdictor or jump a gate in your rorqual?

You won’t be going anywhere.