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Dev Blog: Exploring The Character Bazaar & Skill Trading

First post First post First post
Author
Ima Wreckyou
The Conference Elite
Safety.
#381 - 2015-10-15 17:43:56 UTC
Aaaand they are at it again.. totally disconnected...

They rather add some micro-transaction crap and delete some possibilities than deliver something that makes the game more interesting and worth playing...
Querns
Science and Trade Institute
Caldari State
#382 - 2015-10-15 17:45:07 UTC
Hendrink Collie wrote:
Querns wrote:
Tado wrote:
No thank you this is a terrible idea.

I have been playing this game since day one and for me this idea of yours will kill EVE for me.

I'm going to go out on a limb and assume your motivation for playing Eve is to watch the SP number go up.

I'd recommend Cookie Clicker as a more satisfying number incrementing simulator, personally.


I don't know, I personally really like making the ship spinner counter go up. Smile

Good point. Eve also makes my laptop overheat less than cookie clicker does. :V

This post was crafted by the wormhole expert of the Goonswarm Economic Warfare Cabal, the foremost authority on Eve: Online economics and gameplay.

Devin Wallace
Sebiestor Tribe
Minmatar Republic
#383 - 2015-10-15 17:45:11 UTC
The overall concept is disturbing at a glance, seems more reasonable if you read the fine print, and here's what I understood:

If I had some time and a calculator, how much money would it actually cost to build a brand new character up from 0 SP to around 80 million SP ?

The Aurum fee for a Transneural Extraction Packet is going to be "analogous"? to the currently existing double-PLEX transfer fee. Does that mean it's actually going to cost 2 PLEX ?

At current market value, I believe 1 PLEX is equivalent to $20.00
So, let's assume that this fee is actually $40.00

To skill from 0 to 5 is going to take 10 fees 10x 40= $400.00
To skill from 5 to 50 is going to take 112 fees 112x 40= $4,480.00
To skill from 50 to 80 is going to take 150 fees 150x 40 = $6,000.00

So, some people think that trolls are going to "exploit" this system to create 2 day old bait characters
That would cost anywhere from roughly $3,000 to $10,000, if the aurum fee is truly "analogous".

You know what I'm thinking right? People in EVE Online are literally so insane that they would already have gladly paid $10,000 to do what is described above, even though 3,000 would get you a nice tradehub undock camper toon. It will happen. Probably hundreds, if not thousands of times.

This game mechanic would potentially create millions of dollars for CCP.

The ONLY thing holding this ridiculous Pay2Win feature back, is that the skillpoints have to be currently existing on another character and cannot be purchased directly from aurum store. That creates a market cap on availability that would mean creating 80 million SP 1 day old characters is probably impossible.

If the aurum shop is selling the transneural skill extractor and transneural skill packets at a lower price, for the sake of arguing let's say 7 dollars, it's more available to less committed players, but why would CCP want to now be making only 500k-1 million dollars when they could have been making 5-10 million dollars ?

This is what everyone is thinking about.

Also, slippery slope, this would set a precedent for a pay2win culture in EVE that will ruin everything about EVE Online.

Please tell me my math and assumptions are blatantly wrong, I'm prone to delusions.



I hope I don't meet the worm that creates the holes,  must be immortal.

PotatoOverdose
School of Applied Knowledge
Caldari State
#384 - 2015-10-15 17:45:43 UTC  |  Edited by: PotatoOverdose
Feyd Rautha Harkonnen wrote:
There already is pay-to-skip-levelling-up, it's called the character bazaar, so that horse left the barn a long time ago.

However, moving SP from one toon to another seems a bad idea, I will say I don't know why because agreeing with Ripard Teg on anything is abhorrent to me.

I am ok with re-allocating SP within a toon, with the diminishing returns approach suggested by CCP. Its re-allocating, not buying.

I am even more ok with making the new player experience more compelling and less an utter ballache, by giving subbed toons 10m SP to allocate as they see fit on day one. This reduces the initial SP grind ballache while not breaking overall SP progression to high SP toons. i.e. Lets be honest, it still takes about 80-85m SP and upwards of 4 years to fly most of the subcap stuff you want to fly well.

F

It's bad because selling SP for isk, in any arbitrary amount, in any arbitrary package removes hard choices from the game. I like hard choices. I like playing games with hard choices.

