Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I suggest limiting the use of SP injectors to players of similar levels of SP. This would allow players of the same age to transfer SP among each other, but would prevent farming of alts to feed rich players.

The current scheme benefits rich, powerful players because they can buy SP from farmed alts to boost their 200M SP characters.

It would be fairer and more balanced to restrict injectors to specific bands. For example, have a Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, etc injects each with a limit on who can use it. For example:

Alpha, usable only by characters 10M SP and below
Beta, usable only by characters 10M to 25M SP
Gamma, usable only by characters 25M to 50M SP
Delta, usable only by characters 50M to 100M SP
Epsilon, usable only by characters 100M to 200M SP
Omega, usable only by characters above 200M SP

By "use" here, I mean both the character that extracts and the character that injects the SP must be in the required range to use the injector.

If this is done, you could remove the current SP benefit shrinkage (high SP characters only getting 150K instead of 400K), because the SP transfer would be lateral anyway, so it is fair. No need for a shrinkage factor.

This system would better preserve character SP parity and avoid the alt farming problem.

Rationale. One rationale for doing this, as opposed to the current system is that the current system is going to create a lop-sided effect whereby a rich, privileged class at the top is going to re-inforce itself by essentially paying SP farmers to feed them SP using null sec corp money. Everybody else is going to be a sort of second class citizen. It will be like WOW making everybody level 65 automatically, except only "premier subscribers" get to automatically go to 65. It is essentially a pay-to-win mechanism.

The bottom line here is that allowing rich EVE players to buy SP and boost low time/young characters with bought SP has the stench of pay-to-win.... a very bad thing.

By restricting SP injector use to specific ranges as I have outline above is not pay-to-win because the bought SP have to come from an equal-level character, so there is no change to the overall "demographics" of EVE.

-------------------------------- UPDATE

When I made this suggestion I was under the impression that extractors would be in-game, player-made items. Having found out that they are, in fact, bought with money from the game company, I can see that I was trying to fix something that is inherently broken.

Why even bother with the pretense of "extracting"? Since we are going pay-to-win, why not allow players to just buy SP from the Aurum shop? So we can induce players to farm SP off alts? That does not seem like a good "gameplay" objective to me. Oh, boy, what's your profession. Oh, I farm SP off alts, what do you do?

Another brilliant idea from Droidster, purveyor of great ideas since 2004







I lolled in my pants

Jesus H. Christ. They've only been on the market for less than a day. Show proof that "powerful players" are using this as a farming opportunity.

Given the ridiculously low cost of purchasing a character on the bazaar compared to extractors, why would anyone in their right mind not just keep doing that to get a new alt?

The injectors will only really support credit card warriors, which is fine by me since they will give CCP some more money to keep developing the game.

What makes you think a supply of alts will be exhausted? Sold alts aren't 'old abandoned alts', they are characters made for a specific purpose and sold intentionally. Not "oops, I didn't mean to make this guy"

Because it is pay to win, not game play.

Letting null sec corp leaders and rich newbies pay cash and ISK to create 200M SP characters will do two bad things:

(1) dilute the worth of players who spent YEARS training their character to 200M; how do you think some guy who has spent 10 years getting to 200M is going to feel about some rich newb having the same SP as them just by buying those points? Its going to make them feel like sh1t.

(2) demoralize the players who do not have the money to skill up their characters; consider your average 30M SP player; right now let's say he is in a corp with 2 other 200M SP characters, but now 6 other 200M characters suddenly appear--characters that used to be 30M like him, but the players have the $1000 bucks to make them go from 30M to 200M in one week. Now those new characters get promoted: corp officer, Titan pilot, whatever. How is that going to make that 30M player feel like knowing he could play for 10 years and never catch up to those guys, just because they have money and he does not? It's going to make him feel like sh1t.

