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Dev Blog: Exploring The Character Bazaar & Skill Trading

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Mr Epeen
It's All About Me
#3441 - 2015-10-19 06:41:02 UTC
Jeremiah Saken wrote:
CCP Terminus wrote:
We don't create a way for players to buy their way to victory.

but you are.
Player A is traing his manufacturing skills to produce modules (it will take some time)
Player B bought skills to maufacture said modules (he will have them instantly)
Who have advantage here?
From what you wrote Terminus it's already decided, why bother with feedback? It's rather how we introduce it, not if.


Player A: Return on investment at the completion of skills.
Player B: Return on investment after selling 25 billion worth of modules to cover the costs of SP packs.

Which is the more likely scenario? People, at least think things through before hammering keys.

Mr Epeen Cool
Aerasia
Republic University
Minmatar Republic
#3442 - 2015-10-19 06:43:37 UTC  |  Edited by: Aerasia
CCP Terminus wrote:
Which is why we're taking extra care with this feature. In this case the dev blog came out before any implementation.
Don't get me wrong, sarcasm aside I don't have any real issues with this idea. I'm firmly in the "This is basically the Bazaar, only less difficult to use" camp.

Which doesn't mean there isn't a cabal of incredibly vocal players ready to shout down any affront to tradition. Smile

Jeremiah Saken wrote:
Player A is traing his manufacturing skills to produce modules (it will take some time)
Player B bought skills to maufacture said modules (he will have them instantly)
You're forgetting that A isn't competing with B. Both players are competing with:
Player C, who's been playing for years and has the set of level V skills that makes new players have to wait so long to be competitive in the market to begin with.

In a technical sense, buying SP from the market gives B an advantage over A. But neither of them are going to be able to sell their wares until they've been brought even with C. This is exactly the barrier to entry that drives the Character Bazaar in the first place.

Maetel Lithium wrote:
I could set up 10 jita alts, never undock and just sell skill points.
There are 25,000 characters traded each year on the Bazaar. Where exactly did you think they trained?
Dave Stark
#3443 - 2015-10-19 06:45:19 UTC
Circumstantial Evidence wrote:
Dave Stark wrote:
so, what's going on with prerequisite skills. you can't remove skills so even if you remove all the SP from them you're still going to be unable to remove SP from their prerequisites or you can "grandfather" yourself in to new ships. etc.

will you be adding a way to remove skills, or are we stuck with deadweight skills like mining IV forever?
I think post #135 copied below, says skills + the points associated with them, will be removed:
CCP Terminus wrote:
The current plan is to not allow skillpoints to be extracted from skills that are requirements of other skills. So in your example you would have to remove the Command Ships skill before you could remove any prerequisite skills like Armored Warfare.
We also plan on having this be something you can only do in stations, so you wouldn't be stuck in in space in a ship you can no longer fly.



it says "you would have to remove" except... we can't remove skills once they've been injected. which is why i'm asking if that's a feature they're adding or if we're stuck with **** we don't want even in the new system.
Urziel99
Multiplex Gaming
Tactical Narcotics Team
#3444 - 2015-10-19 06:46:11 UTC
Teckos Pech wrote:
CCP Terminus wrote:
Daniela Doran wrote:

Very good point.

CCP has squandered the revenues they made from Eve on other non-profitable ventures as stated in the post above. And now in order to compensate for those losses they're trying to dig in deeper and milk their only bread winner even further??

CCP is a company, not a product and it is the goal of any company to outlive any one product they create. If a company relies on a single product for the entirety of their revenue, this is not possible.


