Backstage - OOC Forums
EVE-Online RP Discussion and Resources => EVE OOC Summit => Topic started by: Silas Vitalia on 19 Jan 2016, 09:00
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http://evenews24.com/2016/01/18/dev-blog-skill-trading-in-new-eden/
You can buy skillpoints now? For $$?
Thoughts?
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As a new player of 27 months, this will let me skip a couple of awkward remaps. Won't be really accessible for most genuinely new players and people have already figured out how to farm it. Cost will bottom out at injector store price + 25.73% of a PLEx per packet, but how long it's going to stay there it's anyone's guess.
Conversely, ISK will get more valuable because of this.
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It’s very important to note here that this means all the skillpoints available to buy on the market in EVE will have originated on other characters where they were trained at the normal rate.
I'm okay with this.
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http://evenews24.com/2016/01/18/dev-blog-skill-trading-in-new-eden/
You can buy skillpoints now? For $$?
Thoughts?
That's always been possible, with the character market.
This just simplifies and expands that idea.
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Character history used to be somewhat of an indicator of what you were facing, though? The two week old pilot and the 5 year old pilot now represent the same potential threat?
ability and history of character not so related going forward? Going to be some interesting awoxing disposable alt business going on.
Then again I don't know if artificial limits like skillpoints should even be a thing for gameplay.
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Purely out of interesting was this kind of thing suggested often on the EVE forums?
A month or two before the announcement a Duster, Jadek Menahiem, suggested a skill point extraction and trading method like this one for Dust 514 and tweeted it at the devs.
Just wondering if this was a common EVE request as well.
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It wasn't one that came up often as far as I'm aware, because of the pay to win vibe.
It's tremendously exploitable and ruins a core tenet of the game: that decisions and actions have consequences, and that those consequences are often traceable through history.
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How is it exploitable?
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Since the skillpoints come from existing characters, and aren't generated from thin air, then...
Any time a skillpoint injector thingie appears as destroyed cargo on a killmail, it means that the capsuleer population is now collectively dumber.
lol.
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Since the skillpoints come from existing characters, and aren't generated from thin air, then...
Any time a skillpoint injector thingie appears as destroyed cargo on a killmail, it means that the capsuleer population is now collectively dumber.
lol.
Almost the same as reading battle reports with lots of dead T3 cruisers.
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In the sense that CCP frowns on people recycling characters just because they have bad sec status from ganking and the like.
Since you don't need more than 5m SP for an effective ganking character, you can extract, biomass, create, inject, over and over with no loss except some money (which isn't really a barrier for the sort of person who would abuse this). And then it's a fresh character with no history to speak of, again bypassing the whole actions-have-consequences thing.
I'm perfectly fine with being able to reallocate SP on a specific character at a slight loss of SP in the process. I'm not okay with being able to transfer that SP between characters, even if they were on the same account as one another.
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It wasn't one that came up often as far as I'm aware, because of the pay to win vibe.
It's tremendously exploitable and ruins a core tenet of the game: that decisions and actions have consequences, and that those consequences are often traceable through history.
part of that tenet has changed though, CCP has revisited skills and mechanics in such ways as to make some skills irrelevant, or required to have at 5 to make a difference.
For example, when they changed reprocessing you could melt loot with above average refining skills (scrapmetal at 1), now that doesnt cut it ...you need it at 5 to make it useful....in other areas, tractor beams required the science graviton physics skill....now it doesn'nt....
Having SP just sitting there, regardless if you no longer pay for clones, is a waste.
With this feature you can adjust your character a bit, and make the unused SP useful to others....however the only concern i have is this will make tracking spy alts impossible.....you can always discard a "burn" name and then just create a fully skilled toon right from the get go.
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The awox and infiltration possibilities alone are a bit much?
You are heading for full blown Broker gameplay for anybody into this sort of thing, hehe.
Anyway seems more fuel for the RMT fire. See how it goes. I would speculate this is more of a slide towards PTW/microtransactions from the new board member?
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I actually like the idea. Character age has never been a reliable guide to threat level after just a couple months (time to ~90% efficiency with T1 cruisers), it's always been possible to buy relatively pristeen new characters, and you can already buy your sec status back up on the cheap.
Awoxing? How does this even substantially change things, considering the preexisting character market? Also, who puts a three-month-old character in a director position with or without skills? You still have to deal with the human element.
