Inta skill points, created out of nothing and not following or being handled by the ingame economy. They tried that before with certain ships, it backfired massively.
I don’t care it can only be applied once per account, I don’t care that it “helps newbies” (it doesn’t, newbies won’t know what to spend their SP on so they’ll waste it, it would be much better to give them so booster that trains really fast for 2 weeks or so giving them time to figure it all out and apply the SP with more care).
See it for what it is: a really dangerous precedent of CCP toying with ingame goods via out of game transactions, that isn’t at all needed and can only go from bad to worse.
I can see where you are coming from, gimmicks seem a bit… gimmicky… However, 1 million skill points is not as much as it seems. Recently trained up a PvP alt, and even at the max 5 mil SP of training time, which took a couple months to train up IIRC, in the end all he had was just core skills trained, not even hardly any combat skills… Just injecting a little perspective is all.
You see 1,000,000 skill points.
I see 2 Skill Injectors selling for ~950 Million ISK ea. (~550 after buying extractors)
It has everything to do with the market with diminishing returns on skill points.
It does not matter what CCP promised in the past (except for their credibility with the player base).
It does not matter whether the SP is being created out of thin air.
If CCP needs sales, either because their development path over the last 8 years has people closing wallets in droves, or to hit ‘bonus’ targets for PA payouts… then they will come up with whatever they think will generate sales.
The game does not sell itself these days (given the NPE and overall player experience), and the cash shop is woefully low on interesting sustainable purchases. So expect more and more ‘gimmicks’ as CCP thrashes about throwing things at the store trying to find something to replace falling revenue.
Edit: I agree with the OP that a 15 or 30 day SP training accelerator would be a much better idea for new players (and more in-line with CCPs promises). However this package looks like it is also targeted as a ‘fast start for alts’ pack to me, so perhaps that is why they went with the insta-SP.
There is no going back. The players who would have played the original vision have been griefed away by CCP and they’re not going to come back, ever. The donkeys require a donkey game, so CCP more and more turns it into a game for donkeys. When the donkeys are gone, this game is dead.
Gotta give credit where it’s due, though … CCP’s propaganda marketing department really knows how to fool people with bait and reasons. They reach everywhere, including devblogs.
I hope you’re aware that the game changed significantly in those nine years.
SP has been created out of nothing since day one. It’s a primary feature of this game. All you need is a character and you are creating SP out of thin air. Nothing wrong with that at all.
The problem started with the addition of the extractor/injector mechanic. Easily traded SP has not been good for the game. Good for short term profits, though. So it will stay.
It’s not like the game is going to be more fun because of an added 1M skill points.
The problem is still that the game itself has become boring and stale, while CCP have shown no indication of fixing any of the issues raised by the players. Instead, we have new content no one asked for and some feature fixes that didn’t really fix anything.
So I say, let them pump out their introduction packs and milk their cow a little longer. It’s not like it is going to change the course we currently are on anyway.
Maybe this extra cash will give that junior developer, who has no influence on the game design anyway, that cup of coffee and pizza on those late overtime hours.
You guys quite literally deserve to be derided over this. You swore to never sell skill points. Yet you have done so with alpha injectors, and now quite literally a direct 1 million SP injection out of thin air.
This is wholly unacceptable!
@Foggy_Bernstein that is a complete BS comparison. Skill training is core aspect of this game. It is done over time with an active account, and rate and limitations are removed with omega. This is completely different than CCP snapping their fingers and just handing you skillpoints by just handing them your one time payment of X. There is no gameplay involved, no attributes, no wait, no planning. Just here’s your SP apply where you see fit.
@CCP_Falcon I have a few questions for you. After this, what reason do we have to believe CCP will not do it again in the future? What reason do we have to believe that this will not escalate given what we see occurring in other games? What reason do we have to trust CCP again after being so unabashedly lied to?
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. Player driven economies are key to EVE design and we want you to decide the value of traded skillpoints while we make sure there is one single mechanism that brings new skillpoints in to the system – training.
EDIT: My opinion is still as my above post, i.e. I don’t care. I just posted this since CCP haven’t really made any official statement, and this is what we got from the official dev blog that accompanied the skill trading changes. Do with it what you want.
I didn’t see much complaint when CCP was giving away 1 million SP to Omegas during the last event.
Regardless, the idea of ‘sacred SP, only gained by time and subbing’ is way too out of date. It is also harming the game and has been harming the game for years now. CCP needs to find ways to make the game more engaging to play, not simply to ‘sub and farm for 6 months while your SP train’.
People keep talking about the ‘grand old days’ of EVE, when ‘PVP was everywhere, the men were men and the sheep were nervous’. When ‘we were all tough strong pilots before the farmers and dumblings took over’. Which was a fantasy.
What was really the driver back then was that the playing field was a little less uneven. When Null wasn’t perfectly safe and when you weren’t likely to get jumped by a capital group just for poking into low sec. When everybody didn’t have 6 trained alts and 300 billion to outfit the ships to put them in.
SP is only important to the “I paid more, therefore I deserve more advantage, forever” crowd. It isn’t important to game design, it isn’t important to game sales, and it isn’t important to moving EVE into a state where it can succeed in the future rather than continue to sink in the mire of the past.
Edit: I mean, I don’t disagree that CCP has totally gone back on their word here… that’s a given and isn’t, IMO, a big issue. (Mostly because they don’t have a lot of credibility with me anyway.) I mean I disagree that SP only coming from player training is an issue worth making a fuss over.
It seems CCP intends to monetize every possible aspect of this game. Wouldn’t be so bad if the money didn’t just go to other failed projects, over and over again. We don’t even get alliance tourney…
It’s quite literally a core mechanic to the game. Calling it out of date is fair, but selling skillpoints is not the answer. EVE wasn’t designed to be a damned cellphone game where you can pay for speedups. You’re also wrong, I and many others weren’t happy about the 1m SP and felt it was warming people up to something just like this. I’ve also been vocal about how damning injectors have been for the game as well. They have kept practically nobody around longer (just gotten more cash out of them before they left) - our numbers are still on the decline (and I’m not talking seasonal trends). All it’s done is spawn off dozens of more alts and given hackers/RMTers/botters another way to cash out a little bit more in the process.
If you want to have a debate on what is causing most people to leave we can have that. But so far the literal statistics are there for everyone to see from the point of their release to now in the form of concurrent players. I would argue the half baked intermediate player features in this game do a lot more to turn people away than our NPE or skill training. As far as I’m concerned the NPE team is doing an amazing job teaching our newbros the basics compared to years past. What’s letting them down is what they are faced with once they get past that. When was the last time missions got an overhaul? What about exploration as a whole? Low sec? Wormholes?
By immediately pointing to nullsec and high skillpoint hulls you are quite literally pointing at the issue, that intermediate level is completely underdeveloped/missing from EVE. THAT is what must be fixed and improved upon to help retention rates. Not selling or giving out SP so people can rush to EVE’s perceived “late game” because of the utter lack of meaningful, repeatable content to keep them occupied as they train.