Today you can buy a character, true. But that is a character crafted by another, with it's own flaws and skills not made to tailor for each individual. And you pay a market rate for them - some combinations of SP are worth more than others depending on the meta. Creating such characters, choosing to buy characters that are imperfect in one way or another represents hard choices made by either the buyer or the seller, and this is good.
Scott Dracov
Science and Trade Institute
Caldari State
#385 - 2015-10-15 17:46:03 UTC
This is the first post I have ever felt compelled to make. I am a member of the silent majority that plays the game and not the forum. I am a new character in eve terms and would benefit most from this and I despise everything about this idea.

if I have a vote I VOTE NO! NEVER! CEASE AND DESIST.

If you do this I will feel compelled to terminate my commitment to paying for eve via subscription and cease all involvement in this game. Why? Because in my mind this is CCP cashing out with no holes bared, nothing sacred left and with no regard to the most core game mechanic that kept legions of eve players including myself active... the one mechanic to not be undermined that eve ever had.

This is a tipping point in which it seems CCP for what ever reason feels they can now toy with the golden goose that has kept hundreds of thousands of players committed to financing this game by training their toons with total relentless devotion.

Why did so many players do this including myself up until this proposed change? because time was an ineffable element in eve that you could never get back if you did not use it and there was no way to cheat time on a single character you were training. You could always buy a toon or train alts but if you wanted to experience something real and unique in eve first hand and did not want a shortcut of buying another players toon you had to invest time into doing it through the skill training system. You could train alts but they too must adhere to the principle of time that must be invested to obtain any skill training completions.

CCP has already leaned on this pillar of eve in multitraining on the same account and encouraging character trading and these aspects are violations but they do not bring the house of cards crumbling into dust as the bedrock principle of all characters remained intact in that you could never get more skill on a single toon without paying for that skill with time through the training que.

Time is the fire in which we burn.

If you do this CCP you will have a lot of time to think about why so many players simply stopped paying you and they may not be kind enough to give you any warning post to stop your current plan before you commit to it.

They will simply just stop paying you.
Monasucks
BLACK SQUADRON.
Get Off My Lawn
#386 - 2015-10-15 17:46:25 UTC
Skinzee wrote:
Captain Africa wrote:
Tzu Wu wrote:
Captain Africa wrote:
Skinzee wrote:
All the people moaning and complaining about the idea are people that already have 50-100+ million skill points...

Yes, you've spent your fair share of time training your skills to be where they are but this is NOT pay to win...

My character has 2.2million SP and am currently training core skills and want to fly a curse as its my favorite ship..

Current training time left to fly 'efficiently' - 70d 11h 21mn...

That is effectively 2.5m SP (roughly).

If I had the option to spend £20-30 to avoid those 70days to get into the ship I want to fly and make me want to play the game more, than I'd be happy to do it.


What issue do you see of a character being 'boosted' to 5m or even 10m skillpoints etc? I imagine it wont be cheap getting millions of skillpoints doing it this way either.

I was tempted by character bazaar and buying my own character but that character would never be 'mine'... it would never be special... never have my own name etc.

I fully agree with this option as I dont see a major issue with it.

All the vets can go cry somewhere else. Just because you dont want newbies being a 'competition' in anyway...

IM A NEWB AND I WANT TO PAY A LITTLE EXTRA TO FLY A SHIP AND ENJOY THE GAME THAT I ALREADY PAY FOR!



YOU DON'T BUY YOUR WAY INTO EVE >>>YOU EARN YOUR WAY INTO EVE ....like we all did !



Don't speak for everyone man. Have you not heard of the character bazaar? Saying "we all earned it" is beyond idiotic. That's just as much p2w as this is.



Your the idiot do you really think people know me by my real name ...were working with entities . You buy an entity that is a huge difference between buying skills.

You buy a rap sheet and you have to live with the consequences...that's the eve i know ...


How is that a huge difference? THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE OTHER THAN THE BIRTHDATE OF THE CHARACTER. So you buy a character who was a previous corp thief, pirate, scammer or w/e... now what? your screwed with a character with a bad rep which you had nothing to do with.



If you buy something used - you're risk it comes with scars and some not so nice corners..
Thats a difference.

And everybody in game will know that this character is bought, everyone in corp etc. this makes the char bazar legit. you have to stand for what you have done and life with the risks ( bad standing and so on )

Monasucks Tumblr

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"A good worker is a live worker. Free to live - and work! A bad worker is a dead worker; and vice versa. Don't be a bad worker; bad workers are slaves, and dead."

Tzu Wu
State War Academy
Caldari State
#387 - 2015-10-15 17:46:40 UTC
Tado wrote:
No thank you this is a terrible idea.

I have been playing this game since day one and for me this idea of yours will kill EVE for me.



