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Your ability to discuss without reading prior post is non existent.

Greed is a terrible disease.

And it appears that CCP Devs (Dave Starks) has contracted it.

Bottom line is that CCP will do what CCP wants to do. And if they go ahead and incorporate this abominable feature, I and my numerous accounts will disappear from eve forever.

if there was ever a time to go to the character bazaar and buy the character you always wanted it's probably now. i reckon this will see a huge amount of sp removed from the game given the diminishing returns, and the subsequent character price inflation if it's introduced.

still, i could be wrong.

oh, and no i don't sell toons.

What a bizarre train of thought.

There may well be less spare characters in the game as the crap is scooped up to be consolidated into decent characters.. But since every time anyone decides to start an acct a new character (potentially three) is created, the game will never somehow 'run out' of characters and make people have to unsubscribe. Or lessen the number of alts people have.

There will always be enough characters. Always.

Mr Epeen

I'm posting as someone who is fairly new to EVE (2 months, 3.5M SP).

In EVE, interesting content is walled off by skill points barriers, and hence by character time. A big problem is that the new content is not becoming available roughly linear with time. Rather, there are chunks of new game content that become available as you cross some threshold or the other, and then long wait times until you can manage to cross the next threshold.

For example, I'm currently training cov ops and related stuff with the aim to get a reasonably fit explorer frigate to go through wormhole and null/low sec stealthily without getting blown up by every random player who spots me. That takes a month or so. Frankly, I've been playing less while waiting for the skill queue to complete. I don't actually want to mine or rat more asteroid belts, and high sec exploring is getting stale. I can't really run cooler missions than I have been, because I would have to train up skills for my cruiser. But I'm already training the stealth stuff.

What would happen if skill packets were available?

1. I would but a PLEX, convert it into ISK and buy enough skill packets to complete my stealth skills.
2. I would fly my cov ops frigate into worm holes and null/low sec to explore.
3. Because I have stealth, I would probably not get blown up instantly.
4. Because I am unexperienced, I would eventually make some newbie mistake, and get blown up anyway.
5. Rinse and repeat, with me getting better by experience at using stealth and dying less and less.

And this hurts everybody else and in particular experienced players how exactly? Best I can tell, they get

1. Extra PLEX in the market, driving the PLEX price down.
2. Somebody to sell "unwanted" SP to for a lot of ISK.
3. An extra target running around outside of high sec.
4. An extra target that is more of a challenge than a random newbie in a Heron, but still quite killable.
5. A player who is actually still paying CCP subscription money not getting bored into quitting.

Can I abuse all this to boost me all the way to flying a Titan? Well, theoretically. But given how I get rapidly less "bang for the buck" as the SP in my character increases, this would mean major investments of real money.

I expect a skill packet will cost roughly what it costs to train that 500k SP. Let's say you can generate a bit more than 2,000 SP per hour, then you need 10 days to generate one skill packet. Consequently, I expect the market price of a skill packet to be around a third of a PLEX, perhaps a bit less. Let's say it's about 350M ISK.

To boost a character from 0 to 5M SP would hence cost about 3.5B ISK. To boost the character further to 50M SP would cost another 31.5B ISK. To get to 80M SP would require 52.5B ISK, you see there how the reduced skill points gained per packet start to bite. And finally, to get to 100M SP would require another 140B ISK. So in total, from zero to 100M SP would require 227.5B ISK.

Now, maybe you have that kind of money in game, or maybe you have that kind of money in real life to spend on a game. I sure don't. Most people playing EVE I suspect do not have that either. For most people this will be a good way to get their character over a skill speed bump - to be used occasionally.

I think it is a good idea. It will make more newbies do more things faster. It will drive PLEX prices down. And the only people who will full-finance characters to top skills will be the super-rich of EVE. Most skill shopping will be only up to "useful basics" levels of perhaps 10-20M SP, which are somewhat affordable.

While I don't really agree with much of what you said, I am going to +1 you for coming in here an sharing your thoughts in a concise and understandable way without resorting to outlandish rhetoric, fear mongering, and attacks on CCP.

/respect

Mr Epeen

The proposed changes are no difference. The sp packages are not created out of thin air. Someone else had to train the skills.


When I started playing EVE 7 years ago I did nothing but train a character for half a year until I joined a player corporation eventually. Two months after joining the player corporation I bought a character because the lack of skills on my main was preventing me to get properly involved in the player corporation.

I still have my first character and it has 140m sp by now. However, the sad thing is I never really used it because it was always more reasonable to use one of my higher sp characters.

According to CCP there are many more players like me. What you are afraid of is already happening. The proposed changes would just make the whole process much smoother.

I personally wouldn't have continued playing the game for more than a few months if the possibility to buy characters wouldn't have existed.

Spot on.

Then who gives a ****.

I think you are being a bit short sighted. A game that is not immersion breaking by requiring several alts will appeal to a much larger group than one that is alts-online.