EVE Information Portal

I will too, but I think it's a bad way to go abut business.

We do need new players, but the real issues are retention, for both new and old alike. Eve is a rough game, and 90% of new players never even make it out of the starting gates. So with maybe a 10% retention of new players, you have to do something to keep the older players also, cause if we are loosing more vets than the 10% of incoming players, then the game is shrinking overall. Which is obviously the case, cause I see it everyday I log in. Even on the weekends during both EU and US prime, the numbers are a lot lower than just a year ago, much less 3 years ago when I started.

So CCP either needs to find a way to bring in new blood faster than it's loosing it, or find a way to keep more of it's vets. As we have seen, they keep adding more to the new player experience, but yet the nubers keep falling, so maybe a bit more focus on vets might help retain more of us.

What really sucks it the fact that they haven't been listening to this, and while we beg fore more content, they would rather try to push artificial changes at us which end up reducing content. Where as they could spend less time on horrid ideas like this one, and instead add capital level missions, escalations and such. Add in content that revolves around Sov, so that indexes are based on more than exceedingly boring anoms. Give us "alliance" missions in our outposts and have multi-site/multi-system escalations, that pay out on par or better, but require more investment to do.

There are hundreds of idea that have been placed at CCPs feet that could easily boost the games longevity and enjoyment factor, but they would rather toss out fast changes that require minimal effort and produce more quick cash. Which is a shame, because there are a lot of things that would take a bit more design and programming time, but would drastically make the game much more playable and give it a much deeper level of play-ability.

and more...

i think most whiners dont undestand that its just alternative for Pay2Win character bazar just instead paying for new avatar you pay for new skills on your old avatar but with SP sink

Oh well
Low SP char farms a thing ?

PS. If you rage quiting, can i have your stuff.

Thats a nice summery, in that respect, I think its a good idea, the total POOL of SKILLPOINTS in EVE stays the same, and I like the idea.

Sure, but you can already do this. Are people really wasting active accounts with NO characters training? Any account I have with characters not likely to continue training will always have one slot reserved for training a new character solely to be sold on the bazaar. You can already convert active account time into ISK via bazaar sales for accounts that you were going to have active anyway. The proposed system makes this somewhat easier to accomplish, but it doesn't necessarily introduce a new element.

Ppl chill out, we don't even know all of the details and, as ppl've already stated, it doesn't create sp out of air, someone has to lose it first. I bet ppl would whine the same if a char bazaar would have been announced this way, but it is working just fine. The game can't stay the same forever.

Well, this is equivalent to paying real money for SP, as you pay real money to train then more real money to extract those skills. Okay, I'm not too bothered by that in itself, but you might as well be up front about it, you're not fooling anyone. This is going to give you a lot of bad publicity, you'll probably set the aurum price too high so it'll barely get used and it doesn't fix the SP wall faced by new players, it just makes it look like a paywall instead. If I were in your position, I'd be concerned about the effect this will have on retention.

Where is the actual skill training reform? Remaps, learning implants, steep requirements to merely sit in or fit ships and modules. These are places where design by delete key (and LP refunds for learning implants) is actually appropriate unlike the emergent gameplay you've been applying the delete key to recently.

As it stands right now, we're paying real money (our subscription fee) for a standard rate of Skill Point gain for 1 month.
Baring implants (which are limited), there is nothing we can do to increase our Skill Point gain and I believe thats how things should stay.

It's one of the things that sets Eve apart from the other games out there, and for the last 10 years it's worked!

It's already much easier for new players to gain skill points now than it was a few years ago, and if you look even further back (anyone remember the 'learning' skills?) the new players have it really good right now, and that's a good thing. I like that new players are better enabled to get stuck into Eve, but enabling them to buy SP is too much.

By all means, bring the Character Bazarr into the game to make it more visible.
If you want to mess around with SP, maybe part of the new 'ingame' Character Bazaar would be a feature where you buy the character, and for an additional cost, you are able to completely redistribute all of that characters skill points to better suit your needs, but they must stay belonging to the same character (and maybe have a small element of diminishing returns).

I'd even still be happy if you allowed people to sell their unwanted Skill Points back to Concord at a set price, so people can clean up their character sheets, but those SP's are destroyed, not put up for a sale to another player.

Overall, I like the fact that you're looking at this, you've got an idea and you're asking for our opinion.
We already buy our monthly supply of skill points when we pay for subscription. Allowing people to pay more for more SP is too close to pay2win.

Skillpoint extractor / Neural Packages kill proper character progression!
Progression is very essential for a new pilot. He/She reads the skills, considers wether to spend time on it or not and starts to plan. Also, I'm very certain we all remember that very moment we first got into ship X and undocked. We trained for it HARD, we waited, we earned ISK to spend on fitting and so on. It was very well earned and gave a great sence of archievement. So do you really want new players to buy themselfs in, jump in a fancy ship, fly out and get podded home just to quit eve again?

If you as a player feel like you are ready to take on higher archievement and the skills are holding you up. That's when the Character bazzar might make sence. It balances for demand and supply and does not instantly change a characters attribute in some magic way. Remember the 3 Levels? Customer, Player, Character? What level do you want to 'fix' or improve really?

I don't want to tell new pilots pilots to just go buy some neural packages. It's the lamest, entousiasm-killing thing you can tell a new players.

Boost new players in better ways. Give them Skillpoints for archieving certain stuff like the opportunities! Give them boosts for game-interaction with other players. Provide them features that take them into the actual game rather than to a store.

CCP you have this great sandbox, try less to interfer with how people play the sand - give them more sand to play with!

Character Bazzar, for transfers - why not?
Just the transfer system tho. Ensure players who want to sell or buy a character get that extra option to easely doing it without spending too much time on forums and 3rd party time. What I think could be usefull:
> Official 'transfer' notifications on characters that everyone can see. So players know when Char XYZ has switched an owner. Of course not "what owner", but that it switched.
> Filtering, sorting, auctions, ect.

Is this a financial attempt?
I understand from looking at what financial numbers of CCP out there look like, you need new ways to get income. Now, there's many other systems that provide solid ways to generate income with microtransactions that do not influence the game mechanics or player experience in a bad way. Look out for them, or ask us for idea's > Skillpoints is one of the holy things you shouldn't touch that way.

Internal bets?
If anyone at CCP said "this is a bad idea!", now it's the time to go to that person and receive the "I told you so!" right away.