EVE General Discussion

Very much this. Of all the different strategies for CCP to bring in more cash, this one is by far the one with the smallest impact for the game as a whole. Yet because it provides a tangible sense of benefit to individuals, I suspect it will be very successful. If CCP takes the money and spends it elsewhere, okay, fine. It's a business and can do what it needs to. I don't care. I actually like EvE online as it is right now quite a lot. And I'm excited about the roadmap. If it starts to suck for me due to neglect, then I won't play anymore.

But I still think that some of the new revenue will get reinvested back into EvE. When something makes a lot of money for you, you tend to put more effort into it, not less. So I see the skill injection maneuver as a way for the EvE team to make a business case to the company leadership that says, "Look. This is working. Give us more resources, and we can do even more."

I'm sorry to say but I 100% agree with the OP. I think skill injectors were a very bad call on CCPs part for all the reasons given by the OP and many other people in this thread.

I think CCP should immediately take steps to remove skill injectors again (or at the very least severely limit their use) without totally screwing over people that already hold large stocks of extractors or injectors. No idea how that's supposed to work but that's one of the reasons why I've paid about 4'000$ in subscription fees the last 10 years, so CCP can build a competent team to deal with these kind of things.

Here are my views in greater detail, in case you care:

Initially, I was actually quite happy about skill injectors (for purely egotistic reasons). They allowed me to drop a considerable amount of my ISK-reserves (that I hadn't actually touched in years) and spend them on advancing my characters.

However, having played EVE for over 10 years I basically already had all skills that were relevant - the injectors mainly allowed me to ODC stuff up by perfecting certain skill categories. Even before the injectors I basically didn't care about SP anymore and now (after finishing off the few "holes" in my skills) I'm even less interested in them. This means that (from a purely subscription point of view) CCP has lost 3 loyal accounts and replaced them with 3 accounts that will only be active and training when I actually intend to actively play EVE (which was at most 20% of the time in the last 10 years - the other 80% of that time I was only subscribed to continue training while playing other games or travelling).

So basically CCP went from a subscription model to a "front-loaded payment model" like most free-to-plays have: they want to motivate customers to start the game, drop a few hundred dollars on the game, play a while and then quit again. From a profit point of view this can make sense - especially if the developers of the game do not expect it to be able to retain players on a long-term basis.

So how should I interpret this change that CCP implemented? Is CCP doubtful that their game will be able to retain players (and attract new ones) in the coming years and are therefor taking steps to "cash out" as quickly as possible before they let the game die? If not, why implement such a short-term, front-loaded payment model?

A further aspect is the entire pay-to-win thing: EVE already was dangerously close to being pay-to-win by legally selling ISK in the form of PLEX. This allowed people with lots of RL cash to more or less directly buy power in the game (because lets be honest, having lots of ISK is a huge advantage in EVE and opens doors within minutes that other people take literally years to reach).

Now that you can not only buy ISK but also buy skills this pushes the game even more into the realm of pay-to-win. Any one-day-newbie willing to drop a few thousand dollars on PLEX and then buy injectors will basically be able to get as many skill points as they want. This was demonstrated fairly nicely by that guy that made a new character and then dropped 1,7 trillion ISK on injectors and thereby gave his character maxed skills (441 million SP). Sure, the costs of buying PLEX worth 1,7 trillion is pretty damn high (prohibitive to most people) but that's sort of the problem: if you have lots of money in real life then you can basically buy a custom-made character with perfect skills and zero time and effort. This is pretty much the very definition of pay-to-win.

I find it totally laughable (and frankly insulting) that CCP claims that this mechanism is anything other then pay-to-win... sure, you can either spend 20 years (no exaggeration) training skills or you can drop a few thousand dollars to get the same thing in 5 minutes... if that's not pay-to-win then I really don't know what is...

