New PLEX - The 500:1 Conversion

The 500:1 PLEX Conversion - what changed

Background

For most of EVE's history, PLEX was a physical item - the "30 Day Pilot's License Extension," 1000 m³ in cargo, station-locked at the level of normal trade. Buying a month of game time meant going to a trade hub, picking up the PLEX, and either consuming it from a station hangar or hauling it home in your ship. Hauler ganks targeting PLEX-laden Iterons were a recurring highsec drama for the better part of a decade.

The 2016-11 Ascension expansion introduced an opt-in PLEX Vault - a per-account inventory location where PLEX could be parked safely. Players who used it stopped losing PLEX to ganks. Players who didn't kept hauling. Both PLEX-as-cargo and PLEX-in-Vault coexisted from November 2016 through May 2017.

The March 2017 dev blog PLEX Changes On The Way announced a far more sweeping rework - typeID swap, redenomination, mandatory Vault, Aurum integration. Release was promised "this spring or early summer," with a follow-up at Fanfest 2017. The actual deployment date was confirmed in late April: 9 May 2017, with the 119.5 release.

What changed on 9 May 2017

The 119.5 release shipped the entire PLEX rework in one cutover:

• PLEX was reissued as a new item. Volume per unit dropped from 1000 m³ to 0.01 m³ - five orders of magnitude smaller, designed to live in the Vault rather than a cargo hold.
• 500:1 redenomination across the entire cluster. Every old PLEX wherever it sat - cargo, station hangar, contract, opt-in Vault - was converted to 500 new PLEX automatically. Total ISK value preserved; unit counts and per-unit prices multiplied / divided by 500 respectively.
• Vault became mandatory. PLEX no longer existed as a cargo item. Old PLEX in your ship at the moment of cutover was converted in place and moved to the account Vault. From this date forward, PLEX-laden hauler ganks were impossible by construction.
• Account-shared, not character-shared. The Vault is a single inventory location across every character on a single account. Hauling PLEX between alts on the same account ended overnight - alts now share a wallet for PLEX purposes.
• Aurum integration. The redenominated PLEX now slotted into the New Eden Store at finer granularity. SKINs, Multi-Character Training, and other Aurum-priced cosmetics could now be paid for directly with PLEX in sub-old-PLEX increments. Outstanding Aurum balances were converted to PLEX during the same downtime; residual sub-1000-Aurum balances were swept up in a follow-up downtime two weeks later (23 May 2017).

What this means for returning players

If your last memory of PLEX is buying one in Jita, hauling it home, and either feeding it to your sub queue or selling it locally for ISK, everything in that workflow is gone.

The first thing returning players notice is the count: "My wallet says I own 500 PLEX where I remember owning 1." That's the redenomination at work - your ISK value is identical, but the units have shifted by a factor of 500. The second thing they notice is that PLEX is no longer in any of their cargo holds or hangars. It's in the Vault, account-wide, accessible from anywhere a station UI loads. The third thing they notice is that they can spend PLEX in granular amounts at the New Eden Store on cosmetics, MCT, and other formerly-Aurum items.

For PLEX-as-store-of-value strategies, the 2017 conversion was a clean preservation event. You did not gain or lose ISK from the change. But the workflow shifted permanently from a hauling-and-stockpiling game to a wallet-and-vault game.

Why CCP did it

The 2017 dev-blog framing landed on three motivations:

• Aurum granularity. The New Eden Store's Aurum-priced cosmetics had outgrown the 1000-m³ PLEX's indivisibility. Redenomination at 500:1 made it possible to spend, say, 200 PLEX on a SKIN without converting through Aurum first, eliminating the dual-currency UX hassle that had built up since Aurum's introduction.
• Vault security. Years of PLEX-laden hauler ganks were a friction point CCP wanted gone. Forcing the Vault closed the gank-vector entirely without removing PLEX trading.
• Account-shared usability. Multi-character account holders no longer had to send PLEX between alts. The Vault makes PLEX the same kind of cross-character resource as Skill Points (via injectors) or Omega state itself.

Connection to subsequent PLEX evolution

The 2017 conversion ended PLEX-as-physical-item. The 2025 Global PLEX Market ended PLEX-as-regional-market. Together they trace an eight-year arc from "1000 m³ item you haul to Jita" -> "0.01 m³ Vault entry traded in Jita" -> "0.01 m³ Vault entry traded in a single global market that pools every region's liquidity."

For returning players coming back in 2026, both moments matter. Skip the 2017 conversion and the new wallet UI is unrecognisable; skip the 2025 Global Market and the per-region price arbitrage they remember from a decade ago will look more competitive than it actually is.