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I guess skills don't matter then, let's just remove them all.

How do you think this is a good argument?

the show is over i guess
Eve R.I.P

It will always be cheaper to buy a pre-made character. As it stands now, you can buy one for less than it would cost to make it at today's PLEX prices.

What I suspect this will be used for (for most capsuleers) is the occasional top up for people really impatient to get into that new shiny ship that's still a week away from them hopping into it. There will be outliers , of course. The idiots with more money than brains dropping hundreds of dollars in the mistaken belief that SP equals skill.

Like I said in my very first post in this thread. It's really much ado about nothing. It won't be a game changer and it won't be the death of EVE in my opinion. It'll just be another option I'll have to think about when character trading. Now I'll have to factor in the option of breaking them down and selling that way.

But then, I build characters like this. Good name, good looks and hyper focused. That's how you get a premium price at auction time. I'd likely lose money by breaking her down and just selling the SP. But I'll see how it pans out and make my final decision then.

Mr Epeen

That is the point. If CCP is ready to change fundamentals of the game so easily, without even any bigger effect and without visible benefits for the player base then what is the next we can expect? That means that we, as customers, cannot lean on CCP as service provider as they have no consistency. As this is not counter strike gungame, it takes a lot of time to spend in game to get somewhere, who will be risking to play long term when they know anything can be changed just like that. That means one more dead MMORPG. And this is the MMORPG i like, I do not want to see it die.

What this boils down to is CCP is selling for cash instant unlimited skill point boosts to players.

I'm already setting up characters to farm skill points not because I think it will make good isk but to increase my income to compensate for the inevitable increase cost to plex accounts.

Yes it is for one simple reason:

The character bazaar does not let you bypass game mechanics; this idea does. The reason for the difference is because we're talking about raw SP rather than collections of skills and because you can trade with yourself. In combination, these two let you bypass the inherent limitation that exists in how quickly a single character can evolve — something the character bazaar does not let you do.

The whole P2W rhetoric is somewhat silly, because it just devolves into a debate of what constitutes “win” in the game. However, P2W is a just one case of a general class: paying to skip, ignore, or bypass game-mechanical limitations. “Win” or no “win” is largely besides the point — the SP trading is a very clear example of this larger pattern, and as such is an inherently bad idea for the simple reason that all cases belonging to that general class are inherently bad ideas.

That is not to say that skill trading itself is inherently bad; only that the way it is done here is an awful implementation that breaks things.

Great idea CCP +1 thanks for opening the game up a bit more to allow more people to enjoy themselves.

Will probably be looked back as one of the greatest changes EvE ever made once all the tin-foil hat doomsday preppers realize this isn't Y2K.

If the figures will be tweaked correctly, I believe you're right.


But it's still a crap idea, because:

Benefit: as you say, mostly occasional top up. this also means occasional (not constant) aurum milking for CCP

Cost: veterans pissd off (probably irrationally so, but that's how people are), newbros feeling ripped off (rightly so), CCP introducing the first real p2w mechanic in EVE history and exposing themselves to greed accusations


How is this a smart move???

Only the richest of all players can benefit from this model. Once players can buy and sell SP on the market the price can just raise as SP as a resource is much more limited than ISK is. So either those with the most ISK or those with the most $ will profit from it. And these are the people who already are (or at least look like to be) in an advanced position as both do not need to care about loosing stuff. New players instead care about loosing stuff. And they care about ISK and $. They won't be able to afford buying SP from self-earned ISK. They need to spend real money and they need to spend much of it. Will they?

Even then, sooner or later it will be too much if you do not control the market by fulfilling the demand with supply. So where comes the supply from? Out of nowhere? I can not believe that you at CCP have not considered that. What I can believe is that you do not have the balls to tell us directly you want (or need) to sell SP directly for real money as you fear our response. But you should also fear the results of such a shortsighted approach by ******* us up!

But wait ... wasn't it just about the character bazaar? Isn't it a fact that we can already buy SP with money? No, we can buy characters. And this is a huge difference because we only need a limited amount of characters but an almost unlimited amount of skillpoints.

Please, think again!

TL;DR:

- It would be even fairer for new players if you sell SP directly for AUR as the price would be fixated
- It would be more transparent if you do so as you do not need to manipulate the market
- It would still need a limiting factor such as addable SP per year
- It may THEN be much more reasonable to NOT diminishing the SP/$ proportion based on existing SP as long term subscribers can at least decide whether they want to keep their SP lead by paying more *
- It may still be the wrong concept at all **

(*) Though this might sound strange in the context of my introductory statement don't forget that veterans would be penalized with any kind of mechanics that narrows the SP gap. Where I personally feel that having SP more equally distributed on the playerbase (thus lowering the relative advance) can only bring in more fun to the game, a mechanic for keeping the absolute advance would still be present. Sometimes a power creep is the best solution, yes.

(**) Bring in other ideas which not directly involve RMT for SP - e.g. ...

Consider introducing an enormous SP/hour boost for ALL new characters:

- Activate it once a player pays a 3 month subscription (which approx. corresponds to a full price AAA title) or a special 3 month of dual character training
- Let it slowly decrease from something like 1M SP on the first day to about 40M in total within this 90 days
- Appease the veterans by still introducing the very interesting mechanic of letting us reallocate OUR OWN skills at a given cost (e.g. 50%) and maybe even give away every player 1M SP per year since DOB or per year of subscription / PLEX (yes, again a power creep might sometimes be the best solution)
- Do the math and consider the possible revenues of having countless people training up multiple new chars (who really needs uber-SP chars when one can have 3 specialized chars instead?) vs. the risk of looking like a greedy P2W/F2P vendor who eventually kills its cash cow

second, we already have the character bazzar if acquiring SP is "winning".