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But you try and tell the young people today that... and they won't believe ya'.

More seriously: I had a great first year. I have no idea what Marsha Mallow is talking about.

Let us look further at the economics of the proposal.

1) CCP won't want to destroy the character bazaar. Thus the price per skill point will be significantly higher than the price per skill point in the bazaar.

2) the bazaar price is about 1 B isk per 2 M skill points (or 250M per 500,000 sp packet).

3) The previously calculated break even training price of 300M per packet to the player is in line with that because people can fund an account through training and selling toons. Because selling packets is much more flexible, CCP has to raise that cost higher, let us assume that they need to double the price. Anything less and the bazaar is doomed. Much more and nobody will buy.

Which suggest that the extractors will need to be priced at least at 250M per each. This makes a total price for the packets of about 500M per packet. Or about 2 packets per plex.

you don't even need the extractors in order to make the bazaar more competitive. the diminishing returns makes any SP character with a higher SP total than the first diminishing return bracket uncompetitive compared to the bazaar.

for example, if you were to take two 80m characters and turn them in to 80.5m characters. it would take 1 plex (1.2bn) and 30 days to achieve that normally (since you can't buy a fraction of a plex), or 10 packets (77 days of time), which would cost 3bn isk.

instantly we can see that just dumping SP on a character prices it out of the running. it costs more than double for the same amount of SP.

People don't make decisions based on just the price alone though.

The argument is not that the SP pop up from thin air, but that training time isn't a 1 to 1 trade anymore.

Under the current system a character is sold as a whole package that took x months to train. The seller and buyer trade x months training time in specific skills for a certain amount of ISK.

With the proposed method a buyer can buy unallocated SP and apply them to any skill he wants and as often as he wants. Everytime he wants to fly something new that he couldn't fly before, it's sufficient to open the wallet ... no more waiting time.

At the same time the seller doesn't have to train one character for months to get him up to specs. A seller can optimize his SP output with a litteral farm of SP creating alts. This way 3 months worth of skilling could become 3x 1 month worth of skilling. The ability to scale up SP farming is a risk factor.

Let's consider the buyer side again. As others have pointed out already: If new players get the signal that you have to buy SP booster packs to be competitive, the psychological hurdle to keep playing EvE might become too high ... much as the perceived need to spend time training SP is now. The difference would just be that we swap time for money.

I'm not against the idea of SP reallocation per se, I'm pointing out what could be a problem.

I liked some proposals made here:
One was to limit the amount of SP boostable per month or year.
Another was to convert SP extracted into a training time acceleration.



I think that I have been constructive.

You're right that we lack the information on profitability of a scaled up farming operation. It could be that a surplus of SP boost packs is created by everyone who wants to get rid of undesired skills, thereby crashing the market for SP boosters. That would allow some players to get SP on the cheap.

We can speculate though, that players with less money to spend might feel shafted when other players can buy both ISK and SP at their leisure. Of course it's possible, that we get more players in who didn't like being held back by training times.

considering literally every downside people have come up with are simply things that already exist it seems we already have the downsides. if we've already got the problems there's no reason not to make the system suck less.

gonna go back to a point that i made to tippia.

you can dump sp on a character until it has all Vs. what can it do that can't be matched by a character that you can purchase from the bazaar?
nothing - we're long past the time where nobody can do something perfectly because of a lack of SP.

Don't be stupid, CCP.

It's as if modern gaming doesn't even want you to play the game anymore. Everything has to trend towards some sort of "instant" outcome.

That is not quite what I was getting at. I'm talking about something nobody has thought of yet that has a downside. Do you think that is zero?

I'm getting the impression you think it is zero.

I don't know the current figures, but it used to be that a majority of players had left EvE before they had reached 4 years.

Let's also not forget that you're maxed out in each skill once you reach level 5. No player is ever competing with all of the existing skills at the same time, except Dr Caymus and fellow skill collectors. Usually you just compete on a subset of the existing skills.

It's important to help new players get a complete subset of their choosing. If it takes all new players the same time to achieve this goal, that's a level playing field. Rising the tide so that every new player rises at the same speed is helpful.

Telling new players that they have to get as many skills as 10+ year old characters is outright dishonest. Especially if you couple it with pay to advance faster options.

BTW, when's the last time that you needed to have the skill to create an alliance and allow 5000 players in your corporation ?