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I got very mixed feelings about this.

It would be nice to reallocate skill points, but I don't like the idea of trading them. Just give every character the option to deallocate eg. 1M SP/year and increase that for traded chars.

A better integration of the Character Bazaar seems a good thing. To see a char's previous trades in a info tab would certainly be helpful.

The part I dislike most though is that the only limit for this activity seems to be ISK/AUR/money. There should be some time limit as well in my opinion – either on extractor use or affected skill points.

I can tell you for sure, if you do this "pay to win" thing, i'll cancel all my subscriptions and quit playing for good. This is not EVE, this is something else. I'm defending my position telling you that you are going to blow up the game for good. EVE was unique a time ago, it is not anymore with all the changes you've made. If you proceed with this ideas and decisions, the game witch took more than a decade to develop will fall and your servers will get empty. So, go ahead...

Affff....

To keep attribute choice relevant, sp should probably stay in their respective categories.

This would also prevent a character from training some perception/willpower max speed only to relocated the sp into say, charisma related skills.

Other than that, can't wait to see the final iteration.

And for those claiming this make your character OP-pay-to-win... unless you can magically fly more than 1 ship I fail to find this argument convincing. Ever since I passed 100 mil sp, I have been queuing level 5 skills, in no particular order, which provide marginal benefits. Still die to the blob, still get killed by half-skilled hard counters, still pwn F1 kitchensink fleets...

Agree. So why do the players need this pay-to-SP crap?

If it was, say, a once-an-year partial skill reallocation I'd say ok, whatever, maybe good maybe bad, who cares.

But since it's a whenever-you-pay-us mechanic, I can't help thinking it's stinky and shady as hell...

Majority of new players cannot afford it. For older players the return is quite low so I doubt many will do it. Ie they are ready to change game fundamentals for something which will have weak results? What`s next we can expect? No idea if they have no consistency and who would want to invest years of playing in something which does not have consistency? Not many for sure.

Time.

But if you bought it from another player....

I don't even really care about being able to buy SP for any char. Even if we consider the character bazaar the be an equal thing, which it isn't. There's a lot of hoops to jump through to buy a character.

Anyway, what I'm concerned with is how this is going to essentially **** over the entire skill system. Why have a skill system to begin with if newbies can simply pay 10 bucks and advance a month?

Let me explain. A while ago there was some racing game, I think it was Forza, that introduced a way to buy new cars with real money instead of having to grind for it. You could still earn all the cars without paying by just grinding hours into the game so it wasn't really exclusive content, but the grinding would require a good 500 hours of play time before you got to the best car. In other words, the grind was purposely made so long that just investing some money sees like a more decent alternative to getting that shiny car.

Going back to EVE, the skill system has always been the backbone of the game. Everyone progresses roughly at the same speed and because it's roughly the same for everyone, there has never been a reason to really complain about the training length. However, that becomes an issue when you start offering people the option to buy unallocated SP, because now suddenly that long training time is directly used to encourage micro transactions. You're basically telling people that they can either wait a month to fly a Battleship, or pay 10 bucks and fly it right now. If you're going to introduce a system like this you need to take a very long hard look at the training times as they stand today. You're obviously trying to cater to the instant gratification crowd, so maybe a skill that takes 60 days to reach level 5 isn't really fit for this day and age anymore. If you're trying to cater to that particular crowd, why not half all training times across the board and maybe it will make the buying SP thing a bit more balanced.

THIS

Rather than buying skill points, personally I would rather new players be able to complete missions that involved traveling into low and null sec space to accomplish it's objectives, whatever those objectives may be.

Ship specific missions that offered your choice of rewards towards that ships specific "mastery level" in skill point allocation.

So lets say I want to fly a Drake. I go to one of the NPC agents that offer Drake missions. I put down my ISK desposit, like 70 million and I get to fly around this drake with it's mastery level 1, 2, 3 whatever gets decided as the baseline. I get sent to low sec to do a mission chain.

While I'm doing this mission chain I get experience with the drake. I get an idea of a possible fit that indicates at least an idea of how the ship is suppose to be flown. If I complete the mission, I get skill points towards being able to fly one of my own accord whenever and however I want.

This will allow me and anyone else doing these missions for whatever ship they've chosen to get to know if continuing down the path of training for it is indeed something we want to do. Also, it gets us out into the game in dangerous situations really seeing what the game offers. It puts us out in the field so others can try to stop us from accomplishing our objectives. If we get destroyed, we lose the deposit. If we don't complete the mission in time, the ship gets repo'd and we have to limp back to wherever we choose to go in a noob ship or capsule.

Times change, and if the game doesn't change, it wont grow. We already see it's not growing anymore. It's not even stagnant. The numbers are declining (debatable but not going to debate it). This is a drastic change, and CCP is probably considering it because drastic times call for desperate measures.

It's nice that the game has held together so well over the years, but nothing lasts forever. Instead of rolling over and accepting a slow death, CCP is showing it has the balls to make big changes to the core constructs of the game in an effort to give us what we all really want:
A more populated EvE.

Now if people would stop threatening to quit or actually quitting the game, a fun game, over silly ideals and principles that ultimately do not negatively effect anything other than their egos and perception of how they personally feel the game should be, then we would stand a real chance at convincing all those newbros who've stepped away to come back and give it another shot.

Throttle back on the knee jerk reactions because Change scares you.

Things are always changing, and the ability to do so is what separates the living from the dead.