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actually, it's just going to be the price of SP. ~1/4 plex price + extractor price.

there's no reason to sell below cost price, and the barrier to entry for selling SP is basically a subscribed account meaning anyone and everyone can start an SP farm. unless you're already dual training you can have up to 3 SP farms per account.

this literally non-existent barrier to entry will put a near uncontestable downwards pressure on the price of TSPs.

there's very little for the price to go except to track at 1/4 plex price + TSE price.

i wasn't referring to that part.

i was referring to the bit that says "rather have isk than those mining skills you don't use any more" that simply won't be the case if you mined. the prerequisite for mining ships are the mining skills. if i can't extract any of the mining skills i don't use any more because i injected the mining barges skill...

Toons higher than 50m SP still be unique because of small effectiveness of SP injector.
You can transfer your experiences by teaching (how it happening IRL) but it's side question.

Great for people 0-5million SP... then you get deminishing returns after that...

So.. How afraid of characters with 5-10million skillpoints are you? Give me a mark out of 10... 9/10? -.-

Have you actually started a new toon lately, you get 400,000 sp's now, they throw skillbooks at you left right and centre , theres all manner of ships to be got running the tuts, when we started there was nothing and 5k theres the door goodbye. How much more you wanna dumb down a game for newguys ...... may as well stick a few orcs and dwarfs in at this rate.

Yes, that could happen. The other is that if the demand shifts outward permanent for some reason driving up the price, over time that will likely drive up the PLEX price, bringing the market back into alignment.

The price tend towards equality with the PLEX market with periodic deviations.

a large portioin of skills people will want to get rid of are prerequisites. especially if they invested in something heavily before investing in something else - like pretty much all older characters did.

Interesting question. I would suspect it is mainly people bankrolling their own purchases, but v0v.

I'm a fan of Elise Randolph's for various reasons. However, I feel that he's presented some arguments in favor of SP Trading which seem reasonable, on the surface, but don't quite take into account how the mechanic would affect EVE as a whole.

I'd like to summarize what I'm about to write (this is the tl;dr).

1. Character Bazaar and SP Trading are not comparable mechanics. The only similarity they have is the SP transfer, but we can't divorce the pros and cons of each when we compare them.
2. SP Trading devalues characters and removes consequences (not just the consequences of skill training choices).
3. SP Trading is pay to win. I'll clarify exactly what I mean by that.
4. SP Trading will be abused
5. There are better things CCP can spend time on to make EVE a better, more attractive game to new players.



Part 1: The Character Bazaar and SP Trading is not the same. It's false equivalency to say they're the same.

1.Motivation: The primary reason for Bazaar to exist is, as CCP says, to "discourage people from participating in illegal account sales on eBay and other sites".

SP trading does not inherently prevent RMT like the Bazaar does. Why? Because people can trade characters by exchanging login info even if CCP did not have a mechanism to transfer characters. However, there is no way that people can trade SPs today. This means SP trading doesn't exist in any illicit way that character transfers can exist. Thus, SP trading as a mechanism is not motivated by the need to prevent RMT. From the perspective of an "EVE Fan", it seems like CCP's motivation is a money grab.

2.Pros and cons: Let's talk about the second distinction between Bazaar and SP trading.

Bazaar:
(A) Con: reputation, corp history, sec status. This is not immediately apparent, even with EVEWho, zKill, etc.
(B) Con: character name
(C) Con: Race is locked
(D) Con: Gender is locked
(E) Con: SP is untransferrable. From the point that you buy the character, they have to train realtime
(F) Con: SP is locked to all the skills the original owner chose to train.
(G) Con: 2 PLEX transfer fee baked into sale price
(H) Con: If the sale is posted on Bazaar, then there is a public record of the "bundle of SP" being transferred to you
(J) Con: Cost of skillbooks (if expensive) baked into sale price
(K) Con: Adds logistical difficulties on part of seller. They have to transfer out excess inventory, move the character to a neutral location, add eveboard link, making a public post and bumping it, advertising the character amongst myriad alternate options, etc.

(L) Con: Adds logistical difficulties on part of the buyer. They have to transfer in inventory (and then possibly move it long distances), apply to the corp they want and pass the recruitment screening, do extensive research before buying the character, and then suffer all the consequences of "A" if they didn't do adequate research.

(M) Pro: Buyer instantly gains a bundle of SP they did not themselves train for
(N) Pro: Probably? cheaper than SP trading in ISK/SP. However, this may or may not be true depending on the Extractor + SP training cost (for 500k SP it is 1/4 PLEX + 300? Million ISK)

SP Trading:
(i) Con: Probably? costs more than a Bazaar transfer. However, this may or may not be true depending on the Extractor + SP training cost (for 500k SP it is 1/4 PLEX + 300? Million ISK)

(ii) Pro: Does not have any of the Cons of Bazaar, specifically A,B,C,D,E,F,G,H,J,K,L
(iii) Pro: Increase SPs on your main who has the reputation, corp history, sec status, character name, race, gender, inventory in all the right locations, has already passed corp recruitment, is sitting in a station that you choose.

