Assembly Hall

How do they not? Either they are expensive enough that players need to consider whether they are worth the iSK which favors the wealthy, or they are so cheap that they just become mandatory and everyone uses them without thinking.

The later case adds nothing but busy work to the game, while the former favours the wealthy.

There needs to be some trade off to using them to make the choice meaningful and ISK is not the best choice as it favours established players.

You ran into your own law on this one, Malc.

Implants also have an ISK cost.

In the event that my proposal was accepted, the demand for learning implants would plummet, if for no other reason than each character would only need 1 rather than 5. The simplest way to protect LP store income would be to add learning boosters to LP stores (as suggested in the proposal IIRC) and make them cheap. Say 1-2% of the price of the equivalent implant per dose. That puts a +5 booster at, what? 1200LP and 1.2M ISK.

Then they'd be universally available, impossible to corner and widely advertised to any player doing even L1 missions for income.

Then there's also the issue of granularity. As a rich old player, I can plonk down for a pair of +5s whenever I feel like training extra fast. That +5 goodness is easy for me to achieve, but it's a very high hill for a new player to climb, But that new player can buy a few booster shots and amp up his training speed without making a huge downpayment in advance.

Not having to risk high priced implants if you don't want to reduces the grind and means that you dont have to choose between training skills and having fun. Anything, anything that undermines the horrible terribads who grief new players out of the game (and ruin EVE's reputation amongst potential players) by telling them to grind missions to earn +5s and then "stay in hi-sec until you have enough SP for 0.0" is good for the game and good for the new players.

There is explicitly a game play choice, because there remain several strong use cases for implants

1) My holiday clone! I'm going away for 2 weeks and I can't log in to apply a new booster every 3 days
2) My empire mission/trade/R&D/production alt! This guy will never consensually PvP, so why not use implants?
3) My character farm! I'm training characters for sale. Using a learning implant will significantly reduce my effort:ISK ratio
4) I live in the ass end of W-space! Supplying boosters is irritating, but implants just keep working
5) I'm a lo-sec pirate and I know how to get my pod out! Why rent my SP gain when I can buy?
6) Pretty much any well funded character role that isn't routinely exposed to pod loss and wants to train SP

I had not considered this in the context of implants staying in the game. Boosters would add choice in that case.

Boosters without learning implants just become a 'no choice' option. Boosters in the context of learning implants provide an alternative choice for people who do not want to be at a SP accumulation disadvantage but also do not want their 'out in space doing stuff' implant slots tied up by non-interaction learning implants.

It is nothing to do with risk. I routinely PvP in implants which are more expensive than a +5 learning set. But every time I choose to use these 'interacting' implants I lose SP because I am not in the +5 set. Encouraging people to sit in 'non-interacting' learning implants is bad because we should be encouraged to be in 'interacting' implants instead.

The decision is analogous to manufacturing with a bpo or a bpc. Both have plausible use cases.

Pretty much all of your use cases are just balancing your perceived risk of losing your clone vs. the cost of replacing them. It's much like insurance, another mechanic many people think is problematic, where if you don't think you will lose a clone you get the implant, and if you estimate your chance of losing a clone is above extra cost of the booster, you go booster. I guess it is additional gameplay, but practically for most players there is no choice - your trader/industrialist will always go implant, and the active PvPer will always go booster.

It might reduce the hesitation of those with learning implants to PvP, but still, the PvPer has the problem that boosters are mandatory. There is no reason for them not to use them and thus you have to buy and use the most expensive one you can afford. Once you identify yourself as likely to lose the clone, or benefit too much from the pirate implant set to go without, you have no trade-off to make except for how much ISK you are willing to spend (which favours established players).