Yeah companies that sell electricity are never around long are they. Roll



Comparing a game software company to a public utility that is consumed by everyone? Apples vs Oranges

fail troll -5/10
Dave Stark
#3445 - 2015-10-19 06:49:21 UTC
Jeremiah Saken wrote:
CCP Terminus wrote:
We don't create a way for players to buy their way to victory.

but you are.
Player A is traing his manufacturing skills to produce modules (it will take some time)
Player B bought skills to maufacture said modules (he will have them instantly)
Who have advantage here?
From what you wrote Terminus it's already decided, why bother with feedback? It's rather how we introduce it, not if.


player C has the advantage, the one that brought a character with max industry skills and the skills for a catalyst pilot from the bazaar who competes easily with player B and then blows all his freighters up so he can't produce anything and monopolises the market.

funfact; player C already exists. and player A can do so if he wishes.

besides, i'm not huge in to industry so some one might correct me but most of the industry skills just give you faster manufacture/copy times and a bigger range on remote starting of jobs... neither of those are going to push player A out of the market as they'll still be working to the same margins.
Divine Entervention
Doomheim
#3446 - 2015-10-19 07:00:58 UTC  |  Edited by: Divine Entervention
player B hasn't had the joy of all the time spent experiencing the greatness EvE has to offer.

You guys keep trying to punish us for not having joined the party as soon as you did, but that in of itself is a punishment.

Missing out on all the great stories we hear about is already bad enough.

And we're not getting these skill points for free. In one fashion or another we have to PAY for them.

Stop being so greedy and share the game with the rest of us.
Jeremiah Saken
The Fall of Leviathan
#3447 - 2015-10-19 07:02:00 UTC
Mr Epeen wrote:

Player A: Return on investment at the completion of skills.
Player B: Return on investment after selling 25 billion worth of modules to cover the costs of SP packs.

Which is the more likely scenario? People, at least think things through before hammering keys.

So, same goes for comat skills?
Player A will be training
Player B buy instantly, make sense...
Dave Stark wrote:
player C has the advantage, the one that brought a character with max industry skills and the skills for a catalyst pilot from the bazaar who competes easily with player B and then blows all his freighters up so he can't produce anything and monopolises the market.

and now comes the "more granular" part. Buying SP may be cheaper than buying character as whole.

"I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas..." - Herman Melville
Mane Frehm
Immortalis Inc.
Shadow Cartel
#3448 - 2015-10-19 07:05:59 UTC
CCP Terminus wrote:
Mag's wrote:
CCP Terminus wrote:

Which is why we're taking extra care with this feature. In this case the dev blog came out before any implementation.

Ahh so a PR exercise, but it's still a done deal?

Nice.

Daniela Doran wrote:
Yes I also really like to know if this is a done deal? The $144.00 usd I'm putting into Eve every month hinges on this decision.


If it was a done deal we'd have put the dev blog out when it was going to be shipped. The whole point of the dev blog is to gather feedback and assess.




With all due respect now that you've let this particular cat out of the bag, it will be enormously difficult to stuff it back in (kitties with claws and all that). If you persist in making characters fungible commodities, you will annoy those (and there are many) who think this is a bad idea. If you decide to withdraw the idea, you will annoy those who were anticipating stuffing their characters full of SPs via this mechanism.

I'll repeat what I've said in a number of posts on forums - presenting solutions without clearly identifying the problems that you hope to address takes you to a bad place. You'd be far better off identifying your critical issues and then looking for options to address them. Perhaps you've done this internally.....but its hard to tell from here.

Whether you are willing to admit it or not, this is a fundamental change to the game. Today characters are unique, the result of difficult choices amongst a large number of options, often postponing immediate gratification for long term gain. Tomorrow, characters will be just a collection of SP parts, malleable and ever changing, all of them joining the flavour of the month club. If you recall, we had a bit of a problem with Ishtars in the game recently....imagine if everyone was flying them.
Dave Stark
#3449 - 2015-10-19 07:06:45 UTC
Jeremiah Saken wrote:
Mr Epeen wrote:

Player A: Return on investment at the completion of skills.
Player B: Return on investment after selling 25 billion worth of modules to cover the costs of SP packs.

Which is the more likely scenario? People, at least think things through before hammering keys.

