OK I liked that because it did seem to answer the question but looking at it further that’s a pretty pedantic take and it completely skips over the second half of the paragraph from that dev blog. Here’s the full paragraph.
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.
I would argue that saying “while we make sure there is one single mechanism that brings new skillpoints in to the system – training” is an assurance that CCP will not directly sell skillpoints. It may not be a direct promise not to do so but the inference from this dev blog is that they want to make sure the market for SP is player driven and that SP is not created out of thin air which is no longer the case.
It’s also not the only time they’ve made a similar promise. After the original summer of rage they said:
It is CCP‘s plan that the Noble Exchange (NeX store) will be used for the sale of vanity items only.
It’s also something CCP Rattati has said in 2021 here:
I think this is the biggest problem with “promises” from CCP, everything is always worded in a way that they can wiggle out of it later if they need to.
Now I’m not sure where I stand on selling SP, I’m entirely on the fence about it, but I think it’s reasonable to claim that it’s something CCP has previously said they won’t do which they have then done.
Or more computing power?
That “Time Dilation” business is a wierd one to me. I never heard of it until I got to this forum. As I understand it, everything slows down when 3 or 4 thousand players battle it out. I read that some battles lasted over 24h because of it. That doesn’t sound like fun at all. I wouldn’t - couldn’t - be in a slow-mo battle that long.
I’m no expert on servers but it sounds like EVE needs a better servo.
More computing power was a problem as everything was (and I’m pretty sure most still is) single-threaded and at that time they had fewer services split away from the main solar system service. Yeah, TiDi slows everything down. So let’s say everything is slowed down to half speed, now the servers can take twice as long to compute everything. I think the maximum is 10%, so everything takes 10 times as long, but then the server can still be overloaded so everything takes a longer time than expected and some commands will be lost.
Remember EVE was built at a time where processing power was increasing rapidly, so being single-threaded was fine as they can just move to newer, faster processors. Eventually cramming more power into a single core hit a limit and the focus shifted to more cores, more processors, horizontal scaling rather than vertical.
That’s hard to take advantage of without rewriting the core code for solar system services. They’ve moved some things like attribute calculations off of that so that can be done separately and I assume bounties would do the same if they were to bring them in now.
Bounties were always broken though, they didn’t really do what they were supposed to do because payouts for PvP can be too easily exploited with alts, so most of the time they were used to put a wanted banner on people who get angry at having a wanted banner.
People can buy entire characters…and I’m pretty sure the character bazar has existed for a long time. Somehow that strikes me as wrong. I don’t see how the fact that ‘someone else’ trained up that character within the rules suddenly makes it OK for a noob to just jump into it.
I mean, that is waaaay different to someone like myself paying 400m to knock 4 days off the training time.
Looks to me that ‘Alt’ business needs to go. It’s causing more problems than it’s worth and I know that it makes CCP money so I guess we’re faced with the usual everywhere: Money vs People, in this case the players/customers.
Sure, but those characters were still trained by a person, still part of the player economy. Directly selling SP is injecting value into the player market.
Like if you could just buy ships for cash, that would mean that ships are no longer just created by players, they would be created out of nothing by the system.
As I say, I’m on the fence. I definitely see the benefit for letting players jump straight into the game without waiting for skills but I’ve always felt that the only thing injected into the game from direct sales should be things that only originate from the store and only get used for cosmetics or subscriptions so that it doesn’t affect the player drive aspect of the economy.
That will never happen. It wouldn’t fix the bounty thing anyway. The problem is that the bounty can’t be paid in full, so you say “I put a bounty of 1 billion on Elizabet”. If that gets fully paid then I get in a cheap frigate and have an alt or a friend kill me then we split the bounty. So CCP put limits based on ship value on it, but then the value of the payout was often below the threshold to make it worth hunting someone.