You bittervets really need to get over yourselves.You've been playing since day 1 and want to hold that "elite" status until the server finally shuts down? I say that because it seems bittervets would rather the game day then CCP make any changes that might effect their "elite" status.
Felo Maxun
Felmax Trade Inc
#388 - 2015-10-15 17:46:42 UTC
"We hope that because this feature is modeled from the Character Bazaar, a long-standing and well-established feature, we are already pointed in a good direction."


This feature is not "modeled from the Character Bazaar" not in the slightest.

There is basically only one thing in eve that cant be bought.... and you want to put it up for sale.

This is a sad day.
Jaime Wulfe
30O.
Fraternity.
#389 - 2015-10-15 17:46:42 UTC
Nope.

Eve is about learning his **** and be patient. Ruin it. go on you dumbos.
Neville Smit
The Scope
Gallente Federation
#390 - 2015-10-15 17:47:20 UTC
My first reaction to the dev blog was: "Interesting - this could give novice players more flexibility in developing their characters for different specializations. That might help with retention of new players."

But then I thought further about it, and decided that all the potential downsides greatly outweigh any benefits.

The proposed mechanics will make ISK far more important than SP. Since I can buy as much ISK as I want (using PLEX), then the amount of SP on a new character would depend mostly on how much disposable cash I am willing to spend. Yes, there's diminishing returns in the model, but no matter how you look at it, this is pay2win.

The proposed mechanics diminish the value of early character development. In fact, it makes a character more or less irrelevant - it simply becomes a vessel into which one pours SP, not an asset in game that one must carefully and thoughtfully nurture and develop. I'm not a serious role-player, but I do like that Neville Smit has had to make some commitments to developing certain skills, in order to unlock new capabilities in the game. That was an enjoyable part of EVE gameplay for me - and those kind of decisions largely go away if all I have to do is buy packets and stuff batches of unallocated SP into my body. In fact, it means I can make stupid skill selection choices faster than ever before, with fewer consequences.

Others have posted examples of how the proposed mechanics could be farmed and abused, so I won't repeat them here.

So, while my initial reaction was somewhat positive, upon reflection I've decided that I'm not a fan.

-1 on this idea.


I am an unapologetic fan of EVE Online. My blog: http://nevillesmit.com/ - My Twitter: https://twitter.com/NevilleSmit

Tzu Wu
State War Academy
Caldari State
#391 - 2015-10-15 17:47:30 UTC
Felo Maxun wrote:
"We hope that because this feature is modeled from the Character Bazaar, a long-standing and well-established feature, we are already pointed in a good direction."


This feature is not "modeled from the Character Bazaar" not in the slightest.

There is basically only one thing in eve that cant be bought.... and you want to put it up for sale.

This is a sad day.


If you don't consider the character bazaar as buying isk or even a new identity, you're either blind or just in denial.
Kilian Katar
Unknown Enterprises
#392 - 2015-10-15 17:47:35 UTC
OH OH OH and lest we forget, you wouldn't multiple training queues to train up a vast number of gank alts, 1 day old characters in t2 fitted catalysts..... YEA you go CCP
Querns
Science and Trade Institute
Caldari State
#393 - 2015-10-15 17:47:50 UTC
PotatoOverdose wrote:
Querns wrote:
PotatoOverdose wrote:
Querns wrote:
Jenn aSide wrote:

As someone else already said, CCP's move to make the game "more accessible" have been smashing successes so for.

Naivety is a bad thing for a business.

[...]
Sure, but the burden of proof is on the person who says "X happened, therefore the fact that Y also happened shows a direct relationship."

Correlation is evidence (or perhaps more accurately an analysis of evidence, but semantics). Evidence that can be used to support a conclusion of causation. Ignoring that evidence with a platitude of "correlation is not causation" is foolish.

The general public lifted "correlation is not causation" from scientific literature, most notably the "debate" on climate change. Yet, in the broad scientific community, correlation is used as evidence of causation in tens of thousands of papers across every quantifiable subject imaginable. Correlation alone does not prove causation, but it can be and is used as part of a set of proofs for causation.

Evidence alone is not sufficient. It has to be shown to directly affect the causation. Observing PCU count drop isn't even that great as evidence, because PCU itself is only tenuously related to subscriber count.

Every argument or thesis starts off with nothing but a scrap of evidence or observation. Nascent ideas are not discarded out of hand because they haven't been completely proven yet. Especially if there is some evidence for them.

My own view is that driving eve too far into the "accessible" category may result in depriving the game of unique aspects - choices with consequences.

