EVE General Discussion

People still play older FPS. According to CCP, the arenas for DUST were procedurally generated and scalable as hardware increased. Potential for some pretty nice battles. Was a good gamble I say? Just execution problems.

The second part, that is a necessity for any business. Eve was doing well, they thought they had a plan. There was a market that wasn't tapped into. A fairly good market I would think. yeah, eve needed more infrastructure, but that gets into planning and development direction which could have definitely gone better.

All about return of investment. They figured that dollar to new player, vampire game was more than if they did stuff for eve. Only CCP knows the business strategy. I think what they did was sound, but the product was flawed.

I think of this...

I really understand your concern. It was actually the first one that popped into my mind. I do not consider it P2W though. Talking like the equal of a week of training for a newb. This rate goes for up to a character two years old. After that, yes, it drops off. That keeps if from being a pay to win.

What will the costs be like? Currently, a person can instant buy a high pvp character off the bazaar. How much isk is the average price for one of these instant gratification toons plus a plex? How will it compare to a built character. In addition, the skill packets are created by sacrificing skill points. Some toon somewhere will be removing skills. Most likely bittervet alts who want isk. Though to get it, they need extractors that can only be used on toons a few months old preventing trial farming a fair bit.

I am a vet, there is no punishment here. My roles that I trained for, people already get by buying said character. This won't build power characters, but players doing well will just instead spend their isk to get that bump. Most likely to grab those last level V skills they don't want to wait for.

In the end, the vs wealthy, people won't notice. Those that more long term play to get their SP won't recognize the difference aside from seeing somebody newer with more SP. That doesn't change the fact that the supply is limited with players setting the cost of those items. Eventually, there will be a supply and demand equilibrium. Those that have nothing left to train for will sell off the unwanted SP once unused alts are farmed up. Somebody who wants to P2W won't be able to because I seriously doubt there will be the SP on the market to even make some 3 year equal toon.

People aren't going to sell alts anymore. I realize that's the intent, but instead, they're going to use the for SP farming.
Train 500k worth of SP, wipe it and sell, train 500k more.
So, we're literally going to have a bunch of SP farming characters.

Also, the pricing is likely going to be insane.

So, it costs a plex, plus however many days it takes to train 500k SP based on the value of PLEX (we'll say half a month so half the cost of a plex, plus whatever I feel my time is worth.

We're talking 2 billion isk for 500k SP. (based off example math).
Considering you need a plex to buy the extractor, we already know that the SP packets will cost AT LEAST that much.

So, how is 2 billion isk affordable for new players?

Again, I say this system is beneficial for vets creating new characters and serves little to no benefit for actual new players, unless they have a personal pocket book that is quite a bit more packed than my own.
Same for those vets rolling alt toons. The more money they have in their personal bank account, the more they can throw around in game developing characters with comparable skills to my own.

I have 65 mil in SP.
Someone with enough RL cash could literally match me in a day, provided they want to throw their money around.

Hey, while we're at it, WoW is going to be allowing players to boost a character to lvl 100 with their next expansion.
Why don't we allow players in Eve to boost a character to Carrier pilots?

Do you feel punished when a restaurant denies you the kid menu?

Do you feel punished when your ISP give the first 3 month at a lower rate to new costumer?

Nope, but that's a bad comparison.

It's more like, the restaurant's kid menu is the exact same plate that you're going to be given, only at a cheaper rate. However, you're not allowed to order your food off that menu, simply because you're not a kid.

On the ISP comparison,
It's more like the ISP giving a new customer 2 years of lower rates, when you did get a lower rate at all.

When I first read the dev blog, I immediately hated the idea. Then I read through other people's posts here, and I can somewhat see the positive effects of such proposal too.

However, there are a few things that I'm still concerned about.

1. As the 'golden rules' page linked at the launcher clearly says, EVE is not all about skill points and isk. It's about using the right tool for the job at the right situations. Personally I feel that there are many ships and modules available to relatively low skilled pilots to utilise to over come a high SP pilot in a 'wrong' ship, i.e., a T1 scissors can still beat T2 paper. Through the series of ship balances and modules tiercide we've had, many T1 frigates and cruisers are quite useful now, and the idea has been that each of them has a 'role' to play, albeit less effective than T2. Such ships can still be very much effective for low SP pilots with support skills to IV, when the ship is fitted and piloted to serve its role and the strengths.

Skilling up to IV in most basic support/ship skills really does not take long time. I know the meta has changed a lot since then, but we used to have Drake fleets with arbalest HML and alpha fleets with scout artillery (just as an outdated example). Nowadays people rage about a noob in a griffin perma jamming them and a T1 fit celestis keeping them out of fight. Heck, a group of catalysts can gank pretty much anything given enough strength in numbers.

What I'm getting at is that there are already plenty of reasonable options available to low SP pilots, for them to be able to contribute to fleet or even have a stint at solo piracy if they understand the game mechanics. Everyone has experienced 'clueless' pilots with bling fit ships doing clueless stuff in low/null, losing horribly to a lower SP/cheaper ship that was fit for the purpose.

