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Dev Blog: Exploring The Character Bazaar & Skill Trading

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Stalking Mantis
School of Applied Knowledge
Caldari State
#661 - 2015-10-15 19:21:41 UTC
The fact that CCP is even tossing this idea around tells me volumes on their current financial situation.

I had doubts before this post. Granted I took a year and three month break from EVE awhile back and came back to servers that had 15 to 20 thousand people on them instead of the 60 to 90 thousand people on them.

I can't blame CCP for trying to spin this idea. I really do believe they are desperate for cash. Speaking of cash how is all that cash you poured into DUST doing?

Like it or not CCP is losing money and they already alienated their veteran players from the Jita riots onwards to the latest Fozzie sov.

They really have put them selves into a situation where they really do need to appeal to new players as they already lost a huge chunk of players in the past year or two.

I really love this game, but the utter nonsense the devs keep thinking up instead of listening to the player base.

Case in point I assure you this was not even screened on the CSM before this blog.

EVE is in a downward spiral.....don't believe me? compare server numbers today with two years ago...I am talking more than a 300% drop. This is FORCING CCP to try to appeal to newer players, such changes might not appeal to us the people that have played EVE for years. But this tells me CCP is in alot of trouble due to years of mishandling the EVE community that they are now forced to think up things like this to appeal to new blood.

Amarr Liason Officer Extraordinare -->Check Out Amarrian Vengeance/Amarr FW History from 2011 to 2014 https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=352629&find=unread
Nakito Kobara
Yamagata Syndicate
Northern Coalition.
#662 - 2015-10-15 19:21:53 UTC
Selling SP likes its some cheap w***e. Lol

Please. No.

Why not concentrate on improving the game experience? There is so much that can be done to improve and evolve Eve and this isn't it!

Yamagata Syndicate - Null sec - PvP - Join today!
Monasucks
BLACK SQUADRON.
Get Off My Lawn
#663 - 2015-10-15 19:21:54 UTC
Don ZOLA wrote:
As a bitter vet, owner of ~244mil sp on main char and probably ~1bil on all chars i think this is great idea. CCP please read carefully to understand why:

1. For 12 years I have been playing this game, did plenty of mistakes with missed training, getting podded without clone and losing BS 5, training without implants. Even had some inactivity periods. But for all those 12 years I have been looking at Dr Caymus being the guy with the most sp in the game. Wishing to take his place...

He had trained every day for 12 years, to his optimized attributes, with implants, without doing any (at least visible) mistakes to be on the top for all these years. Now with this new option I will simply use my inactive accounts (you can check their sp) and spend cash to take him over. I mean F*CK his 12 years of efforts I will give you money!!! (And that`s what this is about right?)

2. People will focus even more in ISK grinding, in order to buy chars, get the sp. I mean you can never have enough sp, right? You can hope it will not happen, but I assure it will. That means that less people will PVP and we (bitter vets) will enjoy pvp like in good old games with much smaller numbers. Get rid of the blobs \o/

3. As people focus on grinding, game will become more boring to them and during the time they will simply quit. Not everyone has persistence to train and pay for 12 years eh? So the player base will shrink and there will be less lag.

4. As more and more people "pay to win" and speed up with getting wanted sp to be able to fly the ships they dream about, they will sooner make their dreams come true and get bored. Easier the game is - faster it gets boring. More players quitting - hurrah!

5. People who like fair chances in games will quit as well. But who cares, **** on the poor people, just grinding isk is not enough. If they cannot spend the money in your game you do not need them anyway. Why should EVE be different from other p2w games. Why should it be niche game better be classic mediocre game but get the masses and the money eh?

6. As more and more people are quitting, some of my bitter vet friends will do as well. I am sure decent amount will quit due to this change as well, no one likes to see their efforts and money treated like sh*t.As in past, most of them will give me their assets and characters and by taking their sp i can be sure to remain top 1. And that is lot of isk and sp to get!

7. In the end when everyone quits out of boredom, I will be the real winner.Thank you CCP, sorry for your game that will die btw. Until then, my credit card is ready for this brilliant idea.

