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Yup. That's exactly along the lines I was thinking of. It still produces an advantage that reduces the cost of a job over competitors who haven't trained the skill, but it is reduced in power such that it remains to some extent optional. As you say, you can always build in cheaper systems instead of training the skill. This solution would suit me just fine.

I liked the rest of your post, but this idea I quoted above is just plain wrong. High skills should never guarantee a profit at anything, especially market activities.

Hey, it's great that you're stepping up into the proud tradition of the CSM just apologizing for CCP's decision to radically depart from prior, fair practices, it really is, but the rest of the community isn't as bound by your honor code. So here's the situation:

This is the first time that CCP has removed a skill (not nerfed, removed) and openly admitted it would not refund SP because they can't be bothered to put forth the effort. This, in a game where a lot of the most meaningful choices a player can make - the reason many keep subscribing month after month - revolves directly around the trade offs that everyone makes in their skill queue. That's a pretty ******* important aspect to one of the most unique features of EVE.

I was pissed when recent announcements made my decision to train up Scrapmetal Processing largely worthless, but didn't expect a skill point refund, because the skill still existed - it got nerfed. It happens, and because of how the skill queue works in EVE these types of nerfs suck more than in other MMOs, but hey, it happens.

This is the complete removal of a skill. Go ahead, try and deny it.

It's simply because CCP can't be arsed to put forth the effort to perform the traditional refund for removed skills that we are in this dumb situation where the forums are spitballing replacement skill ideas. Why didn't they just invent a bunch of new skills when they replaced the learning skills? Because that's dumb, counter-intuitive, and unfair. What changed between then and now?

That's the question the CSM should be asking, not demanding the player base toe the line. What changed between then and now? Is this what we can expect going forward whenever CCP removes a skill that players deliberately chose to train over any other skill, for very specific reasons?

So, thanks again, but I think people are going to rightly continue to remind CCP that a refund is the right way to handle skill removal.

I won't be happy unless this is is refunded or made in to the must have at 5 to play that it was. I would not have wasted time training it to 5 if it was not.

So um - yeah. Still consider myself a new pilot. Wanted to get into Industry. Been training Material Efficiency the last umpteen days cause it sure seemed pretty important. Read the devblog and this thread tonight and finding that a pretty much mandatory skill for an industry pilot is now worthless.

Its not like this was an easy to find change, nor did I get a little pop up on my screen telling me I may want to rethink my training plan as the skill I intended to train was going to be removed from the game.

For a new toon like me, none of the proposed changes would have caused me to train this skill at such an early stage in my career.

I am glad I read about it tonight though. Removed the skill from queue with 8 days left to level 5

The old Material Efficiency skill was incredibly important to get to 4 and had enough of a benefit at 5 to make it worth taking the extra time to get that level.

What about making this bonus a bit like the Logistics skill, where that last level is still quite important, by providing a 15% discount per level to the production fees. This moves the baseline for established producers to be 25% of the production fees, so you might want to multiply the production fees for everyone by somewhere between 2 and 4 to counter this (assuming you'll want 4, since you want the production fees to be high).

A more moderate solution (which does not make level 5 very attractive) is a 10% per level reduction paired with a doubling of base production fees.

Assuming the 15% / level, a 4x base cost multiplier, and a 10% (multiplied to 40%) fee, you are looking at a production cost of 110% the material costs for someone with level 5, and 140% for someone without the skill. This basically means a 28% cheaper production for someone with level 5, which is close to the benefit provided by the Kronos version.

Could we please keep in mind that the skill is NOT supposed to be mandatory again?

Something like 5-10%/level should be sufficient incentive to train it to IV. Balancing it for perfect value at V and keeping the 'not mandatory' policy might be aiming too high.


I'm really glad only one of my toons is affected - yet on principle I'd still favor a refund. However, I can emphasize with the reasons given not to do that.
(All the reasons except for the 'too much work for the DB team' one, though, which is hilarious. Given the fact that it's not the first time, that workload should be 1 second to start the refund script.)

At least the skill rank isn't as high as Research Project Management. They didn't touch that skill, but instead killed what it was used for.

