Life returning to normal here finally. Will be back to regular Eve and normal blogging soon (tm). I did notice on my social media feed that Skill Point Trading is coming in February and appears to be little changed from the original concept.
When skill point trading was first announced I wasn't sure which way I felt about it. There were certainly good and bad possibilities that could from it. Now I think it will be good for the game.
When I started Eve I was a missioning carebear. NPC corp running missions. I can remember slowly working my way up the Caldari ship tree. In fact one of my earliest memories was being frustrated that I could buy either the Caldari Cruiser skill book or a Caracal, not both. Anyway after a few months I got talking to an old friend from back home and he said he also played and was a director in a hi-sec corp and that I should join them. So I did. However this corp dipped into faction war one weekend a month. OK PvP, I've been playing a few months I'll try...
May be I was unlucky. What if I.....
OK so....
Right I got this now! Oh for f.....
"Anyone seen Drack this weekend?"
"Its FW weekend. You'll not see Drack this weekend!"
"Its FW weekend. You'll not see Drack this weekend!"
It soon became a standing joke for this old group of Star Wars: Galaxies players. I'd simply not log in those weekends. Then in January, some seven months after starting Eve and three months after joining -RS- I tried PvP again.
So what happened?
Were my Eve skills better? Not really. Fighting rats and roids does not really improve your PvP skill.
Were my ship hulls different? Nope. At that time it was destroyer and frigates with the odd cruiser. Same as what I fought with before.
I believe it was my core skills. My tank was tankier. My pew was now pew-pew. I was faster, stronger and tougher quite simply and able to fit a ship properly. This was due to maxing out the core skills which make a hell of a difference.
Is SP trading any more PTW than buying a PLEX and fitting out a faction ship with deadspace/officer loot? Probably not. Has it any downsides that the character bazaar already provides? I cannot think of any? Will it affect new players? Probably not much. When I first started I couldn't afford a Caracal by the time I could fly one, unless you are buying and selling PLEX for ISK new players are unlikely to be able to afford these. They will be an alts wet dream though! Perhaps that's the biggest downside for a certain type of player? "Ah ha! They are only two months old, this should be an easy kill.... oh shiiiiiii....."
Or have I missed something?
I'd argue that absolutely new players are unlikely to find value in this; buying sp would result in them outpacing their experience and ability.
ReplyDeleteHowever, while it may take 4-5 years to train a 4-race character with solid core, gunnery, shield, armor, missile, drone, and navigation skills, it does NOT take that long for a player to become good at PvP. If a player jumps into dangerous situations, is willing to lose ships, and actively chooses to ignore the "safe" path (ie. joining the blue donut or hiding in high-sec), you can become an experienced PvPer in a year or so. And that's the kind of player that will benefit from this.
I couldn't care less about cramping the playstyle of a player who only attacks fresh characters if it means these newer players - those who throw themselves into the gauntlet to learn quickly - can be active and effective in half or a quarter of the time it takes now.
They talked about this replacing the character bizaar so I see this as an actual buff. At current you can buy a 100m sp character. Under the new system that 100m sp converts into 10m sp for sale on markets. It actually removes 90m SP from the game.
ReplyDelete20 injectors pull 5m sp each
20 injectors put on market 500k sp each.
Not taking into effect penalties for prior sp on who's injecting.
So this is nerfing the character trade market while Buffing the overall game letting new players have some crack and bring in more cash to CCP. While never going to effect the game in a large way compared to keeping high SP toons in rotation.
SP injectors don't introduce something new that can't be done in other ways. What it will do is make it easier and more widespread to have characters with the desired skill set for an objective.
ReplyDeleteThe character bazzar provides everything you get with SP injectors accept control over your personal character. And I think the biggest players arguing against SP injectors are ones that either 1) make a killing off of building characters and selling them on the bazzar. or 2) Are opposed to the bazzar and SP injectors.
I look forward to SP injectors and hope I can afford a few to boost some of my slower skills to get me into the fits I want to be flying sooner.
On the flip side, it's much easier to make ISK when you get to around 5m SPs or so. By then you're in a Hulk or a basic boosting Orca, you've got really good Covert Ops/Hacking skills or you can create an efficient PI network in short order. I'm quite certain there will be rookie players who buy PLEX to jump the queue to 5M SP [on their mains & alts] so they can do just that, provided those 500K skill packets aren't too spendy.
ReplyDeleteBut that's the really unknowable variable in all of this right now. If it costs more than a PLEX for two skill packets [or thereabouts], it'll be hard to see the value from a new player perspective.
This is absolutely p2w and CCP breaking its promise about not being able to buy a time advantage. I've been really happy with CCP lately until this. Now they're showing their true colors again, this Aria collaboration will be toxic for the game & when CCP sees the minimal outrage to this betrayal, it will encourage them to open the floodgates to any & all microtransactions and it's probably going to go downhill from here.
ReplyDeleteIt's all been said better in the EVEO thread, though, so I won't rehash the details here.
Yeah... I unsubscribe from Eve Online permanently. It's just Pay 2 Win now. Also command destroyer is annoying as hell, they eject you 100 km any random direction, yeah I'm not going to play anymore on their term, literally.
ReplyDeleteStar Citizen, here we come!