A further aspect is that EVE used to be a game where grinding was not as important (at least not long-term grinding) as most MMOs because there was no gear-threadmill as such that you had to thread to remain competitive. Now, with the introduction of skill injectors, anyone not willing to invest large sums of RL money to buy skill injectors will be forced to thread the mill and earn ISK to buy injectors in the hopes of remaining competitive that way. And sure, you might say "well, any amount of skills above about 150mil will not have any great influence on your performance and will only increase your versatility" (and you'd be correct up to a point) but if it's easily possible to attain skills quickly via injectors then any sufficiently "elite" corps or alliances will not have much understanding for people that have a small amount of SP. Example: when I joined my first "serious" PVP corp the requirement was 40mil SP. That used to be a fairly decent number of SP. Nowadays the same corp will likely require you to have 60mil SP to join. And now with skill injectors that number of minimum SP is likely to increase massively. Not having 100mil SP is now basically your own fault because you didn't spend the last two years grinding ISK and buying SP (or dropping 500$ on PLEX for skill injectors).

Personally I find this a very VERY bad development for a game like EVE. It's gone from a mostly grind-free experience to a situation where SP-proliferation will force anyone who wants to play EVE on a serious level to grind their asses off to maintain their relative SP-level or compensate their lack of grinding with RL money. That's exactly the same thing as if you could login to an MMO like WOW, drop a few hundred dollars and get your full epic set (or you can quit your job and grind your ass off instead). Oh what fun... NOT.

Basically the only ones that will profit from this development will be CCP thanks to PLEX sales.

(continued in next post)

If they remove or limit the use of skill injectors, what would you suggest they do to increase income instead?
Everyone knows this is to increase gain, which is okay. My take is that the community kinda forced CCP into claiming it is to help newbies, which it in some cases would and in others not. If they had said it was to increase profit (Which again is what companies does), the forums would be spammed by the "greed is good" tards.

And I totally agree with you. But "it's too late"... Doomheim time for my characters as my sub is ending now.
Time to move on ! o7

If you don't like it vote for a CSM that has a standpoint against them....
Really suprising that the Incarna riots haven't come along yet because wasn't that about something similar?
the NEX store turning into something for Real money -> skill extractors -> skill injectors.
instead of just vanity items.

Look at it from the point of view of a recruiter for a corp that considers itself to be above average (not to even mention the ones that consider themselves to be "elite PVPers"): you get an application from some character that has been playing since 2005 and has 140mil SP and a second application by a character from 2005 with only 80mil SP. Why should I even consider allowing the pleb with 80mil SP to join? By the recruiters logic he's clearly not committed to the game enough. If he were then he wouldn't "just" have spent those 10 years training his character but he would have been grinding ISK and could now afford to inject himself with skills until he reaches a decent number of SP (or he would be committed to the game and rich enough to simply buy those "missing" SP).

My point is that SP-requirements are subjective. If you get 50 applications a month then you'll very quickly start filtering applications by SP and anyone who doesn't work hard enough (in the eyes of the recruiter) is basically not worth having as a member.

Before skill injectors you would have been considered just as committed to game, no matter if you had 100mil SP, 80mil SP or 60mil SP - you simply joined the game later. But what's the "excuse" for anybody to have less then 80mil SP now? Clearly they are lazy plebs that don't invest enough time into EVE and/or are poor in RL, meaning they have to work a lot in RL and are therefor undesirable members of a "serious" EVE corp. (And, yes, yes, of course I know this representation of EVE reality is somewhat exaggerated - I'm just trying to demonstrate my point.)

On the other hand if you get an application by a 3 year old character with 100mil SP then you instantly know that this person is either rich enough to drop huge sums of money on EVE or has massive amounts of time to grind ISK and "power level" that way (ugh, that word alone makes me want to puke). Those are the kind of people you want in your "uber elite PVP corp", not some uncommitted low-SP quack, trust me.

Now please note that I do NOT share this view of things. I personally think that SP is overrated when it comes to recruiting but it's still a fact that many people will start to think exactly in those terms.

And sure you can say "well if they don't accept me because of my "low" SP then they're not worth playing with in the first place" but that's again just an excuse so you don't have to acknowledge that more and more doors are being locked behind a massive grind-wall or (worse) a pay-wall.



Why? They as good as rolled-back Incarna by puking it into the game and then never mentioning it again (let alone investing the time and money to turn it into anything other then an excuse for their crappy monocles).

When I say "roll-back" then I'm obviously aware that they can't literally "roll-back" the game to a point where the injectors didn't exist yet.