CCP has gone so far off the rails now that anything they do wouldn’t surprise me at this point. They are selling skill points directly, ships directly, free login SP, free ships from the Career Agents, and the ISK you get from Project Discovery is pulled out of thin air. Might as well just start selling ISK directly from the NES store without having to convert it to PLEX first…
The purchase of a 15 year old account is surely injecting money into the system that would not otherwise be there. So you end up with both the skills AND the price paid for them…whereas if the person selling did nothing you’d have only the skills in the game.
If I sell my account and someone buys with X billion PLEX, the game then still has my skills…plus the PLEX paid for them.
The money doesn’t go into the economy. There’s the ISK paid from buy to seller, that’s just transferred within the economy. There’s the fee paid to CCP, that’s cash paid directly to CCP, then there’s the character with their SP and assets, which again is just a transfer within the economy, from seller to buyer.
When you buy SP directly though, you pay cash to CCP and they create SP in game out of thin air and deposit it in your redeem queue. It’s that last step that affects the player driven economy. What’s funny is that if SP extraction and selling in-game weren’t possible then direct SP sales would be less of a problem.
TBH, buying PLEX is more of an issue now than it used to be anyway. When it was only used to sub it was just one payer paying cash for a token for a sub then trading that token to another person who then consumed it, so the creation and destruction of that asset was balanced.
Now PLEX is starting to be used for more things like SP, and is now traded in citadels where the fees for trading it are distributed to players, it’s becoming more tightly coupled to the economy. If they ever start selling assets for PLEX, that’ll be the sign to me that things are broken beyond repair.
This is already the case. You can get over 100 free ships from the Career agents if you do all of them. Let’s not go to that extreme though. Let’s say that 1,000 new Alpha players do only the first 5 agents available to them. They get 9 free ships from those career agents. Multiply that by 1,000 players and that is 9,000 ships now in the game that players did not build…
Not if I specifically bring in PLEX to buy the character, and given the price of characters the average newer person is likely to be doing just that. If I buy a character with ISK created by bringing in PLEX, then all of a sudden one has both the skills bought and the ISK created from nowhere to buy them.
The bigger issue is that you can do the AIR missions on a new character in your third slot, redeem the rewards on your main then biomass and reroll your alt and do them again. There’s an EVE-Uni guide showing you the ISK/hour you can make doing it and all the steps.
I think CCP should at the very least lock these so they can only be done once per account. They recently changed some of the criteria to make it harder to cheese but it’s still a problem.
Even if you buy PLEX, the ISK is not created from nowhere. You have to sell the PLEX for ISK which means someone else is giving you their ISK for your PLEX. You’re just conflating two different transactions.
Biomassing and re-rolling alts is a way around many things, AIR being just one of them. I have an Omega account that I use solely for the purpose of running the SOE Arc on all 3 toons, splitting the faction standings with my main mission runner, biomassing those 3 alts, create 3 more, immediately do the SOE Arc on all 3 again, bypassing the 90-day wait. Rinse, repeat…
Wait, faction standings get split on the SOE epic? Interesting…
I’m less concerned about standings than about the SP though. The AIR program gives a decent amount of SP because it’s aimed at new players, but it’s too much when people are able to multibox farm it.
A very simple change that can be be made as far as AIR goes is just make the SP injector soul-bound to the toon that earned it. No other toon can claim it from the rewards…
EDIT: Or better yet, just make it instantly apply to the toon that earned it. No need for the SP injector, it just goes straight into unallocated SP like the daily challenge SP…
Yeah, I think it would have to instantly apply, as I don’t know if they can bind redeemable items to a specific character. I just think they need an account-level flag so you can only do it once on an account. Noone realistically needs to do it more than once.
After watching this video and other old videos and screenshots from the game, what beautiful ships the Caldari used to have, asymmetrical, Condor, Scorpion and others, and the Minmatar too. It’s a pity I didn’t catch those times
Little off-topic, but I do miss the sound that mining lasers used to make. It’s hard to describe. It was harsh, abrasive, “BRRRRRZTTT”, like a high-powered electric transformer. It was overly loud and obnoxious, but I loved it…