Now off with sarcasm. For those commenting that bazaar is already p2w: it does improve your "winning" a bit, by speeding some things up, but you can never take over people who invested years of efforts and subscription to be where they are. And that should be honored by CCP if they do not want to lose their face in greed for some more money. Because if you do not honor your vets today, players who are new now will know you will not honor them in couple of years either. And no one sticks long in such "relationships". Maybe some pathological cases, but they are not so common :)

And yes, as you probably already know there are people who will spend thousands of bucks on this game in order to accomplish what they want. So you will make some money, though it will be short term only. In the long run you are continuing to kill this pearl among the games...

I am not sure who came up with such "brilliant" idea without taking side effects in the consideration. I agree there should be ways to help new players. But not by killing the one of the essences of the game. Get advisers not just from GSM, most of them is there just because they have large alliances behind them, it is more of e-peen measuring (or at least it was in past, while I still hoped they would come up with some good ideas).

People who already have more than 20/30/50? mil sp will probably stick to the game anyway, they have already invested time and learned a lot about the game. You need to help just the focus group. I am sure you can run data analysis and check when the most of people quits and make separate strategies to try to keep them. I think the most quits with less than 10mil sp, but do your work and find it out yourself.

What made this game was its toughness, nowadays 1 month char can make isk easier than 10-20mil sp ones could do in past. They get skills boost, they do not have to train learning skills, etc. It is already MUCH easier. And you keep failing to keep them with all those new ideas? Then you need to find some other approach to get/keep them into the game, get new people involved.

Decade ago, EVE was elitist game, we laughed to other grinding MMORPGs. Now, EVE is slowly turning in one of them. Everyone wanted to PVP back then, even though it was much tougher to make isk for lost ships. Nowadays the most of the players are "scared" to do so as someone might see their losses and make fun of them. Or simply because they do not want their "losing" to be public, if there is no API they can always deny it :) They will rather wait for certain win scenarios so they can boost their kb stats. Which are rarely related to their skills... And meanwhile just grind isk for bigger ships, not realizing that "you are not your ship" rule :). Same will be with sp, they will rush to get more and more, without knowing that sp do not equal skills.

EVE has changed a lot over time, from taking pride in being different game among plenty of MMORPGs, harder and tougher, being unique, joy of our community compared to games dominated by 13 years old players etc. For some time it is taking direction to even with them and this seems like one of the final nails in the coffin. I am sorry for that :(

TL; DR

NO

Get better advisers.

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Heroes and Villains.
#664 - 2015-10-15 19:22:04 UTC
Clearly CCP no longer have the integrity to self value and protect the core values and fundamentals of this game.

Concord Approved Trader
Don ZOLA
Omniscient Order
#665 - 2015-10-15 19:22:20 UTC
Eternal Bob wrote:
drunklies wrote:
Eternal Bob wrote:
Don ZOLA wrote:
I mean F*CK his 12 years of efforts


Explain what effort is required to gain skillpoints.



The effort involved in researching, planning, and implementing those 12 years of skills. I mean, someone spending 12 years perfecting something passive shouldn't count as having done anything.

Gardeners are by this logic, worthless.


The only 'effort' required to amass skill points is injecting the skill book and applying it to your queue. Please don't pretend there is any real effort involved.


I will try to stay away from replying to troll alts but just so other know skill queue was not there since start. For years you had to time skills and plan when you will change it, wake up to do it etc.

Also there was no attributes remap either so you had to plan well how to develop your char.

And even after getting those it still takes effort to do the best possible planning to utilize the most of your attributes in the long run.

And if nothing else I am sure plenty would stop playing and training if they knew this will happen. Why should i spend hundreds / thousands bucks on subscription while having to bother about training when I can just come and drop the money and get everything i want?

There are 2 rules in a successful life: 1. Don't tell people everything you know
Mastodontti
Shadow State
Goonswarm Federation
#666 - 2015-10-15 19:22:43 UTC
heh eve online pay2win. eve online will die if you do this
Winter Archipelago
Autumn Industrial Enterprises
#667 - 2015-10-15 19:22:57 UTC
The more I've been thinking about this, the more I think I could deal with it, though with some heavy restrictions.

Limit it to 10 mil SP, and have all injections give 400k (it would be a net lose of 20% of the SP). It would take 25 injections, then, to reach the 10 mil SP level.

