Player Features and Ideas Discussion

2 week old char comes in a 250 grand a year job he can get 500mill isk per plex hey buys 20 plex hes instantly got 10bn isk, buys a 50m SP character for 8 bil. i think this alone is a big prob you should not and quite frankly i think most others share this view ever be allowed to pay-to-win. the last time the eve community got a wiff about this we shut it down after only a week with a 10k strong protest in jita not to mention over half the comminuty signing a pettition that it would not happen or ccp would lose our subs. - liek dis if u cry evrytiem

If the eve community got a wiff about players paying to win you'd all mass un-sub? Wake up and smell the coffee, browse the Character Bazaar and realise that's what happens already. Nobody trains their own titan pilot these days, if you want a titan you buy a titan alt. You want a mission running alt you buy a perfect tengu pilot. Please, by all means go shoot a monument about it.

But no, it's perfectly okay for a rich new player to buy his isk with real money and then spend it on a perfectly skilled pilot that was built by someone who knew how to build a character, but it's not okay for anyone to spend some money on cutting out a dreary timesink, if we let people do that you might unsub.

I'm training Amarr Battleship 5 on a full perc/will remap with +4 implants. the skill is currently 593,000/2,000,000. As of me writing this it'll take 25 days 5 hours and change to complete. In game time that's 5 days short of 1 PLEX, and I'm getting 1.4m SP for 1 PLEX and a month of my time doing nothing. Then you come in and say "you get 10m SP for each PLEX and then anyone can fly anything in the game and thats why its a bad idea" - No, that's not why it's a bad idea, that's why you shouldn't be put in charge of deciding the PLEX to SP conversion rate. Personally I'd say I might pay 1 PLEX for 1 million SP, even though that's far lower than what I'd get for just running my account and training normally. In the case of that 50m SP char above being sold for 8 billion, that's 3.1m SP per PLEX which is far above and beyond what I'm getting my training my character legitimately.

Why will rich new players who buy isk not be given a massive advantage with this? Because if they can buy SP directly, who's going to tell them where they should allocate it? Are they going to think that engineering 5 and electronics 5 are a good idea, or are they just going to follow the minimum skill requirements for that carrier they think looks so cool? There are plenty of stories of rich morons getting scammed out of supercaps because they have no idea what they're doing with them, getting blown up in ships they have no idea how to fit, of jumping into a perfect level4 mission running character and then asking "hi, how do I run level 4 missions? where is the agent?". I'm not saying they bought their accounts and isk from Russian gold farmers (that's what I'm saying)

Any rich new players want to buy their way into a shiny ship and high skillpoints, let them for all I care. Hopefully we'll see more comedy killmails.

"But players will just buy their way into more SP" - So? If they're in empire it doesn't matter, most of them are effectively playing a single player game anyway. In nullsec having too many skillpoints is a liability as you're going to face the prospect of replacing 120m SP clones if you get too greedy.

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I'll make this quick.



Note that there is no way to transfer SP from one character to another. You can only buy characters that are player made and grown the old fashioned way. A 50 mil SP character takes over two years to make. There are only so many of them around.

The fear of Infinite SP is reasonable. One way to address it would be to limit SP purchases to some reasonable number, perhaps 20 or 25 million.

But the characters on the bazaar did NOT bypass training times... they trained in real time, like all characters train. All the character bazaar allows is for people to trade their character's with other people... This helps reduce RMT, it helps people consolidate their assets and downsize their accounts, and it provides a tool for impatient people to acquire new and desired characters.. and you still have to deal with the choices people made when building their character, you still have to deal with inadequacies and a limited selection pool....


FOTM is a game design, but that doesn't mean it's not occasionally problematic. Currently, many FOTM ships require a month or so to get into. This creates a time lapse between people initially experimenting with it and the period when everyone is doing it. This time lapse allows CCP to correct significant issues, as well as creates a nice cycle where people that plan ahead can capitalize on the upcoming changes. If this winter, black ops BS's suddenly become the new fad, people that have taken the time to previously train up the specialized skills to maximize their BO's production will have several weeks of profits before "everyone else" can train up to build BO's too. Pilots that have already trained BO's BS's have several weeks to use them before everyone else can fly the new great ship. Finally, if we can buy sp, you'd also change the expectations of alliances... pilots currently have to train into a ship type, rather than just buy the sp like they do a ship!


Perhaps "discourage" is the wrong word, it will devalue specializations because getting those rare specialty skills will be as simple as buying a plex. Player specializations, like perfectly skilled leadership pilots, or scanning pilots, or industry pilots, or what not, become diluted as players just buy skillpoints to train up a specialization instantly, rather than actually making the harder choice of training a less-used specialty skill instead of a more widely-utilized skillset. When skills become easy to ascertain, specialization loses it's value...



Consequences, like losing skillpoints when your tengu dies, becomes much less meaningful, as you no longer have to wait several days to get that needed level V skill back... as opposed to paying 500m isk. Consequences, like putting several million SP into industry suddenly means more when that represents a month of training... as opposed to 500m isk. Consequences, like being podded in an not-upgraded clone and losing Amarr BS V have a lot more meaning when you can't spend 500m isk and instantly retrain it. As for planning ahead, it's not planning ahead when you can do it instantly...