Note also the diminishing returns. Aria would benefit very little from one of these.
I'm not sure the dynamics will be constructive, but I'm not sure they'll be destructive, either. I'll be interested to see how it works out (and muse extensively over the philosophical implications, IC).
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The awox and infiltration possibilities alone are a bit much?
You are heading for full blown Broker gameplay for anybody into this sort of thing, hehe.
Anyway seems more fuel for the RMT fire. See how it goes. I would speculate this is more of a slide towards PTW/microtransactions from the new board member?
It'd be PTW if it let me get a skill to Level 6, whereas people who trained normally were limited to Level 5 at maximum. It's not more pay to win that paying your sub at this point.
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Since you don't need more than 5m SP for an effective ganking character, you can extract, biomass, create, inject, over and over with no loss except some money (which isn't really a barrier for the sort of person who would abuse this). And then it's a fresh character with no history to speak of, again bypassing the whole actions-have-consequences thing.
You apparently can't extract skills unless you have over 5M SP, curbing this kind of abuse somewhat. And no one is expecting skill extractors to be cheap - they're very probably going to be at least as expensive, in the end, as simply PLEXing your character and waiting a while.
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It doesn't take much to fly a gankalyst (https://zkillboard.com/kill/51494134/). Tags for sec status is also a thing.
It's also questionable how this would fuel 'awox and infiltration possibilities'. Where's the difference if you hire someone who bought his character (someone bought it on the bazaar) or someone who has bought SP (Age and SP doesn't match up)? The innocent reason is the same "I wanted more SP to play with." Whether it's the alt of your arch enemy or not you will not find out either way if it's done correctly.
Same for Awoxing.
You can, however, get tackled and cyno-dropped by that 2 day SWA character you didn't perceive as a threat in local. Someone invested into that to outplay you. That's literally EVE. (Cue everyone that ever complained that passive intel is too effective in EVE)
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My only wish in this new feature is that if a skill reached 0, it would give the option to "discard it".....effectively removing mining from your head for example.
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My only wish in this new feature is that if a skill reached 0, it would give the option to "discard it".....effectively removing mining from your head for example.
Why'd you want that? Having skills injected is much more useful than not having them.
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why would i want a skill that i no longer find useful in my character? the isk sink is already done...let me do what i want with the spent isk.
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Well, considering that if you no longer find it useful, you can drain it to 0 SP, what's the problem? I mean, obviously it's not good enough for you. What I'm asking is why.
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Well, considering that if you no longer find it useful, you can drain it to 0 SP, what's the problem? I mean, obviously it's not good enough for you. What I'm asking is why.
In a word, clutter.
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As was alluded to earlier this is part of the ongoing trend towards removing character action and history from affecting your gameplay, which used to be a thing.
So along with sec status payoffs, you don't have to discard skills (time investment), for burner alts or your general scheming. I'm not going to spell out all the possibilities, but the ability to suddenly reshape and min/max the skills of lots of untraceable pilots at any age towards any task has disruptive applications.
At this point they should remove skillpoints entirely, as its a bit meaningless now. But this mostly smells of a cash grab to me.
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Well sec status payoffs are also needed to deal with a major gameplay issue in FW/LOW sec. If in the militias, you need to basically let neuts/pirates Alpha you if you don't want to take a sec stat hit for doing what you supposed to be doing - defending or taking plexes. So i don't view that as changing core game play that much (plus one has to hunt or buy tags).
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So along with sec status payoffs, you don't have to discard skills (time investment), for burner alts or your general scheming. I'm not going to spell out all the possibilities, but the ability to suddenly reshape and min/max the skills of lots of untraceable pilots at any age towards any task has disruptive applications.
Fun fact: Biomassing characters to dodge sec status hits is still a violation - I don't think 500k extra SP or not will make a difference in judgement. Training time for a functioning gankalyst is probably in the timeframe of an afternoon anyways. It'd also make ganking much less profitable, which is important when talking about hypothetical chain-ganking.
As far as scheming goes - these are the 'tales of EVE' that draw folks in. I'm surprised that this is suddenly evil now.
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Training time for a functioning gankalyst is probably in the timeframe of an afternoon anyways.