At 2,250 SP per hour (the current maxed training rate when not using attribute implants), this is about 185 days (six months). You can create some very nice characters with that, including specializing into a decent number of things. This would help new players get into the game faster without making it overly strong for older players.

Admittedly, older players (and probably chars) are going to dominate the market, and after the initial sell-off of unwanted skills, SP-mules (such as my industry alts) are going to be the primary source. It's still going to be a pretty one-sided flow of ISK, but it would at least provide a nice boost for new chars (and especially new players) without making it too easy for wealthy vets to create a day-old / multi-year-skilled character.

If there's really a drive to take it further than six months, give them up to a year, but with 40% loss of SP over 10 mil, allowing them to boost themselves up to 20 mil (about a year of training with a maxed remap and no implants). It would take ~60 injections to go from a starter char to 20 mil SP, and would be a net loss of 10 mil SP (or about 1/3 of the total).

Being able to boost yourself with ISK to 50 mil is simply too strong. Ten mil already gives some pretty solid characters when dedicated towards a purpose, or a very nice well-rounded char, while 20 mil provides access to a significant number of very nice characters.

For the Newbies: The 8 Golden Rules - The Magic 14 Skills - Finding the Right Corp - EVE University Wiki
Querns
Science and Trade Institute
Caldari State
#668 - 2015-10-15 19:23:08 UTC
drunklies wrote:
Querns wrote:
drunklies wrote:
Eternal Bob wrote:
Don ZOLA wrote:
I mean F*CK his 12 years of efforts


Explain what effort is required to gain skillpoints.



The effort involved in researching, planning, and implementing those 12 years of skills. I mean, someone spending 12 years perfecting something passive shouldn't count as having done anything.

Gardeners are by this logic, worthless.

What?

There's no planning or research involved with training. You plug things into evemon.


Eve mon def existed 12 years ago.

Point is, they still went through the effort of doing it, and no one else has, not to that extent.

Having to struggle with a nascent skill system and without the tools necessary to manage it does not somehow entitle those ancient souls to anything.

This post was crafted by the wormhole expert of the Goonswarm Economic Warfare Cabal, the foremost authority on Eve: Online economics and gameplay.
TheSmokingHertog
Julia's Interstellar Trade Emperium
#669 - 2015-10-15 19:23:17 UTC
Josef Kennet wrote:
Skinzee wrote:
Vrarrg wrote:
No this is a horrible idea, if you are really hurting for money then listen to what we have been saying and get those things done. Instead of trying to make the game P2W or even F2P. There have been several good ideas over the past few years you guys pass up or don't even care about. This is a whole new low for CCP to reach.


PLEASE EXPLAIN WHY THIS CHANGE WOULD MAKE IT PAY TO WIN?

Train over 9000 accounts for a month and sell SP to your main


You cannot, since you need to invest AUR in all those accounts to offroam all SP, probably you will not be @ a surplus.

"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 =-
Hashtag Rare Pepe
Doomheim
#670 - 2015-10-15 19:23:24 UTC  |  Edited by: Hashtag Rare Pepe
Skilo wrote:
[quote=Gospadin][quote=EvilweaselSA][quote=Skilo]I've been playing this game since 2003

I'm a proud "owner" of a multi million skill point char who took me 12 years to get

[...]

And that it's not the same of buying a char. its placing skills on the char you want

you can spin all you want that it doesn't change this fact



Only multi years old players can buy characters without being irresponsible with real $$$ money.
The current system (character bazaar) is flawed and the riches get richer by being able to fill accounts with ratting ishtar characters at an exponential rate. How is this system more fair than the p2win alternative that is proposed today?
Ben Musana
Doomheim
#671 - 2015-10-15 19:23:29 UTC
Tzu Wu wrote:
Ben Musana wrote:
First of all - i dont like the idea of trading skillpoints.

We all need our time for getting our skill goal to be reached. One of the major reason why im plaing eve since 2008 is the skill tree and there possibilities. Open this to the market will ruin the game.

A 5M SP Character could buy SP to speed things up. OK the character has now the skillpoints for there new 'toys' but still not the isk to buy it - well CCP offers PLEX for sell to serve this kind of problem. So CCP has no reason to lower the plex price and so on ... just think about it. - Some could say: CCP gets greedy!

