EVE Online creates exotic financial instrument to combat gold-farming

EVE Online is trying to combat gold-farming (working on repetitive in-game tasks to amass wealth and levels that can be sold to wealthy, time-poor players) by tinkering with its monetary supply, creating a special instrument call the PLEX that entitles a player to an extra 30 days' playtime.

The idea is that the cash-trading will at least take place among "real" players as opposed to those who join up merely to farm (I suspect "real" is a synonym for "rich" in this case, or at least "first world").

The other half of the CCP Games offensive against RMT is the 30 Day Pilot License Extension, typically referred to as "PLEX."

A PLEX is essentially an in-game item that represents 30 days of game time. They can be traded or given to other players, bought and resold. Once an EVE Online player has a PLEX in his or her possession, all they need to do is right click and credit those 30 days to their account.

The principle behind this is what's already been established by some of the free-to-play games on the market. Those with disposable cash in real life but who are short on time can buy game time codes and convert them into PLEX, so they have ISK to spend in-game. (One game time code = two PLEX.) When they sell PLEX on the market in EVE, that's money that players injected into the game that didn't go into the wallets of aklfjalkfjd and his merry band of ISK farmers.

Likewise, players who have more time to rack up the ISK through gameplay can buy PLEX in-game on the market, and play for another month without having to pay a subscription fee.