EVE Information Portal

I get it, you hate SP and you hate waiting. That's fine.

Time will tell if the concerns many, many have were valid.

a lot of the thread is guesses. the devblog left many variables unknown.

neither side of this argument can give many solid arguments without making a myriad of assumptions.

There's established motivational science. If I say that SP limiting every aspect of the game from fresh subs is a negative without a relevant positive, there's a very clear response line that could follow.

If I say that maximizing reasons to log on is simple and logical, that reinforcing exploration and dynamism through options, variety, and depth is obviously interesting -- how cool is it if there's a lot more than just "simple and logical"? There's a lot of information on decisions and risk-reward. Feel free to ask questions.

Good gods man, you're dismissing fanfest data, over a decade of continued life with the swipe of a hand that "nothing" supports SP being a good mechanic.

And you expect me to engage? With what? How? You're ignoring both history and evidence laid out time and time again by CCP. PvE is NOT healthy for typical retention.

No, the track record of SP speaks for itself. The onus is on you to demonstrate why tearing it down/apart now is somehow a good idea and that the last 12 years have been...what? Fluke? Bloody mindedness on the part of the players? The foolishness of old men?


Tell me why you think people won't get trapped into grinding isk to level when they ALREADY get trapped today and it is divorced from levelling. If a PvE pathway is deemed unhealthy to retention, tying SP progression HOWEVER LOOSELY to it, it utterly insane.


But you can't see this, you're not long enough in the tooth and you're too bitter about perceived limits. All you seem to see is "the vets" trying to keep you young up and comers down with the stick of SP...it's quite the opposite. We want to keep the game where people stay, where people don't get caught popping red crosses to "level up".

Here's a fun fact, I have a pretty much perfect scanner alt, she has change out of 6m skill points. She can outscan every single one of my combat pilots who are years older. She can outscan most people in new eden, She's not even 6 months old. Keeping up with the vets? Don't make me laugh - unless you're one of the these lunatics who wants to fly a titan, you can "catch up" to and be on a level footing with most vets in under a year. You could surpass a great many in that time too, keeping to smaller ship sizes.

But no, you people want it all and you want it now and damn everyone else, why it's just not fair that it'll take 3 months to level up a pefect (and I mean perfect) FW toon. No, this is unreasonable and even with said perfect toon you still "cant compete" because.... :reasons:


So you'll forgive me for bowing out of the argument with you, because you don't want to debate, you can't meaningfully challenge the evidence we have at hand or the legacy of the past. It's like me telling you round wheels are awesome and no, we're not all mad and yes, the fact they've been employed for ages DOES mean they work and yes, those triangular numbers ARE pretty...but ultimately going to lead to some crushing disappointments in the months to come.

So, you're evidence for the success of SP is that the game has had subscriptions? So has WoW -- is that great game design?

Why have a progression mechanic at all? It's a sandbox game! Like, are you literally implying that keeping subs from playing the game is helpful?

Smart move by CCP testing the ISK for SP waters in disguise of a Halloween event.

The standard accelerator gives you a total of 21,600 SP and sells at app. 150mln. Given it is a new thing and let us assume the price would go down to 1/3 or 50 mln then the market would value 1 SP with app. 2,300 ISK. A skill package of 500,000 SP would be worth app. 1 PLEX.

Which is again a smart move as trying to sell 25% faster training for 1 PLEX would be far less succesful than the proposed method.

I like the idea of selling SP even less now.

WoW actually is an excellent counterpoint as it is designed from the ground up to facilitate PvE, with PvP being a back seat (lol arenas indeed). The entire ecosystem is designed to facilitate the grind.

Eve is not, never has been.

Trying to make it so is like taking a square peg, carving it into a crude circle then jamming it back into the square hole. Certainly it might fit, but you lose a lot in the process.

I know. Wrote i´m out of here, but i can´t help myself :)

Ok, let´s strip sp progression from the game. What´s left then? Eve is a calculation based game. Look at the current way it get´s played. Drop more people / alts, doctrine fits, a.s.o.
If we are able to fly anything with any possible fitting and all players have identical values @ dps, hp, ecm and whatsoever
what does this mean for our gameplay if the mechanics are the same as they are now? There are... some people complaining about the boring mechanics, they won´t change. And eve players try to do the things they do, the most efficient way.

Isn´t it possible that the diversity of activly used ingame activities get´s reduced due to this?For example: If everyone can produce everything like all others. This would be the death for the ingame economy. Whom would you sell your products, how are you going to make isk instead of fw? who would be your customer? At some point - why buy plex with rl money and sell it to the market?

Imo eves ingame economy , the markets, the professions, the specialisations... everything needs to be as fractured as possible. Without the need to specialise, without the pressure to develop into a specific playstyle / isk-grind, without the inaccessibility between the specialisations because of time and / or sp ... the transfer of assets, isk, services will be hit hard - partially it will be less and less necessary.

This leads me to the conclussion that competition in the remaining, profitable areas will increase. Increasing competition - say bye bye to your profits :D

Imo. this is already the case in slighter form right now, but even allowing sp transfers will only strengthen this effect.
We allready have oversupply for years now.

EDIT: I´m not against deleting or changing sp mechanics - but the question is: "does this make sense?"

You know what happened with wow, late into wrath they introduced ilvl its caused problems - cata / very poor exp hardly any content and nothing for pvp / major grind / slight skill tree altering

Pandaland - dailys boredom / no content / lacking decent raids / total destruction of the skill system and more fluff no lore.

WoD - mini games - shop - crap content - ever playing with balancing - oh yeah instance level 90 ..... any of this sounding familiar yet.

no, many of the assumptions are reasonable.

yes, i agree many people would be grinding pve to level up. however as i pointed out, 80% of the people who didn't leave within the first month (if i remember the stats correctly) are grinding pve anyway - would it be so bad to make that activity have a little more meaning? it's better them sitting in a station scared to undock because "mah +5s".

this very very bad thing is what most people are doing most of the time. i know that i spend more time "grinding isk" than not grinding it. pretty much anything that isn't pvp is grinding isk - and a lot of pvping is just shooting people who are grinding isk.

no, i don't think "grind for SP" is a great idea - but there's certainly a market for it i feel. obviously there's a huge conflict here. tap in to that potential market, or don't.

i think eve would survive without this coming to pass - but would it really be so bad to attract more players to eve? let's face it, i doubt many people are doing now, what they intended to do when they started eve.