A lot of ppl have 'unused' alts and are happy if they could 'transfer' there SP to there main, but is it worth a hole 'system of SP trade' for it with all there consequences ..... NO!

Electronic Arts has gone a similar way with Need 4 Speed World. They where to greedy - changed to much! Now the servers are offline!

Does i see the end on the horizon comming ? Is it still worth to play this game ? I have no answer for that, but i really hope that enough of us, will shoot jita if they bring that feature (SP trading) on the market!

Regards

Ben Musana


I hate to break it to you and others who think like you but CCP is a business, it is their job to make money. All I hear from a lot of clueless EVE players is "CCP is greedy!, they want more money!". Without money to game doesn't operate. Not really hard to figure out.

>but i really hope that enough of us, will shoot jita if they bring that feature (SP trading) on the market!

Oh noes,not an in-game riot because EVE players don't understand the concept that it takes money to operate an MMO,the horror!



Sorry for thowing the ball back to you, but i always pay with real money for my subscription(s). I do not plex my accounts - so i spent more money for ccp then every game before. CCP is business for sure, but at a certain point we have to choose: Is CCP like Apple Inc. and we pay whatever they want, or will they fail will there business politics ....
Kyt Thrace
Lightspeed Enterprises
Goonswarm Federation
#672 - 2015-10-15 19:23:56 UTC
The only reason I see CCP wanting to do this is for more cash.

They have had too many accounts unsub over the past year to other mistakes that they made and are losing money.

So CCP thinks they can come up with a cash printing scheme to help them out.

Results will be more accounts unsub leading to less cash coming in.

How to fix it CCP?

Stop coming up with stupid ideas that **** off the majority of your player base & only cater to a few.

R.I.P. Vile Rat
Barakach
Caldari Provisions
Caldari State
#673 - 2015-10-15 19:24:01 UTC
Captain Africa wrote:
TheSmokingHertog wrote:
Skinzee wrote:
Skinzee wrote:
I have a question for ALL people that say this is a bad idea...


--- WHAT EFFECT WOULD IT HAVE ON YOU AS A PILOT IF THIS WOULD ACTUALLY GO LIVE? ---


There is already an option to buy 0-200m SP characters... Character Bazaar - (Thats Pay2Win if you look at it that way)



Would love someone to actually give me a valid answer to this question.

As far as I can see, there is none.



I do... Bitter vets would have more people around them that could fly high end doctrines like they do. Just by roaming off their own SP.



Lemme throw this right back at you ...I had to wait 6 years to get my character trained up to be 145 mil sp do you think it fair that you would be able to achieve that by just buying sp and whalla ? Infact just **** off...**** that im outta here


I can already buy 160m sp chars from the bazzar. I don't see the difference, as long as it's MUCH more expensive this possible new way. Like several factors more expensive and scales along with char prices.
TheSmokingHertog
Julia's Interstellar Trade Emperium
#674 - 2015-10-15 19:24:06 UTC
Mastodontti wrote:
heh eve online pay2win. eve online will die if you do this


Do you people even read the blog? the skillpool stays the same size, its not pay to win.

"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 =-
Stalking Mantis
School of Applied Knowledge
Caldari State
#675 - 2015-10-15 19:24:45 UTC
Glasgow Dunlop wrote:
Batten Down the hatches, Theres a 'hitstorm coming right this way . . . .

Personally P2W is bad, HOWEVER . . . if this was implimented in the same way as remaps ( ie you can remove skills once per year, and implant them, say twice) then it might be a better solution if you are really that keen to roll the dice.



This is not a bad idea. Problem is it does not generate cash for CCP like this suggestion does.

Amarr Liason Officer Extraordinare -->Check Out Amarrian Vengeance/Amarr FW History from 2011 to 2014 https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=352629&find=unread
Querns
Science and Trade Institute
Caldari State
#676 - 2015-10-15 19:24:57 UTC
Stalking Mantis wrote:
The fact that CCP is even tossing this idea around tells me volumes on their current financial situation.

I had doubts before this post. Granted I took a year and three month break from EVE awhile back and came back to servers that had 15 to 20 thousand people on them instead of the 60 to 90 thousand people on them.

I can't blame CCP for trying to spin this idea. I really do believe they are desperate for cash. Speaking of cash how is all that cash you poured into DUST doing?