But in my opinion they need to implement some kind of limits on the number of SP you can get from injectors. Even some very liberal limit like 10% of your current SP would help (so if you have 50mil SP that you earned by training then you can't inject more then 5mil SP and if you have 100mil SP earned by training then you can inject 10mil SP etc.). At least that would prevent people from turning a 0-day-character into a 441mil SP char within 5 minutes...




But that's exactly the problem mate. They just implemented a payment system that tries to motivate you to drop as much cash as possible on the game RIGHT NOW. If they can get you to buy 20 PLEX and then in 3 months the game starts sucking then you've already paid for the equivalent of 20 months of game time. That's the beauty of what I call "front-loaded" payment models.

A company that is serious about providing a long-term game and that tries to retain its players to secure its income via a subscription is far less inclinded to screw its customers over because then - as you say - they'll simply stop paying. But if you already got their 1, 2 or 5 years worth of subscription fees in the form of PLEX then you suddenly don't have to worry too much about retaining players. And traditionally that's not worked out too well for pretty much every game that transitioned from a subscription model to a front-loaded free-to-play-type model.


Sure, it's possible that I'm overreacting here and you're obviously under no obligation to give a damn about anything I have to say but I still think that this new front-loaded payment model is not something that will help such a long-term and slow-paced game as EVE Online.

For us players it will cause an even bigger gap between old and new players and introduce a new kind of gap between (real life) rich and poor players (even more then PLEX to ISK conversion already has).

For CCP it will also cause false incentives to implement features that allow them to earn more and more money from their players as quickly as possible in a "front loaded" manner so in case the game goes down the tubes in 2 years and everyone quits their subscription then at least they'll have earned as much as possible along the way.

Your posts are one big hyperbole. And you start of by making a weird assumption on behalf of recruiters, commitment=SP. I don't accept this assumption. First off the elite recruiter just as much looks on killboards, and chemistry during the interview. And your assumption that it is an disadvantage to not be allowed into a niche corp (elite), is also quite subjective. Another corp will take the player, and the player could have as much, less or more fun than he would in the elite corp. Have you never been rejected by a corp? did it ruin your EVE experience? Your example is exaggerated, and again a special snowflake case.

Tbh. you exaggerate quite a lot, to the point it is hard to take you serious. Your previous stament that it takes 40 years for all skills (which is more like 20years, around 8-10 if you have three specialized alts).And you also claimed it cost a few thousand dollars, but it more like 28 thousand dollars. It means he paid in isk the dollar equivalent of 7 times as much as you claimed that you did over 10 years, for skills he cannot all use at once. He would have gotten more from 3 alts, he multiboxed. The "advantage" means very little on tranquility, due to what I wrote earlier.

and btw. the reason why people disagree on the pay2win argument, is because there are two definitions on these forums. Either A) pay2win is giving money for an in-game advantage B) pay2win is giving money for an in-game advantage you could not achieve without paying. I believe in B, as that is how it was originally coined for another type of games where winning is more easiliy defined. We should not derail with another pay2win discussion though. Just wanted to mention that people don't agree upon what is pay2win, hence all these crappy discussions.

And that SP will not save you from not knowing how to fly a ship. Skill bonuses do pretty much nothing unless you know how to fit to utilize them and correctly operate your modules.

To me, sp injecting, character trading, aurum, plexes and before that at the very beginning: time code for isk trades are all about one core question: should real life time spent on making real life cash be treated differently from game time spent on making game cash as far as it being a determinant for acces to gameplay options is concerned?

All that the OP's argument really comes down to is the opinion that for some reason, any gamer that chooses to spend more time in the game should be rewarded by more possibilities in the game world. I've however never yet heard a valid argument as to why that should be so. Apart from it being a gaming tradition.


Instead, I believe that time is the real currency, and that differentiating between any RL currency and game currency is pretty much arbitrary, not to mention out of place in a game like Eve, that is as much defined by it's oog play as it's ig play.



Personally, I'd say there's serious merit in an argument for restraining the transfer of RL inequalities to the game world. However, it seems that CCP are of a more liberal persuasion than I, and choose not to put any restraints on their RMT mechanics at all. But even if CCP chose to do so, it would make much more sense to limit isk buying than SP buying, since isk is much more of a factor in ingame power

1 Valid argument. We can no longer gauge the rough SP level of a player by its DOB.

Game.

Broken.