Player Features and Ideas Discussion

"Socrata" huh?

OP is a trolling alt operated by some 12th grader with a 10th grade apprehension of the Socratic method.
Nasty troll says 'I try to inspire argument and controversy' but no, troll is trolling.

empty thread is empty.

Bad enough you can buy and sell characters.
Add SP in with the mix......

Part of the game is waiting and building your character over the years.
Sometimes it is maddening, but in the end when you get where you want to go.
Well satisfaction.

It is a slap in the face to anybody who spent time training their characters.
Let alone those who remember getting up at 3am change a skill cause there was no skill queue.

There is no defense for pay to win other than as a means to expand the company's profit margin. As for the player base, it is equivalent to putting puppies in a cage and allowing people to pay in order to beat them to death. What I can't understand is, for the cost that such a system would demand from some people who get off from having an unfair advantage, why not pay people to let you pop them in the mouth whenever you feel like it? It's probably more satisfying, I'm sure.

Don't we already have a character bazaar?

And what about the often used argument that SP doesn't matter but your in-game knowledge and experience is far more important? Yet people cling to their SP advantage like there's no tomorrow. Sounds a bit hyprocritical to me.

+100 to OP, no honest mmo'er would support p2w. You've got everyone riled up though, so can't deny your efforts.

The trolling

Primarily the same thing the OP is missing: time.

That character may, in some oblique way, be considered a pile of SP, but what it is more than anything else is a collection of decisions made over time. While you may be able to use this facility to get access to skills that you didn't have access to before, the only reason you're able to do so is because someone has spent time training those skills in accordance with the skill training mechanics, the attribute and remap mechanics, the economics of skillbooks and implants…

You're also missing the mechanics of what you're doing.

What you're doing when trading characters is simply to continue someone else's work. Once that character is yours, you are still just as bound by the mechanics that regulate skill training and SP accumulation as he was when building that character (and as you were before you bought it). Mechanically, nothing has changed. The work-load has just changed hands. What you have bought is a very specific, completely closed and indivisible selection of skill levels. You are not given any SP. None of what you bought can be transferred to some other character you might already have. You cannot use this facility to augment what your pre-existing characters can do, and if you want to combine old and new, you have to do exactly the same thing everyone else does: spend time… and all that gives you is two characters that can do the same thing, not an actual combination.

But the key point is this: you are not buying SP. This is not a matter of semantics but of cold, hard mechanics. You don't gain a single SP in the transaction. All you get is a single, irreducible, indivisible, atomic character.


Actually buying SP would be something drastically different. First of all, you skip the thing mentioned above: time. You completely ignore the mechanics of attributes and of skill training. You are unfazed by things like implants and remaps — they become irrelevant to you because you no longer use attributes to accumulate SP. You are also suddenly allowed to combine old and new, or rather, there is no difference between old and new. Instead, you (presumably) use that bought SP to alter and further develop a character you already have into something new that exactly matches what you want. Ironically, you also completely remove the whole point of having character trades — why bother buying someone else's character, which comes with skills you are not interested in and/or which duplicate what you already have, and which probably have a silly name you do not want to be associated with? So the character bazaar also loses its purpose.

Buying SP is pretty much everything that character trading isn't. Apart from one very small point — gaining access to skills you previously didn't have — the two are completely dissimilar.

First, thanks for taking the time to explain your standpoint. I understand your position as you explained it and whilst there are elements I agree with, I guess my perception is different.

Say I've been playing a while and decide I want a carrier pilot. In real terms, what is the difference between me spending (say) $150 on skill-points and being able to immediately fly that ship and spending (say) $150 on the character bazar and buying a char that can already fly that ship?

yes, I get that the mechanics are fundamentally different, but isnt the result the same?

I'm not trying to prolong this argument or be deliberately obtuse, I'm genuinely interested in hearing why some people are so vehemently opposed to this when others might feel that this is already available - and a rose by any other name, yadda yadda.

result is the same in THAT example...but fundamentally as Tippia described. once you get the character you are still bound by the same mechanics as prior to your purchase just with a different set of skills and skin. but as Tippia also mentioned, the person who trained that character still had to live through the same mechanics you do. so that character wasn't created in the span of 30 mins due to a CC transaction; that character took however many months or years to train.

what SP buying will bring is...

New player creates account
New player has a lot of cash to burn
New player buys SP
New player buys and converts PLEX
New player buys skill books to put their SP into
New player now has EVERY SKILL TRAINED TO THE MAX

player is now equal at SP point to a player who has been around for years (or worst: at an SP advantage)...all that done in 30 mins...

that is not the same as me training a character for 3 years then selling it to you for billions of ISK that you got from converting PLEX....cause i took 3 years to get there. i invested 3 years worth of time. you invested your money and bought him/her from me: now you have to invest time on him. i need to either restart a new character or continue using my main with billions of ISK in my pocket....

The character bazaar is limited to what is available.
Some characters took years of training to get where they are.
So the possible number of those characters being available is limited.

Selling SP is basically doing away with SP all together.
It is just like handing you all the skills you need from day one (at a price granted but the result is the same)
That is why selling SP is a game breaking mechanic.
Or to put it another way, CCP should just make all the characters the same, cause in the end that is what you will have with a SP selling system.

That is why SP selling should never be aloud.