EVE General Discussion

I don't understand something. When CCP first announced this, there were pages and pages of raging in that thread related to the dev blog. What I'm seeing now is a complete reversal of opinion. What changed? Did people just step away for a bit, think about it, and see it in a more positive light?

Personally I like it. I have a character that's kind of all over the place, skill-wise. It was my first character so I wasted a lot of SP's experimenting with a lot of different activities that I regret now. I'm thinking I might just harvest that character to nothing and then biomass it.

You should probably read the dev blog thread, the topic is as controversial as it was when first suggested.

There's the old saying

Adapt or die

Current suggested pricing puts 50k SP for a 50M character at more than 500M. And the 500k SP need to come from somewhere. My guess is the price will settle around 1B.

So yea its unlimited, in that saving less than *one* day of training will cost 1B. you really think people are going to pay that? Oh and where are all these skill points coming from? They have to come from real accounts.

Where does this suggested pricing come from btw?

Possibly from the current Character Bazaar? Total cost of ISK divided by number of skill points by using a few sample characters.

Oh yeah.

The problem is the ones most likely to be handed the equivalent of billions of isk worth of skillpoints (in addition to just billions of isk) are ones in large groups, which means they are evil.

I will probably start trying to get this into the hands of newbies as the first bunch of core skills are no fun to train and you know we love the Celestis.

Early opinion pieces are useful to stop a hysterical reaction from the playerbase. People have been incredibly squawly the last year or so and those of us who were round for Incarna are starting to recognise how bad a player riot on that scale might be if unleashed again. But I take your point and a more detailed analysis probably would be a decent step going forward. It might be better if that comes from CCP if they're following various discussions and have some metrics in the background they can refer to.

Just to answer some of your points:

1. Anyone who tries to farm SP will have to either pay a sub or Plex their accounts. Just as character farmers do now. Talking from experience here, I have 100+ accounts at the moment although most are unsubbed because my PC is fried. This type of farming is an ISK conversion process and it's tied to Plex prices quite closely. If Plex prices are higher than you can actually sell an alt for you will make a loss. Character prices on the bazaar lag behind Plex in real time by a few months and have to be deliberately manipulated upwards to compensate. Also, anyone attempting an SP farm will be in direct competition with every other player in the game - so if it's massively profitable, everyone will jump on it and crash the market.
2. The proposed numbers are heavily slanted in favour of new players. Rich older players attempting to boost the SP on a character with more than 80m SP will have to inject 10x the Skill Packets that a character under 5m SP will. That's a significant tax.
3. Large alliances can afford SRP for their line members now where small alliances can't. I'd class that as more of a PTW feature than SP. Even then large alliances would struggle to subsidise thousands of players with more than a few thousand additional SP per month. It's not as though large blocs can afford to pay their members now to sub their accounts so I wouldn't overestimate their monthly income streams.
4. Winning an AT match has nothing to do with skillpoints, sorry. I'm really not seeing how this topic even ties in, and honestly there aren't enough alliances signing upto the AT anyway. Not because of lack of SP, but because it requires massive commitment to practice matches which some groups reject if it impedes their activities on TQ for several weeks.
5. They could do this anyway to sell them on the bazaar or return to play.
6. Not sure why EvE quitters would return to game to cash in on SPs? If they were so determined to RMT they could easily sell their characters through gold sites.
7. RMT's a concern in general - but as stated before, if all player characters have some value if sold illegally, what difference do skill packets make to the equation? I'm assuming you mean people will sell the SP then try directly RMT the ISK out. That's really a risk for the security team to assess and I'm not sure any of us are qualified to speculate on what the impact might be.
8. These are separate concerns. Players in highsec have the ability to turn friendly fire off on their corp if awoxing is a concern. Elsewhere there's always a risk, but normally they get one shot and then get kicked, and player groups can replace ships lost without a huge fuss. Lowsec and nullsec groups run background checks on characters to try stop dodgy alts getting in - but tbf these checks only go so far because of the excessive use of alts and the ability to create multiple identities anyway. If anyone engages in this then recycles their alt to evade consequences, they'd be taking a massive hit in terms of cost over time that might make the practice less economical. Any recruiter with a brain will spot newly reformed alts so if anything recycling repeatedly would become a major flag and might impede peoples ability to join player groups.
9. I think the SP scaling works to counter that somewhat. 0-5m really is where the pain spot is for newer players. Educating players about the limits in the value of SP needs to be considered anyway as there's already a problem with the system.


I'm not. I've run my accounts for so long I'd be reluctant to part with even the ones I don't use. Since I have 4 with 150m SP+ and 4 with 100 plus a few more mains with less gutting them would mean losing massive amounts of SP in tax to reconfigure them into new alts. I can't speak for anyone else, but I suspect it's not just me with an attachment to characters I've had for a long time, so it's hard to judge exactly how many would cannibalise high SP alts. Certainly they might do with lower SP alts and move it across to their mains, and if that means they can cut their number of accounts I can't see a problem? We've been encouraged to run silly numbers of accounts and for people reliant on Plex, under conditions where Plexes are increasing in value sharply there's a risk that players who are dependent upon them will simply quit altogether.

Since I bought alts early on because of frustration with the early months and the half dozen people I got to play the game never even subbed because 'why pay to train for 6 months before you can even play' there is very much an argument that it'll benefit newer players. Sorry, but I've made it abundantly clear that newer players are likely to benefit the most from this, so you're either completely misreading my remarks or assuming a selfish agenda that just isn't there. Actually in a lot of ways I see this as a form of FTP to correct problems with the sub model but haven't seen anyone else follow through on that idea.

Someone is butthurt about not being able to make billions upon billions on the char bazaar :) I like the changes

I'm not, and the comments I'm seeing from other character traders in public look positive towards this too. The rest are keeping their mouths shut which suggests they're either rage posting in opposition from alts or whipping out the calculators and rubbing their grubby little paws together in glee. If this goes through players sat on lots of alts for trading purposes might cash out well. Or lose massively. They wouldn't be in this market if they didn't enjoy risky types of speculation - it's always been fairly volatile - so they're probably enjoying themselves either way.