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I make this plea for sanity from CCP in my unequivocal re-iteration that I vote NO, NEVER, CASE AND DESIST...

I am an individual with unique real life aviation and MMO gaming experiences that holds a life time COMPED FREE OF CHARGE ACCOUNT to certain online MMO games because of the graphics and game play design work I did for them...

and yet I choose to pay CCP real money in the form of monthly subscriptions when I have the option to pick up other MMO's free of charge and play them forever without it costing me one red cent...

and I do this simply because I believe EVE offers something unique that is unfathomable to those other game developers to even consider implementing because they could never pull it off...

That EVE gave gravitas and weight to the quantity known as time and long term planning through its skill training mechanic and its diverse sandbox game play...

Do you (CCP) understand you have competition that can undercut your asking price for entertainment by up to 100%?

Do you (CCP) understand that the skill que system and its time investment mechanic is all that sets EVE apart from every other MMO in that it can not be cheated and time in EVE if missed or misused can not be replaced on a single character?

Players can buy someone else's toon or train a million alts but on the toon a player made that they hold dearest as their creation they can never cheat time on it. This simple twist on MMO implementation makes EVE the most realistic game ever made and it is the only reason why hundreds of thousands of people put up with bad game play decisions you (CCP) keep making...

because they are invested totally by the time it took to create their characters...

What is more important for you (CCP) is that new players like me are hooked on this long term time investment as much as the old players only we are having more fun with our low SP than they are with their High SP because every new skill is a new treat and a new adventure or a new ship and the ride has just begun...

and now you (CCP) propose to cheat time to increase profit because you (CCP) believe those hundred thousand players new and old that will walk through fire to keep their toons training even when they take breaks from the game will be happy to keep paying you when their time investment is nullified into something trivial because you (CCP) say you want to help the new player (ME) even after the new players tell you they do not want this either...

This is what I now know from my time in EVE is called a Cascade Failure in which the leadership of a group loses all touch with its supporting member structure and burns all sacred bridges, crosses all lines in the sand and breaks all promises and the end is swift like any cascading string of domino's that tumble into the vast ether of nothingness from which they came and where time has no meaning.

Listen to your customers on this one...

They are not joking about the long term consequences of even considering an action that removes or nullifies players interest in long term commitments to EVE online.

I have to add my voice to the chorus of disapproval. Cannibalizing skill-points is a daft idea. Eve should remain a game of meaningful choices where patience is rewarded.

In reference to the character bazaar, you can scrap that too for all I care.

Also I can't believe that somehow CCP Rise had something to do with this idea. This has the stench of a certain CEO... Maybe they where thinking since the CSM was already opposed to the idea they have to present it with a friendly face.

Dont' do this. Please. PLEASE!

It's a truly horrible idea.

I played from day one of my Eve career and had a great time doing so.

Make the most of the skill points you have whilst learning about the game.

Hell, I mined in an Iteron 3 - about an hour to fill it, if I remember correctly, and spent a lot of time chatting to older players in local who were unfailingly helpful.

- I want 25m skill points today, - will soon become I want to fly a Titan from day one.

This is probably the worse idea CCP have ever come up with...

Nearly every single person supporting this change seems to be totally ignoring the fact that the game fundamentals are being changed for something with at least to say shady vision, plenty of possible side effects and almost no benefit for new players. This is dangerous road to head to.

With a potential to seriously harm player base. And that is what is a big deal.

No it does not. They will have to spend isk (which they dont have as they are new, so cash) to get in the game. How many people are going to do so. Your subscription is 15 bucks per month, but you should invest 50-100 bucks to get better start. If you think that is going to get people attracted or keep them in the game, you are wrong.

I'll just copy-paste what I've written elsewhere:



I like it less and less the more I think about it. At first it seems fairly clever, but the whole “unallocated” SP is where it falls apart. It ends up being that most awful of designs: a means to bypass game mechanics using cash.

The idealistic case is neat — old players using their largely pointless training time to give skills to the needy — but it's not actually skills and it's not the needy who benefit. Rather, it is a way for me to train at double speed at an irrelevant cost, since I'm getting SP out of the deal rather than fixed skills.

Unless they remove the SP part of the idea, and instead let people trade actual skills, this is essentially the SP buying people have been asking for for ages. The fact that it happens at a loss or with diminishing returns doesn't change this — it just increases the cost: I have to use two training queues rather than one to feed my main with SP, big whoop. :nallears:

They're trying to balance their mechanics bypass on cost. That means it is inherently imbalanced. It also needs to be a skill trade, not an SP transfer, and good luck creating diminishing returns on that in any sensible way.



But that's just it: there is no such limitation — only an increased cost.

Basically, there are two core issues I see with the idea as presented:

1. There is no upper limit other than running out of skills. You can go back for more as much and as often as you like since we're talking about raw SP rather than skills. While the cost increases as you get more of them, there's nothing that keeps you from buying these packets over and over again and just keep piling up SP. This also has the side-effect that the market for these packets will be heavily skewed and will most likely cater to the whales rather than the little guy… as always. There's only one good, and it will be pulled along in one direction with very little differentiation of supplies and demands (plural… I'll get to that). There's supposed to be a limit to this in that the market will only supply so much, but that's not actually true because…

2. You can trade with yourself. With the bazaar, there was no point or need to trade with yourself. You bought a character because you needed its abilities, but if you already had that character, you obviously had no need to buy it — you already had it. With the proposed setup, this is no longer true. The SP you create on your alt can be as useful on your main, perhaps even more so, and are completely unbound — there are no prerequisites or limitations to what you can transfer, only a diminishing return, i.e. a higher cost, which isn't particularly relevant for a high-end character. This instantly bypasses and negates every single limitation or attempt at balance the market portion is supposed to provide. If you're willing to pay for those additional queues to just sit and produce SP, demand becomes almost irrelevant as a factor.

Sure there's still the actual training speed of the alts to contend with, and in practice, there will be an upper limit to how much people are willing to spend, but you still arrive at a situation where you can pay cash to double your training speed.


Problem #1 could conceivably be solved by making a trade of skills rather than SP — hence why I put supply and demand in plural. If you're in the market for a Caldari Frigate I–V package, then that's a completely different market than if you're looking for a Caldari Titan I–V package. It also means that you get some diminishing return-like effect in that, you might already have that skill to IV and you still have to buy the full I–V package, so you only get ~80% of what you're paying for.

It also means that all these different demands can evolve independently; they can mean something and actually reflect what people want at different levels, rather than have everyone compete for the same pile of free-floating SP (and have some bypass it altogether). JDC V is a fairly specialised skill that still has a huge market, so its price will go up. Titan V will not be in high demand, but rare, so its price will go up too. Meanwhile, although everyone needs it, CPU Management V is common as hell and will catch a suitably low price. To some extent, this also addresses problem #2 — getting an alt to the point where they can give your main Titan V, or even just JDC V, means you have a highly capable alt, so trading with yourself becomes much more cumbersome and a lot less desirable in general.

Even so, self-trading is where this really differs from the character bazaar, and that's probably where the biggest potential for absolute disaster comes in… and of course, the problem with trading skills rather than SP is the way the EVE market works. It would either have to be done though the contract system (urgh) or require a completely new market, bespoke for this one purpose.

No.


Why? Because new players will not want to invest money in a game they are not even sure they want to play. And they cannot invest Isk as they are new, they dont have much of it, right? They would surely want to get the SP cheaply, but that is never going to happen.

The ignorance of presented facts as well. This will not help new players.