Why? Because I would be stupid not to.
One month of account time costs € 12,95 a month if I use account management to directly pay CCP for blocks of 3 months. Eight months worth of account time costs me € 103,60.
If I buy 8 months worth of account time through CCP by buying PLEX it costs me € 127,94
This morning Markee Dragon offered four 60 day GTC cards at € 102,16 total.
This evening Markee Dragon offered four 60 day GTC cards at € 103,56 total.
The dollar price did not change as far as I can see so obviously SOMER has affected international financial markets and euro-dollar exchange rate! This RMT thing must be even bigger as we imagined.
Comparison:
€ 103,60 gets you 8 months of account time directly through CCP
€ 127,94 gets you 8 PLEX that I'll value at 4,8 billion ISK on the market.
€ 103,56 gets you 8 months of account time and 5 billion in SOMER credit.
Subscription time through third party resellers, depending on exchange rates is cheaper as directly through CCP.
End of story. The rest is whining about paypal service.
I have an issue with paypal though. I transferred € 105,- to my paypal balance to pay for the GTC codes. Paypal however does not allow me to pay Markeer in euros but forces me to pay in dollars at their exchange rate. Thus forcing another paypal money transfer because at their rate of 1 euro = 1,31171 dollar I had to pay € 106,70 to paypal.
When I called Paypal about the trouble I had paying Markee through their website they were very unhelpful and simply explained that Markee forced users to have a credit card associated with their paypal accounts. This was despite the fact that the error was after leaving the Markee site when already on the paypal site trying to verify payment.
When I sent Markee an (angry) email I received a reply within 10 minutes.
In answer to my questions/accusation they stated what paypal told me is not true and that it would make no sense for them to force customers to add a credit card to their account.
Their advice was that I should cleare my cache (no effect) and otherwise contact paypal again and perhaps ask for a supervisor. (not needed but I doubt paypal could have offered any serious help in identifying the issue).
The issue was that my paypal balance did not cover the Markee fee at paypal exhange rates so I was not offered the option to pay through my paypal account, instead I was forced to add a credit card to my paypal account since there'isn't one associated with my account.
Markee answered my question quickly and they offer better dollar-euro exchange rates as paypal does.
The only benefit for CCP is perhaps that I when I have PLEX (or convert GTC) I am more tempted to use them for characters transfers, a second training queue or just for some fast isk instead of adding them to account time. 2 GTC were converted into account time extending my accounts to february on average. 4 PLEX are in my inventory and most likely to be used for giving 4 secondary characters one month of training time.
ReplyDeleteThose characters can then do basic PI and earn back that plex investment.
You might want to immediately cash your bonus out... There is a huge incentive for Somer to say "so long suckers!" on Nov. 7th.
ReplyDeleteMy somer account is now down to 2 tokens and 95.000 isk.
DeleteI traded the four PLEX to my other accounts and now all four GTC I bought have been used to extend my total subscription time for 8 months.
I'll make a post my my Somer winnings.