EVE General Discussion

Actually the opposite is true.
The people attacking this feature seem to have only two arguments:

1) It's Pay To Win
2) Something magical has been taken out of the game.

The people who support or seem unaffected seem to have the following arguments:

1) Time gates suck and are "arbitrary" (to use your own words).
2) It may attract newer players to the game
3) It allows you to do what you want when you want
4) The SP have to come from the very people who seem opposed to the feature
5) It offers an alternative to an already existing feature (Character Bizarre)
6) It allows the reallocation of SP

So much this!! When I PVP or trade in the market there was already people with more SP competing with me. It does not affect me directly if more inject SP. In PVP there will still be a mixture of people with more and less than me, and I will fight against all of them, using game mechanics.

When trading I never sit and think "omg a buy order went through!! I am loosing EVE because another guy who did not get the order, would have paid less tax (due to SP injection, and optimizing the trading skills) if he had gotten it". I got the buyorder, and get a profit no matter how much profit everyone else get (with more or less SP than me- injected or not)

In regards to missioning: When doing missions, I also do not care if someone 10 systems away injected 8 mill SP or someone 4 systems away trained 9 years, and can also run missions (provided they have the standing). I will stilll get ISK, to buy PVP ships for.

You can buy skill injectors with just ISK. It is possible to make use of the feature without cash, so your first argument is a lie.

Time gating was never "fundamental" to the game or a pillar of it because the character bizarre has been around for years and directly circumnavigates that concept. Now you can be more surgical with the use of bought skill points. Oh, the horror. Yes, if someone wants to pay enough they may be able to get a 2% advantage of me in DPS output or a 10% advantage in MWD capacitor usage, but that's nothing new. There are already people out there with way more SP than me. There are already people out there who's skills are better optimized to their ships than mine are to mine, yet somehow I've still managed to function in this game all the same, and I'd bet half of those people were playing bought toons long before SP trading. Your second argument is also a lie.

That's a lot of could bes and maybes, when in reality no one expects anything new of a new bro. New bros fly tackle and ECM frigates. No one expects a new bro to be in a Cerb in 2 weeks, or even 2 months. What you feel and what goes on aren't exactly similar.

Pay to win usually adds things to a game that are not available by other avenues.

Skill injectors and extractors may be added but their existence alone offers no advantage. The net result of using extractors on a global level is tons of sp being destroyed.

So no, its different enough from p2w to deserve its own term

I really dislike this "Pay to win" concept talk because the entire foundation of the concept of P2W is flawed. You have to have a PC to play the game, pay to play. You have to have a good internet connection, pay to play. You have to buy into the game, subscribe, whatever, pay to play. There is no WINNER in this game, it's an ongoing open game with no definable end point. It is impossible to 'win' in the classic sense of the term, so it's still pay to play.

If someone thinks that someone else with a billion skill points, twitchy reactions like a cat on catnip, and a brain the size of MARS to think through every possible permutation of the game has 'won' they are mistaken. They are just playing. Even if you lose EVERY SINGLE ship fight, the game mechanics specify, you never really die, you get a free ship, and you can keep trying over and over in some kind of Sisyphusian play mode, you can until you tire of it. You have paid your money, you get to play.

Now, all this griping and moaning about people getting advantage over another, please stop calling it pay to win, by definition it doesn't exist in the context of this game. It's a wrong term on so many levels that it's masking the real issue here.

So, Mr. Billionaire decides to have a day 1 mega character, trained to the max. Only someone with some serious doubts about their own skills and play ability should be worried about that character. Even I wouldn't be scared of that toon and I am a terrible PVP pilot at this point. They just don't know how to play. So this argument is theoretical at best and has no effect on the game.

In summary, stop worrying about the other guy. You can't determine ANYTHING other than your own actions. Do the best you can with what you want to have fun with. Make the game fun for YOU, and it doesn't take money. None of us will ever be the best because even the masters of the killboards still lose to other players from time to time. That should make you happy, it means you'll always have something to strive towards.

Can we put this topic to bed? The injectors are here, they aren't changing much and whatever evil they are doing to the game seems to be balanced by the good they are doing, at least at this point. So lets all give it some time, play the game, have fun and not worry about this in the near term. Lets look back on it a couple months from now and see what the effects are in the longer term. M'kay?

No, you said that cash created an advantage over those who can't or won't spend cash for SP. In order for that to be true there has to be something that determines non-cash options cannot match cash options.

Preface: Not a fan of this change.

However, I have to agree with Crosi above.

1. In other games P2W is quite clearly that. I pay $ and I get an in game item or items (that are often consumed--i.e. not always a permanent benefit)

2. The items are created out of "thin air"--i.e. nobody else in the game had the item, made the item, etc. Poof there it is in my hangar, garage, etc.

For SP injectors to work....somebody has to sell existing SP that came out of an existing character. So it is not the same as 2 above.

Also, while skills do open up new hulls, modules, etc. and can convey a benefit they are not the end all in this game. There are no fixed team sizes, no match making, nothing like that. If I go out with a new character and inject him with 5 million SP and start PvPing characters with 1 million SP (setting aside how I could even find such characters) there is nothing from stopping him from bringing a buddy and "winning". So it isn't even clear that 1 holds in this case because there are ways around that too.

Well, he has what...474,368,000 SP, so just going from 80 million to 474,368,000 would require 1,314,560,000 SP. He got to keep 394,368,000 of that SP meaning 920,192,000 SP were destroyed, or almost enough for 2 characters to have near perfect skills.

So not three, but 2.

Having a gambling website making so much isk you can spend 2 trillion on a maxed out character is not evidence of RMT.

Thought having so much isk you could never hope to spend it in game in a lifetime must be watched closely as the temptation to RMT must be real.