[Catalyst, Gankalyst]
Magnetic Vortex Stabilizer I
Magnetic Vortex Stabilizer I
Magnetic Vortex Stabilizer I
J5b Phased Prototype Warp Scrambler I
F-90 Positional Sensor Subroutines, Scan Resolution Script
Anode Light Neutron Particle Cannon I, Caldari Navy Antimatter Charge S
Anode Light Neutron Particle Cannon I, Caldari Navy Antimatter Charge S
Anode Light Neutron Particle Cannon I, Caldari Navy Antimatter Charge S
Anode Light Neutron Particle Cannon I, Caldari Navy Antimatter Charge S
Anode Light Neutron Particle Cannon I, Caldari Navy Antimatter Charge S
Anode Light Neutron Particle Cannon I, Caldari Navy Antimatter Charge S
Anode Light Neutron Particle Cannon I, Caldari Navy Antimatter Charge S
Anode Light Neutron Particle Cannon I, Caldari Navy Antimatter Charge S
[empty rig slot]
[empty rig slot]
[empty rig slot]
For a brand new Gallente player, this does around 350dps, costs just over 5mill
Know how long it takes to train?
16 minutes.
Gallente Destroyer I
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I think it's more 280ish with basic skills (and no overheat) but yeah, it's basically already there.
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At first I was a bit appalled, since I am quite proud of my characters, especially the highest SP character standing now a bit under 264 million SP. Before I go on further, I'd like to point out that you can't in practice buy those unlike mentioned here. There are few and they are seldom (never in my knowledge so far) sold. Back years ago my character was #12 in EB in total skill points at the time IIRC and I couldn't even manage a price check for lulz since there were no precedents. Maybe there are now.
The I realized how liberating this is. Having those SP tick has been the only reason to have the account active. I can finally cancel the last three accounts of mine. Of course, this is all personal and subjective.
I might have liked a detail tweaked here and another there, but I don't think the new system as such is bad for Eve as a game. I do think it is as obvious a money grab as there ever was, but it's not more PTW than what already was in place. And for the record I think what is in Eve is completely acceptable even though I never bought a character from another player or a PLEX with real money.
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This devalues character action and consequences. Not a fan!
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This devalues character action and consequences. Not a fan!
This is pretty much what I think of this idea :s
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This devalues character action and consequences. Not a fan!
This is pretty much what I think of this idea :s
Ditto.
Not at all a fan of dilluting consequences in EVE.
What happened to effort? What happened to needing to patience and investing time? What happened to someone having to deal with decisions made that they wouldn't make now?
Skills trained should be part of that.
So a PvPer isn't using those mining skills he's got tucked away in the back of his skull and is too ashamed to tell his buddies he knows one end of a mining laser from the other? Shame.
What happened to HTFU?
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This devalues character action and consequences. Not a fan!
This is pretty much what I think of this idea :s
Ditto.
Not at all a fan of dilluting consequences in EVE.
What happened to effort? What happened to needing to patience and investing time? What happened to someone having to deal with decisions made that they wouldn't make now?
Skills trained should be part of that.
So a PvPer isn't using those mining skills he's got tucked away in the back of his skull and is too ashamed to tell his buddies he knows one end of a mining laser from the other? Shame.
What happened to HTFU?
It ran repeatedly into a brick wall and died a pointless death.
Consequences are very much a part of Eve. The vast, vast majority of those consequences take resources to correct the problem, but the problem is nevertheless correctable. We will shortly have one more area where that is the case.
I'll listen more seriously to complaints about Eve going soft when scamming is banned along with highsec piracy, lowsec PvP is by FW or consent only, and insurance payouts are handled by market value instead of materials.
Edit:
Bear in mind also that CCP used HTFU as a motto back before DUST and the Jita Riots, when they thought they could pull anything off if they just went for it hard enough.
What happened to it? We did. One massive player-driven reality check.
(The disaster that was and remains the Carbon engine helped.)
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My opinion has and always will be that this game has no consequences if you have more money you now what to do something with. Character transfers and shit like that erase everything, everyone has a ton of alts, nobody scams on their main etc.
Claiming this somehow ruins the action=consequence part of eve, is just bittervets crying, again. Eve hasn't had real punishment from doing "bad" stuff from whenever character trading and alts became commonplace.
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Wrong end of the stick I'm afraid.
I'm not suggesting that EVE is going soft for the gank and scam victims.
I'm suggested that this is another case of removing the need for time and effort to gank and scam.
