EVE General Discussion

That would indeed be arbitrary, but as luck would have it, it is trivially easy to distinguish the Vanguard changes from the historical cases when they've handed out SP after a skill change.

The most prominent feature that distinguishes Vanguard from those historical cases is that no skills are being changed in Vanguard.

Some read Malcanis' Law as something that must be obeyed rather than as an observation on a pattern, it seems.

Oh, and also…

Probably the best example: Ethnic Relations → Diplomatic Relations.

An old skill was replaced by a new one, providing a vastly different bonus to an an entirely unrelated mechanic. No SP.

Care to cite an example where this was done without something that had been trained being removed or which is not done in line with ensuring people maintain an ability they used to have before a change?

Also, if in future starting skill points are dropped back for some reason, would you also agree that your skill points be reduced as well?

Though personally myself and my alts would all love the free SP, you know, just to help out the new players, and not because of any form of self interest.

Yep. But since most people that had more SP than me also had those skills trained also got the same benefit, relatively speaking it did nothing in terms of closing a gap.

Here is a very subtle lesson from economics: it is the relative relationship that matters. Absolute relationships can be important, but in the end they determine very, very little.

I'd argue the same is true for SP as well. Early on 350,000 vs. 50,000 is a huge difference due to diminishing returns. Later on it does not matter.

Not sure what's more depressing, the amount of greediness surrounding these 350,000 SP or the fact that not too long ago players actually demanded SP in return for the several hours the server was down that night CCP Dev's nearly pulled an all-nighter to bring the server back up in stable fashion. Actually, the worst of it may be that I'm not really surprised.

The extra SP is meant for fresh new players to get a small head start on their first few moments in Eve, not be a freebie for anyone because, "What about us?" No offense towards the OP, hell even 5 months is new, but CCP is trying to give players just starting their first 5 days with, for them at least, a nice little pick-me-up. For the rest of us, don't worry; 350k is merely pennies compared to what you already have in the first place, and most of us have already unintentionally (and often negligently) wasted far more on irrelevant or nowadays obsolete skill choices ourselves.

Too bad it only happened in your head.

No, it was free. You're just confused because you fail to separate the concept of SP and the concept of ability.

An even better cut-off is 2 weeks, since that means it is really hard be in a spot where you'd lose anything in the NPE switch-over. A year is so hugely outside the realm of the NPE that it becomes outright ridiculous to suggest that they are in any way affected by this change. After all, that's what we're actually talking about here: we're switching from an old NPE layout to a new one, which means some new characters may accidentally be caught below the intended baseline for no reason other than bad timing. The hand-out to ≤14-day old characters smoothes out this transition and pretty much completely eliminates any chance of that happening.

Extending it to a year makes no sense because anyone who's below the new baseline a full year after the character birth are actually better off nuking that character and rolling a new one.

The funny thing is that older players seem to be the least butthurt by it. This is not very surprising since the NPE doesn't really affect them in any way.

Yes. They've seen these kinds of transitions before; they know the principles at play; and they aren't particularly surprised that those not affected by the change aren't getting any SP.

No. I've been opposed to the OP pretty much all along, and now I still am because he's still not affected by this change. Well… I hope he's not affected by this change, because that would mean he has spent the last 5 months with an empty skill queue. And anyway, if that's the case, he's better off biomassing and recreating the character from scratch.

…except that they haven't been removed — not partially and definitely not entirely. Every level is still there and every level still matters as much as it used to. The levels are still required for the same things they've always been required for, and nothing has changed in terms of how skills interact or are dependent on each other.

So it's more akin to the skills being the same they've always been because, well, they haven't changed in any way.

In fact, if it had happened the way you claim, the new characters wouldn't need the additional skill levels they're getting. But of course, they do need them because the skills and their levels haven't been removed, altered, skipped, fiddled with or changed in any way whatsoever.

This is almost exactly what is not happening. Quite the opposite.

I'd be fine with this, or even make the refund a declining function of time. My view is that at this point, I don't need much of an SP boost. But for a player less than a year old but outside the window of getting the SP boost it would be a bigger deal. Either way works for me.

At his point I'd recommend CCP take the path that pisses off the least number of players.

Iow: just release the patch as planend.