Like it or not CCP is losing money and they already alienated their veteran players from the Jita riots onwards to the latest Fozzie sov.

They really have put them selves into a situation where they really do need to appeal to new players as they already lost a huge chunk of players in the past year or two.

I really love this game, but the utter nonsense the devs keep thinking up instead of listening to the player base.

Case in point I assure you this was not even screened on the CSM before this blog.

EVE is in a downward spiral.....don't believe me? compare server numbers today with two years ago...I am talking more than a 300% drop. This is FORCING CCP to try to appeal to newer players, such changes might not appeal to us the people that have played EVE for years. But this tells me CCP is in alot of trouble due to years of mishandling the EVE community that they are now forced to think up things like this to appeal to new blood.

You're overreacting quite a bit to the Aurum cost of the thing. Any transfer of SP between players HAS to have an associated drawdown on CCP's liabilities or else they are deliberately reducing their capacity to do so. This looks VERY bad to any investors they have. It's financial suicide and they'd be fools to consider it.

This post was crafted by the wormhole expert of the Goonswarm Economic Warfare Cabal, the foremost authority on Eve: Online economics and gameplay.
drunklies
Federal Navy Academy
Gallente Federation
#677 - 2015-10-15 19:25:09 UTC
Quote:
Explain what effort is required to gain skillpoints.



The effort involved in researching, planning, and implementing those 12 years of skills. I mean, someone spending 12 years perfecting something passive shouldn't count as having done anything.

Gardeners are by this logic, worthless. [/quote]
What?

There's no planning or research involved with training. You plug things into evemon.[/quote]

Eve mon def existed 12 years ago.

Point is, they still went through the effort of doing it, and no one else has, not to that extent.[/quote]
Having to struggle with a nascent skill system and without the tools necessary to manage it does not somehow entitle those ancient souls to anything.[/quote]

Not having done so does not entitle those mewling newbies to anything either.
Gneeznow
Ship spinners inc
#678 - 2015-10-15 19:26:02 UTC
I like it.

The old guard in this game have run it into a stagnant hole in the ground and those are the people who are flailing the hardest on the forums, this might actually bring in new people now that they will be able to catch up a little easier.
PotatoOverdose
School of Applied Knowledge
Caldari State
#679 - 2015-10-15 19:26:14 UTC  |  Edited by: PotatoOverdose
Querns wrote:


Also, you're significantly overestimating the number of times any one person would rush out to the character bazaar and snatch up a custom-made character just to stay ahead of the FOTM.

That's my whole point: people don't do it because it isn't practical in most cases.

But now - Farm some gno...Sanshas in the barrens..err high sec to get your SP to level up...errr get your skills to V and get that sweet new raid gea...errr FOTM ship.
Terra Chrall
Doomheim
#680 - 2015-10-15 19:26:44 UTC
CCP Logibro wrote:

The Character Bazaar has been around for a while, allowing enterprising players to buy and sell characters from others. Lately, we've been exploring some new ideas around improving it, but ultimately realized that our effort was better spent investigating a similar idea: skill trading. This is a pretty big thing, so make sure you read the entire dev blog, and let us know what you think of the ideas inside.


Please also read this reminder on our forum rules ~ ISD Decoy

I like the idea in general. May need to some tweaking to get to the right numbers etc. I am seeing some people equate this to ISK or money for free SP, but as I read it the SP is being traded. It does not come out of thin air. Someone earned SP and now is selling it. This seems very much in line with the character bazaar. Someone earned the SP on a character and then sells the character for someone else to use.

One person sounded shocked that this new approach could yield a person a perfect capital alt. Ummmm, that is what people buy off the character bazaar all the time.

I think some of the knee jerk negativity are from people not fully grasping the concept and perhaps from those not wanting competition with their character bazaar sales.

The end result of using this new service vs the bazaar is that you get greater control over the end result. It also offers a player a way to recoup a portion of their own SP and reallocate it, which is a feature I have seen asked for by some player in the past.

Depending on the cost will determine how balanced it is vs buying a "perfect capital pilot".

For many people I imagine it would be used in a limited way just to speed up a train every now and then. For those willing to dump billions in to get high SP could do essentially the same on the bazaar.