But it's not just high and lowsec shenanigans affected here. Let me give a scenario where time and effort doesn't apply, and consequence is now a thing of the past:
I can't fly T3. So let's say I want a T3 character to join a WH Corp. rather than training up the skills over time I can just buy a made to measure character from the bazaar using PLEX funded ISK I got by applying some spare RL cash. That's always been a thing during my time in EVE so from my perspective nothing has gone downhill or got easier here. There's nothing to prompt the bittervet gnashing of teeth over the capsuleers of today not knowing their born.
But now I'm in my new T3 ship it doesn't mean my player skill is where it needs to be yet, and so the innevitable is likely to happen quickly and I'm going to find myself in my pod. My understanding is that that used to hurt because of the SP loss that came with it.
No longer! I'll just buy and inject them right back.
No effort, no waiting, no consequence.
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As someone who has used and abused the character markets for profit (buying and flipping characters) I feel on two sides on this one.
One side feels this will negatively affect what used to be my primary income source, namely the bazaar. Since people can tweek characters with sufficient isk investment through this method, there's less incentive to buy specialised characters, which means their value will go down as demand drops off.
On the other hand, I don't see this much different from tags as COSMOS missions for fixing standings. COSMOS tags for factional standings have been a thing for a while, we now have security tags for sec status, and this will address the issue of 'wasted' sp. All of these take resources to correct an issue. This option follows former precedent where consequences always had a means of a 'fix'.
Options for awoxing/ganking/scamming on 'clean' characters has already existed, and will continue to exist. It's these factors that actually make EvE stand out as a game compared to other MMOs, and I don't actually think these skill certs will make a blind bit of difference there since they've always been extremely easy to set up. If anything, I think this is a worse option then just training up a character for a day or two, joining a lax hisec corp and clearing their hangars/ganking them with an afternoon catalyst.
Wrong end of the stick I'm afraid.
I'm not suggesting that EVE is going soft for the gank and scam victims.
I'm suggested that this is another case of removing the need for time and effort to gank and scam.
But it's not just high and lowsec shenanigans affected here. Let me give a scenario where time and effort doesn't apply, and consequence is now a thing of the past:
I can't fly T3. So let's say I want a T3 character to join a WH Corp. rather than training up the skills over time I can just buy a made to measure character from the bazaar using PLEX funded ISK I got by applying some spare RL cash. That's always been a thing during my time in EVE so from my perspective nothing has gone downhill or got easier here. There's nothing to prompt the bittervet gnashing of teeth over the capsuleers of today not knowing their born.
But now I'm in my new T3 ship it doesn't mean my player skill is where it needs to be yet, and so the innevitable is likely to happen quickly and I'm going to find myself in my pod. My understanding is that that used to hurt because of the SP loss that came with it.
No longer! I'll just buy and inject them right back.
No effort, no waiting, no consequence.
As a regular t3 pilot in wormholes, yes this was a little annoying losing skills, but honestly electronics 5 was the only 5 I really gave a shit about. Looking at the likely costs for SP transfer, I think popping out and getting one of these certs will be very isk inefficient. Unless you're rolling in more isk then you can do with, most players will likely just swallow the 5 days out of the skill queue, or less if they just want to get it back up to 5.
TL;DR I'm ok with this.
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My opinion has and always will be that this game has no consequences if you have more money you now what to do something with. Character transfers and shit like that erase everything, everyone has a ton of alts, nobody scams on their main etc.
Claiming this somehow ruins the action=consequence part of eve, is just bittervets crying, again. Eve hasn't had real punishment from doing "bad" stuff from whenever character trading and alts became commonplace.
Not crying, I thought a worthwhile example of a continuing trend, perhaps.
It used to take X amount of time, effort, and money (real or otherwise) to do Y activity. The long trend since day 1 has been removing those artificial game mechanics barriers to do an activity.
Good? Bad? Depends on who you are and what you do. Plenty of good arguments for both removing and increasing time input and access to certain content in games.
I can guarantee though that this current trajectory is the same line of game design we've seen elsewhere in countless other examples that starts at one end with concepts like permadeath, subscriptions, experience, skills, etc, and ends up on the other end with 'free to play' 'class-less' 'arena' sorts of concepts.
*edit*
It's sort of always two opposing sides to game design pholosophy; one view wants you to work for getting the more powerful game content. The fancy sword, the high-powered gun, the shiny space battleship.