This is not some HYPOTHETICAL outcome. It is outcome that has already played itself out in Runes of Magic. ROM is down to ONE server now. Everybody is quitting that game. Why? Because they got sick of pay to win. Everybody use to love ROM, they had like 12 servers or something like that and everybody was like "pay to win is fine", just like you are now. Well, two years later, now what? ROM is folding, its dead. All their loyal players left a long time ago, so nothing was left but a bunch of rich kids and when they got sick of buying diamonds they quit too.

Pay to win is false revenue, because it seems like you are making more money, but you are losing the core players. Eventually that catches up with you.

Well if you can get 200M SP for 700 pounds then why not turn that into 400 injectors x 700M = 280B ISK = 230 PLEX which is what, 3600 pounds? So you could make 3000 pounds by buying that character and turning it into injectors, couldn't you?

This would never work for one simple reason:

Skill Injectors cost real money and are only available on the Aur Market.

* They do not spawn in game anywhere, so unless someone buys it for real money, no one would get them.
* No one would buy them from CCP if what you suggest was implemented. The point is to make CCP money, while giving characters the ability to respec.

As I point out here in this thread from 2013. : https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=193026

These are the reasons why CCP finally added this.

i think the idea here was not to be exact on the numbers.. however my complaint as a new pilot.. yes i understand all of you have been training for many, many years.. i also understand that most of you not only spent that time getting good at what you do in EVE while waiting on those skills.. i am still discovering eve, and as dull as mining is, i still would like a chance at getting a few injectors to finish my mining skills while i do look for my place in eve.. however the outragous prices on these injectors is crazy.. the most isk i have had is just over 300 million..... my account is 3 months old.. completely new too this game and i can't even touch an injector. this game feels like a pay to win.. you cannot train two pilots at the sametime without paying the price it would cost to run a seperate account.. and you can't dual screen two characters from the same account either.. so while i am mining falling asleep at my keyboard what am i supposed to do for fun in eve? so players who run 10 instances of eve (who obviously can afford it) are getting the leg up on markets, isk, and now 1 billion ish per skill extractor, and selling characters off on the bazaar... me.. i just want to play and have a level field here.. i need a lot of isk currently just to get a few items for fitting, and skills.. i would love to fly a nicer mining ship.. but i have over 42+ days to train for it.. while the more wealthy pilots and those paying for isk (plex ect) are setting high prices, i can't compete with. now i'm not directly looking for handouts.. i just thought this whole injector business was designed to help NEW pilots.. not those that are seasoned.

Give it a little overlap, so people can stockpile them and use later:
Alpha, usable only by characters 5.5M SP and below
Beta, usable only by characters 4.5M to 15M SP
Gamma, usable only by characters 12.5M to 27.5M SP
Delta, usable only by characters 22.5M to 55M SP
Epsilon, usable only by characters 45M to 110M SP
Zeta, usable only by characters 90M to 220M SP
Omega, usable only by characters above 180M SP



If you remove the SP shrinkage, then even by restricting the farming to high-SP alts you still make it easier and cheaper than it is currently. Leave in the SP shrinkage, in fact why don't we give it more tiers:
Alpha, 512K > 512K (100%)
Beta, 512K > 409.6K (80%)
Gamma, 512K > 256K (50%)
Delta, 512K > 102.4K (20%)
Epsilon, 512K > 64K (12.5%)
Zeta, 512K > 51.2K (10%)
Omega, 512K > 40.96K (8%)
I also changed the base amount from 500,000 to 512,000 so that it better lines up with the room a skill has for SP. A 1x skill has 256,000 SP at level 5.



It's not pay to win because this is EVE and no amount of ISK or SP will win you anything. But furthermore since players still have to extract SP that they actually trained, it's still not even pay for free SP, and it is not a true SP faucet. In fact the part I like most about this debacle is that CCP is making a killing off of players trading their SP that they already paid CCP to train, this injects money into our grand overlords that they can spend on fancy toys for us to play with. What I don't like is that so many players are willing to go this route--either buying or selling SP--and it's going to bring back old newbie myths that you need SP to succeed. But I guess I can't change people.