The list is a summary of common counter arguments brought up against your idea... which you'd know if you bothered to read the other threads asking for this exact same thing.... and blowing the list off, or your failed attempts to marginalize it doesn't make the counter arguments invalid.

and as for my final paragraph: Skillpoints unlock doors. They allow you to operate modules, fly the various types of ships, maximize fittings, build and invent and participate in different career venues. However, you typically don't need huge amounts of skillpoints to unlock most of these avenues, and once unlocked, skillpoints don't matter nearly as much as you'd imagine.

No, that's the point of EVE. My account is older, so I get roughly more SP (depending on how I manage it).

And those limits are why this exception to the rule is permitted. Characters can be created and transferred, but SP cannot be transferred to characters. The ONLY way to get SP is to train, which takes time, planning, and effort. Who owns the account can change, but how SP is obtained cannot.


Btw, CCP does not like to refund SP. They only do it when something is being taken out of the game. For that to happen, something has to be broke. They would rather repurpose a skill, like the racial diversity skill that is now an ally tax reduction skill.

The biggest fail in this thread is that OP and some others seem to think that there is value in either SP or PLEX when it comes to EvE.

This is a mistake. The only thing of any real value is time. Both in terms of training time and experience playing the game. Instant gratification will not make this game better in any way. Learn to be patient and learn to play within your means. You will get to that BS/T2/T3/Capital eventually.

The argument about the Character Baazar providing an instant win already may be partially true, as it does allow a complete noob to purchase a Titan character for ISK. However, someone, at some point, has spent time training for that Titan character. No character in EvE is ever skilled up in any other way except by somebody training it for a period of time.

This is the base mechanic of EvE skill progression and should not be changed. If you are lazy and impatient, go for your life and buy a character. I am sure we will all enjoy the ensuing humorous kill-mails.

…and the buyer's perspective is irrelevant to the overall game economy and ecology.

Buying SP means creating time that was never spent in or on the game. This simple fact breaks everything and makes it fundamentally different from character trading. It doesn't matter how much or how little SP you get, it still appears out of nowhere and therefore breaks stuff. No ifs or buts — it is broken, period.

In addition, it doesn't actually solve any kind of problem. Limiting the purchasing ability doesn't solve anything — it just breaks things less, and the optimal limit would thus be “nothing at all” at which point nothing gets broken.

So what you end up with is an idea that breaks the game in exchange for nothing. This makes it a fundamentally flawed idea that hinges on complete misconceptions about how just about everything in EVE works.

No, because the current system doesn't let you bypass time requirements or buy skillpoints — it only lets you gain access to time already spent and to skills already trained — whereas the proposed system does the exact opposite: it bypasses time and gives you unassigned SP. For that reason it will thankfully never happen.

It's simple. He wants more SP now and he can't have it. No matter how well we explain the system, all it this does is tell the person what they don't want to hear. So, they tune it out, say things core to the game are irrelevant, and make bad arguments. You don't even know how lucky you are.

EVE was designed so people can't come into the game and get to the level of an older character by sitting all day on their parents connection while the older players graduate and get jobs.


Character transfers are world different from buying SP. I've already explained why and it forced you to modify your argument. Now you want to buy SP on par with character transfers. The person who buys the account has the illusion that a character and SP has been instantly created. It is not perception to think otherwise, it is narrow-mindedness. Buying a character is not an exception to the rule. You can only buy characters that exist. SP is not created.


There is a limited supply of each, and the further back you go, the harder they are to come by. Those limitations and unwanted SP drawbacks, plus the fact that is no SP is created, are why the system is permitted. If CCP magically created characters then you would be right about SP just being created, but they don't. They don't even sell the characters. You can't even pay more for more SP to start with.

The vast majority of the EVE community is united against one thing: pay to win. CCP wanted to have PLEX for remaps and that was seen as pay to win. The mere perception of it will cause interstellar riots. There is an in-game monument dedicated to the event.

So many people have explained it so many times that I honestly think you are trolling, but for other people reading this, I'm going to write up a bullet response and hope that they don't fall in the same line of thinking as your post and the op.

• Instantly Generating skillpoints is not the same as transferring skillpoints (in the form of characters).
• Being able to instantly generate skillpoints through out of game currency would directly influence both the market and general gameplay in a BAD BAD way, comparable to today's economy.
• If you are logging off for a week or month to train a skill, then you're not really that much into the game, or are you? I can only assume that you have done the tutorial and started doing missions or something. I understand if you think you're not "powerful" enough to do anything worthwhile in the game, but if that is the case, you couldn't be more wrong.
• A character two or three weeks old shouldn't be training amarr battleship V, as it's unlikely that you'll be using it succesfully anyway. Start with the smaller stuff. Frigates, destroyers, cruisers and ALL the support skills you need.