Latin For Gold

"Well, do you mind if I look round the car a little bit?"
Well my glove compartment is locked so is the trunk and the back
And I know my rights so you gon' need a warrant for that
"Aren't you sharp as a tack, you some type of lawyer or something'?"
"Or somebody important or somethin'?"
Jay-Z - 99 Problems

If you buy a Plex ingame, CCP doesn't make much money off you. Essentially you're paying 2.50 extra for your subscription. It's something, but nothing impressive. A while back someone told me that we should all just buy plex ingame one month to protest CCP. I had to explain to them that would actually make CCP MORE money since it costs slightly more for 30 days of plex than 30 days of subscription. Even if you're not paying CCP anything, someone is providing the Plex.

Let's take a step back a year or so. Plex used to be tied to the station it was generated in, you couldn't move it. For a long time this was the status quo, then some guy(we'll call him Jeff) came into the room while people were talking about plexes.

They talked about some random shit for a while, then Jeff asked what the obvious question: "Wait, they can't be moved? Why?"

And the apparently obvious answer was "Oh, so they can't be destroyed,"

Then Jeff crinkled his forehead and said something that made everyone else in the room feel pretty stupid, "Why not? They've already paid us for them,"

So a patch later, they were mobile. And some idiot loses thousands of dollars of them in a Kestrel. What does this have to do with today? Lets take a look at Aurum.

This is a new way to destroy plexes, and to actually get something from them. So it goes without saying that this is probably a positive for people that don't like Incarna to start with. It mean the subscription costs won't be going towards these projects. This is a way for CCP to make money to go towards Incarna related development, plain and simple.

So if it's plain and simple, why am I rambling on about it? The issue I have with this is the way they're presenting it to me. Lets just say that Jeff may've had some input on these things.

Lets take a look at this and this.

Now there is some serious nerd rage going on about the flimsy ingame reasoning. I'm not going to address that, because those people are missing the point. The reason CCP has to shoehorn in a flimsy ingame reason for it is because this will make them more money.

Aurum will be essentially plex, and it has a real money cost. If you lose it ingame, you are putting more money into CCP's pocket.

I guess I shouldn't expect CCP to admit "We're doing it because we want more money," but we all know it.