So, same goes for comat skills?
Player A will be training
Player B buy instantly, make sense...
Dave Stark wrote:
player C has the advantage, the one that brought a character with max industry skills and the skills for a catalyst pilot from the bazaar who competes easily with player B and then blows all his freighters up so he can't produce anything and monopolises the market.

and now comes the "more granular" part. Buying SP may be cheaper than buying character as whole.


also player C exists as veterans.

let's face it - not allowing people to buy and sell SP is basically saying "you must wait an arbitrary amount of time, that you must pay for anyway to compete".

you're paying for SP with your subscription you give ccp your $15 or however much a sub is these days and ccp give you just shy of 2m sp spread over 30 days. if people want to pay for it all at once why should we be against that?

all we're really doing by not allowing the sale of SP is saying "new players must wait an arbitrary amount of time to do what we can". what purpose does that serve?
Mr Epeen
It's All About Me
#3450 - 2015-10-19 07:09:16 UTC
Jeremiah Saken wrote:
Mr Epeen wrote:

Player A: Return on investment at the completion of skills.
Player B: Return on investment after selling 25 billion worth of modules to cover the costs of SP packs.

Which is the more likely scenario? People, at least think things through before hammering keys.

So, same goes for comat skills?
Player A will be training
Player B buy instantly, make sense...

No point in answering. The way you are now and likely to keep moving the goalposts pretty much means it's an exercise in frustration and not a conversation.

Mr Epeen Cool
Dave Stark
#3451 - 2015-10-19 07:10:52 UTC
Mr Epeen wrote:
Jeremiah Saken wrote:
Mr Epeen wrote:

Player A: Return on investment at the completion of skills.
Player B: Return on investment after selling 25 billion worth of modules to cover the costs of SP packs.

Which is the more likely scenario? People, at least think things through before hammering keys.

So, same goes for comat skills?
Player A will be training
Player B buy instantly, make sense...

No point in answering. The way you are now and likely to keep moving the goalposts pretty much means it's an exercise in frustration and not a conversation.

Mr Epeen Cool


we all know the answer is player A, since he made friends with the local pirates while player B was searching for his wallet.
Tiberius Heth
Doomheim
#3452 - 2015-10-19 07:14:26 UTC  |  Edited by: Tiberius Heth
CCP Terminus wrote:
Daniela Doran wrote:

Very good point.

CCP has squandered the revenues they made from Eve on other non-profitable ventures as stated in the post above. And now in order to compensate for those losses they're trying to dig in deeper and milk their only bread winner even further??

CCP is a company, not a product and it is the goal of any company to outlive any one product they create. If a company relies on a single product for the entirety of their revenue, this is not possible. At some point the product will be replaced, even one as long lived as EVE Online. If that's the only thing making us money, the company collapses at that point and a lot of people lose their jobs.

While I don't see EVE going anywhere any time soon, it makes perfect sense to branch out in to other projects, to hedge bets against the future. The current projects in the works like Valkyrie have a lot of promise and hype, while at the same time having a much smaller development budget that EVE does right now.

Any losses incurred from past projects are already taken care of. This new feature is not being developed to compensate for them.


Speaking of which, there's been quite a few questions as to why the feature is being developed? What players are the target for this feature? I think it's fairly clearly described in the dev blog here:

"By putting more control of your characters in your hands we hope to improve the game for everyone. Whether you’re an older player who would rather have ISK than those mining skills you don’t use any more, a clever new player looking to invest your fortune into your character, a Corp leader trying to move everyone into a new doctrine or someone like me who just realized that they would rather fly Armageddon’s than Stilettos, this feature has you covered. This all fits nicely to our overall game design philosophy of giving you control over your experience through cooperation and competition with each other."

The feature is intended to allow players to trade resources. Whether that's real-world currency, ISK, or time. It is the same philosophy behind PLEX, and why PLEX is both effective and sustainable over long periods. We don't create a way for players to buy their way to victory. We aren't injecting new SP in to the game. We simply allow players to trade the resources they have for the resources they want.


Don't lie.