(iv) Pro: Increase SP without any auditing capabilities of where that SP came from. Why is this important? EVE is a game of reputation, and consequences for choices you make. When there is no audit process of how you are funnelling SP from disreputable alts, we turn EVE into a game where character choices no longer matter. Any corp theft, and corp spy can be recycled at a 20% SP cost (or less!). Conversely, the buyer never learns how to be careful and how to do research.

(v) Pro: Add SP to whichever skills you want, in any order you want.
(vi) Pro: Not limited to scarcity. No upper limit on SPs being generated. Bazaar characters of all different kinds of professions can be found, but good characters are scarce. SPs will always be available. To give an analogue, in Bazaar Logistics V will not always be available at the price point or package (ie: character) you want. However, SPs will always be available on market, and always at bargain basement prices due to the nature of one-click-buy market goods.

(vii) Pro: SP will be the only passive income source in the game not subject to any shipping logistics (read: zero effort).

As you can see Bazaar and SP Trading are two completely different animals. It is a specious argument to insist that CCP is not adding a fundamentally different mechanic into the game.

Part 2: SP Trading devalues characters.

EVE is a personality game. Our personalities are tied to characters, whether or not we admit it to ourselves. Chribba is unmistakably Chribba and no one else has the reputation he does. The reason why just about every CSM member and Chribba are against SP Trading is because SP Trading modularizes a character.

The argument is that the character is simply the sum of its parts. Deconstruct and reconstruct SPs and functionally you have the same thing.

A character is more than the sum of its parts, and in order for the idea of a character retaining value, the SPs it has trained have to remain "trapped" inside that character. Why? Because everything else the character does is also "trapped" inside that character.. the metagaming choices she's made, the history she has with others, the Corps she's joined, the ships she has destroyed. None of these things can be wiped out because I believe we have an unspoken agreement that in EVE what's happened to a character is something they keep for the rest of their life. How can Skill Points, which is the most fundamental non-meta mechanic in the game, suddenly be divorced from characters wholesale without devaluing characters themselves?

The argument is that if you don't like your skills, and you want a different skillset, then go to the Bazaar and buy another character. But in doing so you have to sacrifice the reputation and the name of the character you have now.. the one you don't like so much. A character's race and gender have massive significance inside the EVE roleplaying community. A character's name has massive significance in all of EVE's communities. These character qualities are part of an important sacrifice that is missing in SP Trading, and simply putting a higher ISK/SP price on it is missing the point.



Part 3: SP Trading is Pay to Win

I define "pay to win" as any feature that is locked behind a paywall that another RL poor gamer can't unlock no matter how much time and effort he spends in the game.

Is PLEX pay to win? No for 2 reasons:
1. Buying shinier things doesn't make you a better player automatically
2. A person can work hard enough in game and earn the ISK to get a PLEX

Is Character Bazaar pay to win? No for the same 2 reasons as I listed for PLEX.

Is SP Trading pay to win? It is, for these reasons:
1. SP Trading has no upper bound. If I make 1 SP mule on an account using MCT, I can give my main 1.6M SP per month (80% of 2M) extra. If I have 2 SP mules, my main gets 3.2M SP per month extra. The only upper bound is real money, and someone with lots of money can easily "out-perform" someone who is just playing the game without paying extra money.
2. CCP has not responded to the question of how they would prevent RMT on SP. My belief is that it's not possible. Characters are "big bundles" of SP connected to accounts that can be IP tracked to determined if they've switched hands. PLEXs are cheap enough officially during Amazon sales that it hardly makes much sense to RMT PLEX in the first place. But SP will be an ubiquitous currency that will be traded everywhere. And there is nothing that stops people not currently subscribed to the game from coming in and cashing out.



Part 4: SP Trading will be abused.

Let me list the ways:
1. SP mules making passive income on countless accounts
2. People blowing away the max 2700 SP per hour limit. Now there is no upper limit so characters could gain as much SP as they want per hour, because sky's the limit for an IRL rich player
3. Large alliances will be able to afford SP packets for their rookie line members. Small alliance won't be able to.
4. Instant gratification for Alliance Tournament participation. Cash in SPs and enlist as a contender (maybe Elise considers to be a good thing). Can you see how this will be abused when combined with #3?
5. People un-biomassing old characters to cash in on SPs.
6. EVE quitters subscribing for 1 month to cash in on SPs.
7. RMT RMT RMT RMT RMT
8. Awoxers, corp thieves, spies recycled with only a 20% hit in SPs
9. It will perpetuate the myth that SPs make you win EVE to people who will fork out money to chase this myth. This will be one of the biggest exploits that rookies will face coming into EVE, and when they realize SPs don't make them good players they will quit.



Part 5: What can CCP do instead?

I think I've provided logical, rational, not emotional reasons for why SP Trading will be bad for EVE.

What can CCP do better to improve gameplay?

1. Fix skill training boosting implants so that they don't give players a reason not to undock
2. Improve all the irritating little things in UI that detract from us enjoying the game (there are massive lists that can be found in F&I).