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UPDATE: Upon reflection, I've changed my mind about this proposed change and blogged about why.

It's almost like you're trying to turn skill training into some weird market mini game. Or wondering how you're going to avoid screams of despair due to some planned elimination of skills that people have spent considerable time training already. Or perhaps you're just trying to milk more cash from new players desperate to "catch up".

I am strongly opposed to any change that would let characters sell what amounts to "skillrights" to other characters for reasons stated by Chribba, Ripard Teg and others in earlier comments. An important and unique feature of EVE is the sense of investment. SP as a result of training choices are a huge part of that. Besides being unnecessarily complicated, the proposed system is likely to cheapen that sense investment and could backfire with regard to how much value people would attach to their characters under such a system. When people feel less invested and characters can just be mindlessly churned, they won't get attached to their characters and thus no real emotional investment in their in-game identity.

What is a potentially reasonable alternative to address skill training "mistakes" or never-gonna-use-em-again skillpoints would be a very limited capability for a character to draw a small % of existing skillpoints into a pool that could then be reallocated for other skills for THEMSELVES ONLY. At least that would still have some consequences attached to it for that character. Any such thing should always be discernible via API keys and should be expensive to perform and only allowed once in a blue moon.

There are also better ways to support new players in "catching up", one of which is just bite the damn bullet and start them with a million SPs, some allocated to basic support skills and some unallocated. I started playing when characters began with 900K allocated SP; while I recall certain frustrations in not being able to fly certain ships for awhile, I never felt particularly crippled and certainly was able to enjoy fleets with friends from pretty much the get-go. You could also do a LOT more to aid new players in making more informed early skill training choices by providing more explanatory info in skill descriptions about a skill's use, its general priority in the big picture, and complementary skills that make sense to train in a linear or alternating sequence.

tl;dr The dev blog's proposed idea is ripe for exploitation and cheapens that very important sense of investment in a character that helps new players feel committed to the game.

Pay to win. Bad idea, don't do it.

Unfortunately, this is not possible.

Right now, affecting a character transfer causes 2 PLEX to be removed from CCP's Liabilities sheet and resolved. Introduction of skill extractors without at least attempting to mirror this realization of liabilities is bad for business. There's absolutely no chance they will be introduced without an associated PLEX/Aurum cost.

Yey, it's time to train "useless skills" on all my accounts, and every 2-3 month i'll get 1m SP faster....

Seriously, no. No way. I really hope it'll never exist.


How are you going to "win" only with SP gain ? ^^

As long that the PLEX prices do not show an unhealthy sprint up or down CCP does not matter, they won't interfere. Nothing new, move along people, move along.

Skill training is already a market "minigame." Visit the character bazaar for more details. I, personally, keep some of my accounts isk neutral by training pilots specifically to sell on the character bazaar.


This is a good phrase.

I do not like this proposal.

Let me elaborate. IRL, time is one of the most valuable commodities. It’s one of the few things you can't buy more of. I like that EVE has kept consistent with this reality through the years. Time in EVE boils down to SP generation and has always been the one of the more difficult limitations to work around. Sure you can go to the Bazaar and purchase a new char that fits generally into your game plan. But it won’t be perfect; you’ll have to do some additional work, end up getting more that you wanted, have to deal with a sordid past or have to wait until that right build comes along. Point being, there are drawbacks that you have to accept to get what you want.

I think pretty much everyone agrees, ISK is easy to come by in this game. Creating a drawback in the form of ISK is pretty meaningless. Based on the proposed implementation, it feels as though there will be no downside to buying or selling SP. You’ll be free to build reasonably high SP characters without having to be invested in the game or its community. This also makes choosing a career path less of a commitment. It removes the risk from choosing and pursuing a given profession because with a little ISK I can be anything else in a few moments.

This may sound silly, but I view my SP (which is in excess of 100M) as a sort of badge indicating my commitment to this game and community. It’s the one aspect of the game that has encouraged me to keep my accounts subbed and generating SP. Because I know I can’t just go to the market and buy SP, I keep my accounts subbed even when I’m not actively playing. This proposal turns that upside down. Why bother keeping my accounts continually subbed, when I know I can just buy more SP on a whim? Granted it will come at a cost, but what’s a few billion ISK?? The bazaar doesn’t allow this kind of exchange and shouldn’t imo.

That being said, there are certainly improvements that can be made to facility the exchange of characters. It would be nice to see an in game market for this and the ability to rename characters, but please reconsider allowing the exchange of SP. It seems like an easy fix on the surface, but I’m concerned about the lasting impacts it will have on the game and community as a whole.

Oh wow, and i actually think you're serious about this...

^^^^ This.

I think this is the first time I have ever commented officially on a proposed change, but this one, as others have expressed, ruins the complete and utter fundamental of what makes EVE a unique game. The time and training aspect is one of the things that attracted me in the first place. And Pay to Win makes me feel a little bit nauseous, like the game is stooping to a new (and more common) low in the realm of online computer gaming.

While I can't claim to fully understand it, and I apologise if I have misread something (it is currently 4:15am- AU timezone... yay. :P), this seems to be a way that the richer, older, not very new players will be able to exploit their past bad decisions for more iskies, and not a lot of risk or loss.

While I haven't really invested my time into it greatly, elements in game like the Opportunities feature add more to the starter gameplay that simply inputting some credit card details. Being able to explore and engage with the universe is one, if not the main, feature that makes this game great.

This idea in its essence, could also spike the cost of PLEX even more than its already RIDICULOUS high, and, as someone who is not able to spare the rl monies to sub, and quite likes having a life away from the computer and trying to farm isk for Game Time, I would be greatly annoyed that evidently anyone who has to PLEX to play would have to spend even more time and effort on things that take me away from PvP, for the benefit of people who can't be bothered to make an effort at all.

"On top of all that, you have to accept that you don’t get any personalization of the character you’re buying. The name, exact skill distribution and reputation are all set before you buy."

One of my favourite things about starting EVE was the ability to create my own new characters, and I still enjoy the process I have to go through to create a character. Its like the Sims, but better, cause spaceships :P I agree that it would be good to have a way to change character names (including a log of past names), maybe with a limit on the number of changes one character can go through in its lifetime? Its already possible to fiddle with a character and change it already ( when I did it, it only cost me on PLEX at the time- and I could change almost every aspect of Naughty), so how would this change in any way benefit the personalisation problem, beyond the already established methods?

Like Robnik here, I am by no means a vet, and Naughty is only just 3 years old (as of 5 days ago), so this is not just someone whining because I spent 'years and years and new players get everything and older players get **** on, whine whine...whinge'. And hells, I'd be lying if I didn't say that the idea of investing some monies (even though I get screwed by the exchange rates) for instant SP is one that makes me smile! But even with that being the case, I would miss the satisfaction that comes from, plain and simple, making an effort. How else do we learn but from our mistakes?

Also, and on a far more important note, 'Skill Training Completed'. <<< Pure satisfaction.

I could accept this. If you could internally swap a portion of SP from useless skills to useful, there would be no net gain of SP on a character. I would still want to see some limits on the number of times this can be done per year, or a limit on how much SP one could manipulate like this.

And yes, I agree that newer players should get a bit more SP to help them feel relevant. Several of my friends who I convinced to play EVE left simply because they took breaks to train skills and just never came back. One million is not excessive, especially if it is pre-specced out to allow newbros to fly basic fits for PVE and PVP.