I have 18 chars with Prod Eff V, Needless to say that this "new" skill would likely only be trained to level 2 or 3.

I am fairly sure that people are not going to be building Caps in Jita, so the savings from building major parts in major hubs is moot.

The skill was removed, and under the new wastage system then i think that's fine. My guess here is that they don't want to refund because it would just mean way too many free points getting handed out. For those who say "but it is a industry skill, and it still is", meh.... Would you be happy if they changed the navigation skill to give an agility bonus instead of a speed bonus?

(there's 10% waste now too for those of you who say there's now no waste, I mean, THINK about it...)...

The previous skill was not overpowered but it was required for those who specialized in production. Level3 was ample for most people who used it for ammo and perhaps their own drones. Under the new system the skill has no use, I understand that. But re-tasking a skill to do something not even closely related to the first skill is just lame.

As for us leaving it too long to raise the issue with you guys.. Well the last "statement" that was made in a dev blog was that you had not decided what to do... So don't blame the players for waiting to long to tell you we don't like it, blame yourselves for keeping it hidden beyond the point of it being actionable.

I don't know who spent the time dealing with R.A.M. and R.Db conversions (To make sure players like me wouldn't "exploit" it on patch day), but that's the same level of competence that should have been used in designing this skill change.

This is about the 4th major "industry" nerf that has happened since I started playing. I really get the impression you guys dont want it. All of these changes your making only ends up with one major change anyhow, It's a HUGE isk sink. I cant help but think all of the changes (Including the idiotic move over this skill) was just to suck isk out of eve.

- Bumping the rank up without changing accumulated skillpoints is actually probably way easier than removals or wholesale adjustments; the biggest hurdle from a DB-stuff point of view is the skill queue, and in this scenario we would probably just pause the skill, remove it from queues and then make the change.
- Common spot for all changes is the patchnotes; I don't want to talk about exact times because Community is co-ordinating when they're released, but they're a shade under 6000 words and should cover everything.





Some more general things:
- A big part of the reason why we're pushing back on a reimbursement here is that it's a thing that is becoming a habit and we want to push back against it being the default option. There's a lot of things feeding into this, but a major part of it is the model of the value of skill training that considers skills as an ongoing cycle of anticipation and accomplishment, and the way that (for many people, we understand how skill plans work) future training goals more more defined as longer-term skills get close to finishing. By giving people windfalls of skillpoints, we a) suddenly cut short the anticipation, which is expected to also reduce the feeling of accomplishment, and b) break the natural cycle of goal-setting by completing goals unexpectedly early and without the lead-in time to consider and select new ones. We understand that the psychological value that this sets up is not considered relevant by some of our players, but we have to also consider the ones who do derive satisfaction from this sort of system, and skillpoint windfalls can be self-defeating for them. This is a much larger, more extended discussion that there isn't really scope for here, I just want to highlight some of the things we're thinking about to give you a better sense of why we're pushing back on a reimbursement. We do of course recognize that removal and reimbursement works here from a very rational perspective, but not everyone gains value from strictly rational calculation.
- A general percentage reduction to *all* jobs would (perversely) probably actually be less troublesome to push higher; the 1% is somewhat constrained by our desire not to push build times below copy times, so if we did a skill that affected copy and build equally (along with research, which is clearly a pretty valuable bonus for people researching in the new system), we would probably push it up to the 3-5%/level range.
- Adding some new skills with this skill at 5 as a prerequisite is something we could definitely look into; is this something that would make people feel better about having it at 5? They would then likely be "advanced", optional skills targeted at specific niches and very much not required to compete, but we could probably pick a handful such that everyone has at least one they'd want.

I would be happy with this. We have suggested 3% already, but obviously if you would be prepared to go to 5% per level then that would be great. As was suggested by someone earlier you could make the bonuses incremental so either 1%/2%/3%/4%/5% for 15% bonus or 1%/3%/5%/7%/9% for 25% bonus. I like the idea of the second as then training from level 4 > 5 will grant a 9% bonus, which is quite substantial.



Obviously it would depend on what the skills would be. Did you have anything in mind, even if it's just an idea?