EVE General Discussion

Editing to add a bit of a forward to this post:

I'm not looking at this from the angle of a person who wants to preserve their SP farm. I don't run SP farms, and have no objection to the costs of Skill Injectors dropping in price, but only to a point. Where my big concern comes from is that it would make the cost to SP ratio more favorable for injectors than it is for PLEX or actually subbing.

Currently, a PLEX at 1.2 bil gives 1.9 mil SP (under optimal trains), while 1.2 bil in injectors gives 300k-1 mil SP. If the cheap method of extraction were employed enough to drop the price where the net profits from ~10 injectors reached parity with 1 PLEX, then the parity point between injectors and PLEX will provide a cost-to-SP ratio that's equal to or better than what actual training is.

At that point, injectors are essentially pay-to-"win" (using "win" loosely).

It would be like a game where a structure would take 3 hours to build, but if you pay money, you can build it in 1 hour, whereas currently, that structure will take 3 hours to build, but you can pay to have it build in 2.5 hours. Currently, it's still faster, it's still better than going at it without the boost, but it isn't such a huge difference that there's a feeling that you're being held back by not paying more.

I really should have made mention of this in the post originally. Sorry. Anyway, the original post is as follows:

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As it currently stands on SISI, it's possible for an Omega character to extract skills from the Alpha character skillset. On the surface, this seems perfectly acceptable, but when the free training on Alpha chars is brought into the mix, it allows for a person to extract up to 6~6.5 mil SP at the cost of a single month's sub.

Upon training an Alpha character to its max (4.5 mil for ease of dealing with rounded numbers), a person can then sub their account for 3 months, training skills outside of the Alpha skillset and extracting from the Alpha skillset. Once the Alpha skillset has been exhausted and the character has 5 mil SP in Omega skills, they can allow the sub to lapse and retrain the Alpha skills at no cost.

After this initial 3-month sub, a character can train the Alpha skills for free, acquiring 4.5 mil SP at no cost, sub for a single month to extract the 4.5 mil SP from the Alpha skills while continuing to train (1-1.5 mil, depending on attributes, implants, etc), and then drop back down to Alpha status to retrain the Alpha skills.

This gives an SP farm character the ability to generate ~12 injectors for the cost of a single PLEX.

This problem has been brought up several times since it was confirmed that Omegas could extract Alpha skills, including once by myself, but remains possible under the current build on SISI. No comments have, to my knowledge, been brought up by CCP indicating that this will not be possible.

If an SP farmer is lazy, they can train 3~3.5 mil in skills as opposed to the entire 4.5 mil, setting their skill queue to have the limit of 50 skills (again, from the Alpha skillset) at the last day of their Omega status, going into roughly 4 months of Alpha training. Log in four months after, PLEX once to Omega, extract the Alpha skillset, train for a month, and repeat. This would yield ~8 injectors for the price of a single month's sub, but would have almost no necessary interaction with the character beyond the initial skill-up and the extraction every four months.

The only realistic way to prevent this is to change it so that even Omega characters are unable to extract SP in the Alpha character skillset, which raises problems of its own that are outside the scope of this post.

Based on current prices, I anticipate injectors to drop in price until they cost below 380 mil. This is based on:

* Skill Extractor: ~280 mil. ea.
* PLEX: ~1.2 bil. ea.
* Average of 10 extractions per 1 month sub.

With PLEX at 1.2 bil and the ability to get, on average, 10 injectors from a single month, the PLEX would be spread out to around 100 mil per 500k SP. Because people some people will be using more optimal set-ups, and will use extraction to help reduce the cost of PLEX'ing their alt accounts (Cyno, PI, etc), the cost will likely fall a little below the break-even point.

Prices will, of course, vary based on the price of Extractors and the prices of PLEX, but will, I believe, cost (EXTRACTOR+(PLEX / 10)) in the long-run on the high end, with (EXTRACTOR+(PLEX / 12)) being the lower end.

While I don't anticipate the price will bottom out for a while, it's very likely that returning players will opt to pawn off some of their old and unwanted SP, especially if it's outside of their Alpha skillset. I wouldn't be surprised if a sudden drop in price occurs during the first month.

