It transcends Eve Makkal. It has nothing to do with the game and more to do with what online gaming is. It doesn't matter if you're a billionaire in the real world or a burger flipper. The game equalizes all and only your skill puts you on top. Any game that allows you to buy your way to the top or buy your uniqueness is just blah. Eve is cutthroat because of the players and their abilities, not because they have a spare few thousand to spend to buy a golden bullet.
Okay... so? I don't see any golden bullets here.
It's a cosmetic item. It has no effect on gameplay. So are the clothing items that come with the box. The handful of items that come that do have gameplay effects (and they are, literally, a pair of implants, a frigate, and a 5-run Gnosis blueprint if you're an EVE player; DUSTies get some dropsuits and guns) can all be sold on the market for ISK.
What your money is really paying for with the purchase of that box, are the EVE Source book, the Rifter USB hub, and the English version of Hættuspil. All of them physical, real-world items that provide no benefit to gameplay, and each individual one costs money to create. Sure, you can claim you are technically paying for the ingame items too, but remember: the costs for adding digital content to the box are near-zero for CCP on a per-box basis - they incur the cost of the work of creating the item once, after which it is just 1s and 0s in the game client, copied over and over and over.
None of this changes anything at all for game balance. The DUST items are, as I recall, limited-use and the player only gets 50 of each. The Tash-Murkon Magnate is just a reskinned T1 Magnate. It's a paint job just like the Sarum one. And the Gnosis you'll get out of the BPC are identical to the ones we were ALL given for the 10th anniversary.
These all have ingame values in ISK, sure, but only because people put those values on them. The T-M Magnate is really worth no more than a vanilla one you can get off the market in terms of gameplay mechanics. The only reasons it will cost more are because it has a different paintjob (people
will pay to look different), and because it'll be, in theory, a limited-issue item.
OK no I get that. As I said before, I get that. I know it's only a vanity item which is why I'm not really that annoyed. But like Silas, ANYTHING that you can get with real money and not in game money is kind of a bleh to me.
Okay, except there isn't a single case in EVE where there is an item you can ONLY purchase through real-world currency. There are three things in EVE you can directly purchase with real money:
- PLEX
- Aurum (either directly or through PLEX)
- Your subscription itself
Each of these can be purchased ingame, using ISK. Want a PLEX? Buy it off the market for ISK. Want Aurum? Buy a PLEX with ISK and convert it to Aurum, or buy one of the Aurum tokens that are floating about from a year or two ago. Want a subscription? Buy a PLEX with ISK and convert it to game time. (Want ISK? Buy a PLEX with ISK and resell it for more ISK.)
There is not a single item in this game that can only be purchased through the use of real-world money. Everything that can be purchased with real money, directly or indirectly, is available to you ingame through the use of ISK.
You are getting
way too worked up over what is presently a non-issue, and likely to remain one.