It's not made "to give players more control" because in this same post you state "CCP needs monies" so it IS a cash grab plain and simple, it never was anything else and no one could ever mistake it for anything else.

CPP did fine for a long time, with a smaller player base, till the illusions of grandeur set in and they started wasting money on nonsense and silly pet projects. Most of that got cut out in 2011 but apparently this is STILL happening. If you have solvency issues then you fix that by taking long term action: you cut costs by removing the extra dead weight you put on and refocus on your core business, you don't do that by squandering your single main product for short term income. That's dumb.

This system COMPLETELY FUCKS OVER THE CORE IDEA OF THE GAME... choices have consequences especially so for characters. Only someone new to the game who has no idea of its history, background and core values (like some new DEVS) would just trample on that. And of course people who personally benefit from it.

CCP, fix your monies problems by getting rid of stuff that isn't EVE. Stop trying to do yet again what you tried to do in 2011: make EVE and its players pay for the mistakes you made and pet projects you allowed to fck up.
Josef Djugashvilis
#3453 - 2015-10-19 07:18:08 UTC
Just caught up with the latest posts on this topic.

It would seem that CCP, having noted the overwhelmingly negative feedback, have decided to go ahead with it anyway.

Makes one wonder what was the point of requesting feedback in the first place.

Oh well, onwards, ever onwards.

This is not a signature.
Jeremiah Saken
The Fall of Leviathan
#3454 - 2015-10-19 07:20:42 UTC
Dave Stark wrote:
all we're really doing by not allowing the sale of SP is saying "new players must wait an arbitrary amount of time to do what we can". what purpose does that serve?

Why not just remove all skills then? There won't be any time to wait to catch up with vets. Making it pay to catch up with won't solve anything, only the one who afford it will catch up. There always be someone who's left behind in new system.

"I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas..." - Herman Melville
ArmyOfMe
Teddybears.
#3455 - 2015-10-19 07:21:02 UTC
CCP Terminus wrote:
Canadian Fire wrote:
All things considered it's not really such a horrible idea, but I still don't like it. If it is to be implemented, I would like to see a hard cap on it. IE you cannot inject SP on characters with over XX number of SP. Or some kind of balancing mechanic to make it so a day 1 char can get a big advantage, yes, but can't jump straight to all level 5 skills for $15,000 USD.
At the very least I can catch up on some SP I missed when I wasn't able to sub I suppose.


A hard cap seems to be a common request, and I think there may be some merit to that. We'll certainly look in to it. I'm not sure how to determine where that cap is though, if it's purely for prestige purposes.

On a somewhat related note, to keep some prestige without a hard cap, there may be a way to track SP gained 'naturally' versus SP gained from using unallocated skillpoints. If that's the case we could make both values available when characters apply to corporations, or people put their characters up on sites like eveboard. No promises though, it's still to early to tell.


So what you'r really saying is that you do expect some players to put trillions of isk into this just to get passed 200 or even the 300m sp mark then.
(yeah, no need for a hardcap at all here Roll )

Implement a hardcap at around 50m sp, and i wont complain all that much, tho i will still complain.
As was posted earlier, most char sales atm are for chars below that ammount of sp anyhow.

GM Guard > I must ask you not to use the petition option like this again but i personally would finish the chicken sandwich first so it won´t go to waste. The spaghetti will keep and you can use it the next time you get hungry. Best regards.
Dave Stark
#3456 - 2015-10-19 07:23:24 UTC
Josef Djugashvilis wrote:
Just caught up with the latest posts on this topic.

It would seem that CCP, having noted the overwhelmingly negative feedback, have decided to go ahead with it anyway.

Makes one wonder what was the point of requesting feedback in the first place.