CCP has stated that the alpha skill set will NOT be able to be extracted. So unless this actually DOES change it means nothing really anyway. As you will NOT be able to extract under 5mil SP anyway which is why the 5.5mil SP mark needs to be reached so you can extract 500K back to 5mil.

So your entire theory is flawed to begin with.

Actually it is flawed. You are going on the assumption that SISI is correct and CCPs wording isnt. You also believe that somehow SISIs reality currently will somehow supercede the reality that you CANNOT extract under 5mil SP so you will not be able to extract all 10mil SP, though in your second post you are alluding to the fact that you need to get to 10mil and then purge the alpha skills only to retrain.

So it is based on assumptions and not CCP fact so far.





Then on top of it have fun logging in every day to train a 24 hour skill queue, yes thats right you will go back to trial account style limitations, already checked that with the GMs, and your gonna be doing more logging in daily than you know what to do with. And your going to be doing this for approx 6 months at half training time. So even IF you get your golden goose itll take you 6 months, actually more because the skills in the alpha set are NOT all in the same attribute remap so you will not be training at optimal, so say 7-9 months for 10 injectors for 1 plex. And thats IF...

Did it occur to you this is what they want to happen?

Are you viewing this from the POV of a farmer who sees his precious market going away or from an objective standpoint?

Why is it bad if the price drops?

I like how you act like this isn't a bunch of hoops to jump through to actually make this happen. I guess you don't value your time the same as I value mine.

Here's a question: the Alpha skills are basic skills that are very likely to be prerequisites for more advanced Omega skills. You cannot extract prerequisite skills. So can you truly build your 5 million SP Alpha, then add another 5 million Omega skills that don't have any of the Alphas as prerequisites, so you can extract the Alphas?

Because the math is easy to do based on the fact that you can extract the Mining skill, but most of the Alpha skills will be locked as prerequisites.

Well, forgive me if I don't take your word for it being as easy as you're making it out to be, considering you don't do it as a source of income right? Doing something once to test it out and doing something over and over and over again are two different things.

It might be easy to maintain on one or two accounts, but it's certainly not something that is easily scalable without considerable management which means it will take a considerable amount of time and effort.

I've done SP extraction on several occasions, but not for the purpose of farming. I've also been running tests with it on SISI, where I've been treating it like a farm, so while I may not do it on TQ, I'm not coming into this with zero experience.

There's a bit of set-up needed for the initial warm-up period, but beyond that, it takes almost no effort.

The warm-up needs you to tool around with the Alpha (assuming you don't already have an SP farm char from prior to the changes) daily or down to several times per week during the three-month period. This will be the worst of it, though. Once you've trained the Alpha char during that first three-month period, the necessary interaction drops to almost nothing.

After that warm-up period, you PLEX the character for three months, during which it's fairly easy to set up a three-month skill plan using Omega-only skills (as mentioned in another post, off-racial ships and weapons are prime candidates, considering Spaceship Command and Gunnery are both low-SP pre-reqs that won't drop you below the minimum SP mark). Once those skills are set, you can walk away from the character until the skills are trained.

At the end of that Omega training period, you log in, extract the Alpha skillset SP, and push yourself up to the 50-skill limit that Omegas have, filling it with the very same Alpha skills you just extracted. This will push the Alpha char out to about 4 months of training. You can walk away from the character at this point until those skills are trained.

Everything after this requires two interactions every 5 months: the first to PLEX the char for one month after the four months of Alpha training, during which you set an additional month of skills (easily done via a copy / paste from a skill planner), and the second to extract the SP at the end of the Omega month and reset the 50 Alpha skills (again, something easily done via copy / pasting from a skill planner). At this point, you can forget about the character again for four months.

The only "hard" part is the initial set-up, and for anyone with existing characters, even that set-up will be largely, if not entirely, negated.

And I suppose the injectors, skillbooks, and plex all drop right in your lap and there is no effort in shoping for those while attempting to maintain your margin?

I didn't say anything about being able to pay for them, the argument here on a micro level is the time it takes.

But if we are talking about macro and scalability (which is when your argument actually matters), it doesn't take long before capital also becomes a factor as well as time.