Oh, PLEX is next on my list of “other things I want to talk about”. Baby steps. 
The set of claims that I’m getting from the other side of this discussion (and correct me if I’m wrong) are that,
- SP injection removes the time gate, which is a good thing.
- One pilot injecting SP is not going to make a difference in a big fight.
- SP doesn’t matter, player skill does.
- SP trading doesn’t matter, since you could buy capital pilots long before extractors and injectors came along.
- Buying SP doesn’t let you get anything that you couldn’t get just by playing the game.
First, I’ll declare some things:
- When I say skills, I’m referring to the skill that the player has at playing the game, not their character’s skills.
- I’ll refer to character skills as skillpoints.
Now let’s look at these one by one.
Claim 1. SP Injection removes the time gate, which is a good thing.
Firstly, this is not a good thing. Time spent is what gives things meaning. It’s what made the capital, black ops, marauder, jump freighter, and industrial command ship pilots of yore command respect. Any of these pilots was a very valuable asset for a corp or alliance to have. They spent YEARS not only training their skillpoints, but honing their skills. This is something worthy of respect. But if you buy the skillpoints and don’t have the skill to back it up, it just shows you have a larger bank account (which could be easily gotten by buying PLEX and selling it), and a lack of patience and drive to actually achieve a level of skill. I don’t know about you, but this wouldn’t prompt me to look at that person and say “Wow, they’ve put a lot of effort into making such an achievement.” This affects the game less and more the community, equally important in my mind. What this turns into is a bunch of kids running around with shiny toys, yes losing them, but just buying more by selling PLEX bought with mommy’s credit card and all the while, more likely than not, spreading immature vitriol around community. I’ll expand more on the first half of this point in point 5.
Claim 2. One pilot injecting SP is not going to make a difference in a big fight.
On the surface, this is completely true. One lone pilot in a blob will not make any noticeable difference unless he’s flying something big, like a capital. However, what happens when you have 10 injected pilots (a squad)? 20? 100? That small, unremarkable difference becomes amplified by the number of people that have it. Consider a fleet of 100 ships. One pilot has injected skillpoints and has increased his fire rate by 5%. This means that the fleet, as a whole, has 0.05% more fire rate. Not much of a difference, the fight could still go either way. Now let’s change it a little. Let’s say that 25 of the 100 pilots have got %5 higher fire rate. Now the fleet fires 1.25% faster on average. This is a MASSIVE increase when compared to what it was before. That’s, all other things being equal, 1.25% more DPS. This is enough to potentially turn the tide, though unlikely. If 75% of the pilots have %5 higher ROF, that’s 3.75% on average. Definitely enough to potentially make a difference, and solely because one side has people who are willing to throw cash at their character sheets, not because they spent the time to actually train those skillpoints the old fashioned way. The result would be the same, but cheapens the experience to “Oh, they weren’t genuinely better, they just had more cash to throw at their skillpoints”.
Claim 3. SP doesn’t matter, player skill does.
This is very arguably wrong. Consider a bog-standard T1 frigate, with T1 fittings, and a T2 assault frigate with T2 fittings. For whatever reason, the player flying the T1 simply never invested the time into training for T2 frigates or T2 fittings, but has spent a LOT of time flying his frigate so really knows how to use it. The player flying the T2 hasn’t really practiced at all with flying frigates like this, so doesn’t know what all to do with it, he merely has the skillpoints for it. These two players run into each other in low-sec whilst roaming, and fight. Why the T1 would engage a T2, I don’t know. You wouldn’t do that if you had sense. But for the sake of argument, they fight. Even though the T1 pilot is quite skilled, the T2 pilot will very likely win because he has a ship with vastly superior capabilities that, even under-utilized, crushed his opponent’s T1. In this instance, SP makes a very large difference, whether trained or injected.
Claim 4. SP trading doesn’t matter, since you could buy capital pilots long before extractors and injectors came along.
This is also, on the surface, true. You could buy pilots with certain skills with either ISK or (perhaps less legally so though I’m not sure) with RL money. What changed is the fact that cultivating a pilot with marketable skills worth a lot took the same amount of time as it would anyone else. A pilot with common skills was worth much less on the market, since those skills didn’t require a large time investment. But, say, a capital pilot would take years to make. Now, you can buy injectors which came from many difference pilots’ skillpoints, and combine them into one pilot who now has more skillpoints, potentially more than any of the pilots that made the injectors, nearly instantly, and that can now do things that the pilots that made those injectors didn’t have to sacrifice. To make a capital pilot, one simply needs enough ISK to inject the requisite skillpoints and the pilots making the injectors do not have to be anything remotely close to a capital pilot; they only need to give up 500K skillpoints from anywhere in their character sheet. This effectively cuts down the time required to get a certain level of skill points, due to parallelization i.e., dividing the large amount of work up into smaller pieces that take less time individually, then work on all those pieces simultaneously. Think about the way manufacturers increase their output per unit of time by using multiple assembly lines.
Claim 5. Buying SP doesn’t let you get anything that you couldn’t get just by playing the game.
True, but again, it removes the time component, and gives you the edge over your peers (meaning people who are roughly at the same skill level as you) that you might not necessarily have until the roughly the same time they did, assuming that all your peers are training towards the same things as you. You could get the skillpoints the old fashioned way, but instead you use a resource that others don’t have and (more importantly) no one can take from you within the game to give yourself a boost. That breaks the balance in so many ways, it’s making my head hurt just thinking about it. This resource is unassailable, unlike say, the tech moons of yore, where a group of null players held most of them and therefore had that resource that nobody else had and would have been immensely difficult to take, but it was assailable in that anyone with enough players and skill could have, in theory, taken that resource, within the game.
Sorry for the wall of text. I like to try to be as thorough as possible with my arguments.
