I haven’t played EVE Online for awhile, so this is news to me and certainly an intriguing concept. Massively is covering it, but you can also read about it on the EVE dev blog.

Basically, they’re letting players sell gold (ISK for EVE), but not for real money, for game time instead.

It’s a compromise for sure. If you disagree with RMT on the basis that it lets players leapfrog the grind (at least the gold part of it) then this could rub you the wrong way too.

I’m a pragmatist. I don’t like RMT, but it isn’t going away anytime soon. This is one of the least evil approaches to acceptance that we’ve seen yet. CCP started up the program months back but it’s settling into the news again since they’ve presented some of the data in convenient graphs and whatnot.

The big upsides: Less gold spammers and less hijacking of accounts. One downside is they’ve basically got two currencies in the game now: the original ISK and the new PLEX (30 day Pilot License EXtension). Sooner or later one will devalue the other, at which point CCP may have to step in and adjust currencies.

The other upside, or downside depending on how you see it: The system acts like a one-way gate. Real money gets put in via CCP’s website and comes out to players to purchase ISK from other players who can cash in the PLEX for time on their accounts. So is this just an elaborate way for CCP to double-dip? A bit, yeah, but the overall result for the players is probably positive. And of course I’m sure the folks at CCP would argue that their financial health helps the game.

I’m trying to imagine a system like this dropped into other MMOs and honestly, it sounds better than a lot of the alternatives.