Oh well, onwards, ever onwards.


one negative thread on eve-o isn't "overwhelmingly negative" head anywhere outside of this thread and the response isn't nearly as negative.

as mike pointed out, you have to be subscribed to post here. considering the positivity of other people - you could quite easily argue this feature could bring many people back to the game. quite frankly with some of the responses in here and how silly they are even if some people left and the net number of players was constant i'd call it a good trade.
Dave Stark
#3457 - 2015-10-19 07:26:05 UTC
Jeremiah Saken wrote:
Dave Stark wrote:
all we're really doing by not allowing the sale of SP is saying "new players must wait an arbitrary amount of time to do what we can". what purpose does that serve?

Why not just remove all skills then? There won't be any time to wait to catch up with vets. Making it pay to catch up with won't solve anything, only the one who afford it will catch up. There always be someone who's left behind in new system.


serious reply; sure.

this isn't a level based experience grind MMO where grinding new levels lets you play in the new dungeon. this is eve, it's a sandbox you can go anywhere you want from day 1. there's something you can do in every area of space from day 1. having things hidden behind arbitrary waits may have been good when the game was new and they had to have some form of pacing... but there's no need for pacing 12 years down the line.

more people in space shooting things instead of sat in stations waiting is a good thing.

however - for me to fully support such an idea we'd need absolutely perfect ship balance - which we do not have.
Lucas Kell
Solitude Trading
S.N.O.T.
#3458 - 2015-10-19 07:27:55 UTC
One issue I have with this is how it changes what is needed to be a character seller. Right now you have to create a character, chuck in implants, skill it up into something that people like (using knowledge of the market to do so) and then sell it, along with the implants, then start again. It's a long and complex process.

Following this, you just need to create an alt, stick in 2 implants. It doesn't even matter for what attributes, as long as they match a skill. Then you just train that single skill for eternity pulling out SP into packets when there's enough in it, never needing to replace the implants or understand the complexities of the character market. People can then use those for any skill they want. It's a massive dumbing down of the system, and it removes all of the extra costs like the implants and skillbooks needed for each alt sold.

The Indecisive Noob - EVE fan blog.

Wholesale Trading - The new bulk trading mailing list.
Josef Djugashvilis
#3459 - 2015-10-19 07:29:15 UTC
Dave Stark wrote:
Josef Djugashvilis wrote:
Just caught up with the latest posts on this topic.

It would seem that CCP, having noted the overwhelmingly negative feedback, have decided to go ahead with it anyway.

Makes one wonder what was the point of requesting feedback in the first place.

Oh well, onwards, ever onwards.


one negative thread on eve-o isn't "overwhelmingly negative" head anywhere outside of this thread and the response isn't nearly as negative.

as mike pointed out, you have to be subscribed to post here. considering the positivity of other people - you could quite easily argue this feature could bring many people back to the game. quite frankly with some of the responses in here and how silly they are even if some people left and the net number of players was constant i'd call it a good trade.


So, CCP want to say to new players, pay your sub then pay a lot extra to gain some skill points, which even then will mean they can never catch up on vets.

Sounds like a plan to me.

Of course I do understand why you seem to be implying that CCP should regard the views of their paying customers as a weird subset of folk.

I mean this in the nicest possible way Mr Dave, but if you stop posting, support for this proposal is, well...what support?

This is not a signature.
Dave Stark
#3460 - 2015-10-19 07:32:10 UTC
Lucas Kell wrote:
One issue I have with this is how it changes what is needed to be a character seller. Right now you have to create a character, chuck in implants, skill it up into something that people like (using knowledge of the market to do so) and then sell it, along with the implants, then start again. It's a long and complex process.

Following this, you just need to create an alt, stick in 2 implants. It doesn't even matter for what attributes, as long as they match a skill. Then you just train that single skill for eternity pulling out SP into packets when there's enough in it, never needing to replace the implants or understand the complexities of the character market. People can then use those for any skill they want. It's a massive dumbing down of the system, and it removes all of the extra costs like the implants and skillbooks needed for each alt sold.


the character bazaar will net people much larger profits. the diminishing returns system offers pretty much guaranteed profit for the people you mentioned.

once you get past 10m SP you start hitting diminishing returns. also we don't know how much extractors will cost. character transfers are a flat fee no matter how many SP.