My first concern is that with such 'quick access to T2/T3 with ISK' option, the new players may not fully explore more humble but effective options available to them during their early eve career.

Personally I'd be happy to engage someone who's just bought a lot of SP and doesn't fully understand what he's flying, but would that actually be a good experience for the new players? To spend a lot of ISK (earned through real cash or via in game means or whatever) to get into what they thought would be a leet ship, only to lose it in a humiliating way to veterans in T1 frigs?

2. I understand that buying SP is just an 'option', and people can still train normally as we've done for over a decade. But WHO will actually be able to afford such an option? Buying SP will not be cheap. It's anybody's guess, but I'm pretty sure it will be more expensive than a T1 fit Battleship. A lot of new players who aim for Battleship to do r L4 missions or whatever, are usually in a situation where they cannot afford a BS by the time they have lvl III / IV skills for it. New players run L3 missions in drake to save up isk to buy a Raven (just as an example). Can these players, without any outside help or buying PLEX with real cash, be reasonably expected to buy enough SP to fully T2 fit a BS?

I think it's highly unlikely that someone that new to the game has enough ISK to buy that much SP. Traders boast that they can go from 1 million ISK to 1 billion ISK in X number of days, but that's because they KNOW the game, understand the market and know what they are doing in the market. Just based on exploration, missioning and mining, a NEW pilot is very unlikely to be able to buy SP packets to help his progress.

This is my second concern, that quick SP option will be there for all, but new players will not be in position to take advantage of it.

What it boils down to me, is that new players cannot afford SP packets from their usual in-game income, so they will buy & sell PLEX to buy the SP packets. Then they will skill up, and further PLEX to buy a T2/T3 ship and fit them with all T2 mods. And then, almost inevitably, they will lose such ships in loltastic ways we've all done before at some point in our early eve career (or even now!).

This fits the harsh world of eve, and a fool has every right to waste his money in any way he pleases, but I'm just not convinced that such scenario will 1) attract more new players, 2) help us retain the said new players, 3) encourage the new players to progress quickly and join the bigger fun.

Most likely I think new players either cannot enjoy the SP packet purchase option, or they will take this option and lose their stuff and rage quit with bitter taste in their mouths.

Don't get me wrong - I like the skill trading idea in many ways. I probably use it a lot myself to get my ever increasing number of alts trained up quickly and what not. But that's because I've been playing this game for eight years and have enough isk and know how to focus apply those newly purchased SP to my alts so they will serve a specific role, a role which I already have prior experience with.

So I do not criticise the basic concept behind skill trading, and on personal level I actually welcome it, but I'm not confident that this will really help 'new players' as some people say.

PS: Yes, there is already character bazaar, and some new players buy & sell PLEX to get a high SP character and fail miserably. I don't have any factual evidence for this, but at least from what I've seen personally, players who buy a new character from character bazaar are usually NOT that new to the game. They have usually experienced the game for a few months to a year, joined a corp and identified a particular role they would like to play, and go shopping for that specific character. Most people who trade on character bazaar are not complete noobs who's just finished their trial period (correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think anybody has hard data on this :p).

hmm so 500k sp a year? hardly worthwhile is it?

That's not an estimate. It's a fantasy.

Mr Epeen

This happens already. a 100m sp char goes for around 30b isk (rought guestimate) thats aprx 30 plex worth or $600. + 2 plex for transfer. Right now i cna go spend money and buy a 'maxed' char. does it make a lick of difference? no cause i;d still die due to not knowing ho to fly the char ship.

The part of your post that I bolded is incorrect at this time. Per the dev blog, the only statement about cost is that the extractor "can be purchased in the New Eden Store for Aurum." Could be 1 Aurum, could be 1 million Aurum, but at this point the actual cost has not been determined.

http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/exploring-the-character-bazaar-skill-trading/?_ga=1.56012843.1278408599.1443717471

I'll throw some rough numbers out for the hell of it:
Base market value based solely on PLEX cost:
1 PLEX = 1 month of gametime, also 1.2 billion ISK
1 month of gametime = 1,500,000 SP
1 SP = 800 ISK
500,000 SP = 400 million ISK.

Premium cost imposed by CCP Aurum requirements:
2 PLEX character transfer fee from the bazaar = 5200 Aurum (current market value'ish?)
2 PLEX applies to even 100+ million SP characters.
My WAG for the cost of a "Transneural Skill Extractor" I'd put at 400 Aurum, less than 10% the cost of a character transfer. That's about 180 million ISK.

So for 500,000 SP, total investment would maybe be 580 million ISK.

Training a 5x skill to level V takes 1,280,000 SP if starting from zero. That would cost 1.484 billion ISK at 400 Aurum per Extractor. Plus any premiums dictated by the market, plus any market manipulations, etc.

Training a 300 million SP character from zero would take 384 billion ISK. That's about four Titans. Doable by some characters/groups I guess.

Anyway, that 400 Aurum number is pure speculation on my part - even "Transneural Skill Packets" being 500k SP is something CCP has stated is not set in stone.