From where I stand, the drive to make sov more accessible (looking at you sov wands & ceptors) has directly led to a great many individuals and entities out right abandoning the game entirely. This isn't some PCU count bullshit. F*ck PCU. This is about long-term players and community organizations preferring (figurative) death to living with these "ease of accessibility" changes.

Selling SP for isk, in any arbitrary amount, in any arbitrary package removes hard choices from the game. I like hard choices. I like playing games with hard choices.

Today you can buy a character, true. But that is a character crafted by another, with it's own flaws and skills not made to tailor for each individual. And you pay a market rate for them - some combinations of SP are worth more than others depending on the meta. Creating such characters, choosing to buy characters that are imperfect in one way or another represents hard choices made by either the buyer or the seller, and this is good.

If I didn't want hard choices, I'd be playing candy crush or DudeBroShooter 2015 October Edition.

Except no one on the internet actually performs the research. They proclaim "X is correlated with Y, therefore X causes Y" and are done. What's worse, is that people believe them.

This post was crafted by the wormhole expert of the Goonswarm Economic Warfare Cabal, the foremost authority on Eve: Online economics and gameplay.

Duffyman
Brutor Tribe
Minmatar Republic
#394 - 2015-10-15 17:47:54 UTC  |  Edited by: Duffyman
Hi,

not meaning to take sides, but what is the difference between this and the Character Bazaar, in terms of P2W?

edit: just saw PotatoOverdose's post and he makes good points. Still I think it's pretty much the same thing...
Winter Archipelago
Autumn Industrial Enterprises
#395 - 2015-10-15 17:48:02 UTC
One reason why the Character Bazaar and the SP booster plan are critically different: Intel.

Right now, with the way that skills work, you can generally get a rough idea of what the character might be capable of based on their age and corp history. If they're 5 years old, but their corp history is dotted with NPC corps taking up half the time, and their killboards don't show any activity during those times, you can generally guess that they only have about 2.5 years'-worth of SP despite being five years old. Additionally, you can gauge how well they might be able to fight based on their corp history, as somebody who has been in and out of the game is going to probably be less-skilled than someone with less age, but more "dedication" / "consecutive play."

If you see a char that's a year old and had been sold on the Bazaar, you still see that the char has about a year's-worth of SP and what skills they have (based on the Bazaar listing).

Looking at available information, you can make a reasonable guess at what sort of skills and abilities a pilot has.

With SP packs, that goes out the window.

Before, when you saw a month-old NPC char on the battlefield, you knew that they were a month-old char and could estimate their skills based on that. Now, you'll see that month-old char, and instead of the question being "are they a newbie or a vet laying a trap?" you'll have to add "If it's a vet, how much SP have they boosted?"

The same goes for year-old chars. For five-year-old chars. Even for ten-year-old chars, because you have no way of knowing if they took SP out and got rid of it or used it for other skills.

Where before you had an imperfect way to make an imperfect guess at a character's capabilities (something that takes a bit of skill and sleuthing to do well), you're now left with absolutely nothing. No amount of game knowledge is going to give you an idea about what those pilots are capable of until you actually engage. It removes an element of planning and thought without giving anything back in its place.
TheSmokingHertog
Julia's Interstellar Trade Emperium
#396 - 2015-10-15 17:48:11 UTC  |  Edited by: TheSmokingHertog
Ima Wreckyou wrote:
Aaaand they are at it again.. totally disconnected...

They rather add some micro-transaction crap and delete some possibilities than deliver something that makes the game more interesting and worth playing...


Yoohoo!, do you all in here like the people adding this crap to this thread. PLEASE tell us WHY!

"Dogma is kind of like quantum physics, observing the dogma state will change it." ~ CCP Prism X

"Schrödinger's Missile. I dig it." ~ Makari Aeron

-= "Brain in a Box on Singularity" - April 2015 =-

Miao Sajuuk
Deep Core Mining Inc.
Caldari State
#397 - 2015-10-15 17:48:15 UTC
Not too bad, an alternative way to trade character.
Alladir
Alladarium
#398 - 2015-10-15 17:48:35 UTC
At least reddit is filled with open minded ppl who weight constructive pros and cons, makes you wonder how many alts are in this thread.
PMolkenthin
Nostalgia Inc.
#399 - 2015-10-15 17:48:44 UTC
It is my opinion that this is ****.
Divine Entervention
Doomheim
#400 - 2015-10-15 17:49:16 UTC
And it's great because no one can say it makes EvE Pay to win because according to the hive mind, skill points don't define success, player ability does.

This will just give those of us who started later the ability to play now.