The other view thinks making you 'grind' for that is terrible, and wants you to access all the things you want in a more balanced rock paper scissors format, so no 'shiny' ship is the be-all-end-all.
Throw in the ability to spend $$ to access any of that content and it gets quite muddled.
Eve might be a ways removed from a twitchy respawning class-based arena combat game, but those distinctions seem to get more fuzzy as time moves on. For good or bad.
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I think that if people were going to get upset about crossing a line in the sand, it should have been the changes to clones (which as someone with very expensive clones I had mixed feelings about) rather than this. Looking at the way they structured it, it seems like it should take a lot of ISK to really abuse it, which seems very Eve-like to me. Although obviously the threat it poses to my precious SP-superiority is a concern. :cry:
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I'm against this solely because Ghost Hunter might one day be able to cap Silver's SPs, and that bothers me greatly...
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I'm against this solely because Ghost Hunter might one day be able to cap Silver's SPs, and that bothers me greatly...
Right?
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This buying skillpoints for $$ thing also just happened to be launched right before they ditched a whole line of capital ships and launched a new set with new capital modules and skills, right?
Tinfoiling here but do you suppose there will be some cash money being made when people have to train up those new skills suddenly? Or will current capital skills cover the new ships and modules?
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True, they've never released new ships with new skills before.
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This buying skillpoints for $$ thing also just happened to be launched right before they ditched a whole line of capital ships and launched a new set with new capital modules and skills, right?
Tinfoiling here but do you suppose there will be some cash money being made when people have to train up those new skills suddenly? Or will current capital skills cover the new ships and modules?
CCP have always stuck to a "if you could fly it before, you will be able to fly it after" method. See: Battlecruiser/Destroyer skill splits (technically I don't have the required skills for a command ship, can fly them anyway).
If you could fly triage before, you will almost certainly be granted the required skills for a FAX. In fact, they've suggested that all carriers currently with a triage module fitted will be turned into FAXs on release. As for new modules, I can't see them requiring brand new skills, simply higher levels of existing ones. T2 reps requiring the skill to 5 etc.
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They're tweaking some of that a little bit soon though - the current grandfathering method is such that you can train a skill if you have it injected/partly trained even if you don't have the current prerequisites trained up.
They're making some changes to the skill queue that will allow you to inject any skill you want, and queue anything as long as the prerequisites are before it in the queue. This will prevent you from, say, training Command Ships 5 if you haven't got the base leadership prerequisites out of the way already even if you were grandfathered in when they changed the prerequisites to begin with and have the skill trained to 4.
You'll still be able to fly the ship, but you won't be able to train the skill to 5 until the base stuff is out of the way first.
It's not perfect but I guess the case where you'd have a skill but not all its prerequisites at this point isn't too common... as long as CCP doesn't keep changing the prerequisites for things.
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You'll have to put 1 SP into the skill prior to patchday and you can train those skills you don't meet the prereqs anymore at your leisure.
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I read an interesting take on this buying skillpoints thing.
The long-term consequence of it, is that Tech2 becomes even more entrenched in its position as the standard for fitting.
Meta modules, would just get refined for minerals, altering mineral prices.
Ship balancing would be pushed towards using the Tech2 equipment as the default, with no compromises to be made in most ships - e.g. time was, that a Crusader, you had to fit some meta modules, and smaller guns, to get enough CPU and PG to fit things. Now, you don't. You can fit the largest guns and all T2 modules.
while, economically, the increased reliance on T2, is a boost to moon-mineral holding alliances.
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I read an interesting take on this buying skillpoints thing.
The long-term consequence of it, is that Tech2 becomes even more entrenched in its position as the standard for fitting.
Meta modules, would just get refined for minerals, altering mineral prices.
Ship balancing would be pushed towards using the Tech2 equipment as the default, with no compromises to be made in most ships - e.g. time was, that a Crusader, you had to fit some meta modules, and smaller guns, to get enough CPU and PG to fit things. Now, you don't. You can fit the largest guns and all T2 modules.
while, economically, the increased reliance on T2, is a boost to moon-mineral holding alliances.
It's already the standard for fitting. As you say, the constraining factor is CPU/PG, not the SP of the character involved. The step from properly skilled-out T1 guns to T2 weapons is minimal.