Want to Buy Some of My Brain?

So the T2 torches and pitchforks are out in force on the Eve-O forums after the last Dev Blog! 

Unless you have been living under a chunk of raw veldspar the last few days you might have heard CCP are looking into allowing players to buy and sell skill points. It would work like this (these are the initial ideas and everything is subject to change):-

• You buy a special container. Likely this will be on the NEX for Aurum but you'll probably find people selling them for ISK on the open market too.
• You download half a million skill points or so from a character into the thing. Then you can stick it on the market.
• A player can then buy these half a million SP containers and inject them into their heads. How many SP you receive depends on your total SP. If you are a relative newbie then you'll get the full 500,000. If you are a bittervet with 80,000,000 or moew then you might only get 50,000, 10% of the total.

So what are the benefits? Well ones that have been mentioned include:-

• New players can skill up faster and enjoy the game more.
• Newer players can get into better ships properly fit sooner.
• Players who trained something wrong can respec.
• Older players can make some ISK by selling SP.
• Potentially more financial investment in the game (buy PLEX to sell for ISK to spend on SP) which might make new players stick at it longer and get hooked?
• More demand for PLEX (to turn to AUR to buy the container) resulting in increased PLEX prices. (Good for PLEX sellers)
• More money for CCP (in AUR sales).

What about the negatives?

• Instant 'leveling up'. Will this erode the hard work/time you've put into getting your character where they are. Like enabling cheat-mode on a game. Soon becomes boring.
• Recycling toons made easy for Awoxers, gankers and spies. Your ebil toon too well known? Download his SP, transfer his assets, bio-mass him, rinse and repeat.
• More demand for PLEX (to turn to AUR to buy the container) resulting in increased PLEX prices. (Bad for PLEX subbers)
• Corps and alliances may demand newer players respec.

Many of these negatives are already in game. If your ebil toon is too well known you could sell them and buy another with the proceeds.

Looking at the above I'm still to be convinced this is a good idea. The benefits appear to outweigh the negatives but I cannot shake the feeling this is going along the lines of turning on 'God-Mode' which is a sure fire way of soon becoming bored of the game.