If an omega meets the 13-day login requirement during the upcoming event, he/she is rewarded with a booster that allows SP injection 3 times without penalty. Let’s look at this for a second.
The value of such a booster, if it can be traded and used more than once per character, is YUGE. Essentially we have an item that, for an over 80m character, converts 150,000 SP x 3 into 150,000 SP x 10, i.e. is valued at approximately 7 large skill injectors.
This value far exceeds the value of plex and thus the thing to do NOW is plex as many accounts as you can, for 1 month, log them in 13 times during the event, receive the ~6 billion ISK valued booster and do whatever you want with it. You can move all the boosters to your main and roll your SP forward by a YUGE amount. Or you can sell them for YUGE isk.
Is there any chance this is a “once only” item? It will create distortions in several areas.
They had to make the item super valuable to pad their login numbers over the holiday. It iis no longer about the game, it is about impressing their masters at PA.
If the item sucked it would not pad the login numbers enough.
its a complaint that this years christmas gift has the potential to be really valuable, the concern being that people will sub accounts for the purpose of farming them.
so the exact opposite of last years complaint where to get the decent rewards you had to log in and run events which limited the ability for them to be passively farmed.
and opposed to 2 years ago where the big complaint was that they had gotten rid of the advent callendar style event for 1 single gift.
entitled people complaining that their gifts aren’t good enough, or complaining because someone else might be getting more gifts than them.
I am concerned about the arbitrage against plex. If an item is worth more than plex itself, it creates an incentive to roll accounts solely for the purpose of receiving the item since its value exceeds the cost of the new account roll.
Also, an omega typically receives SP at a rate of 15-20m per year. Somewhere in there. Is it fair that one should be able to receive that amount of SP in a day? That is one of the abuses that this item could potentially create.
so what? iron bank injected a max sp character in a single day. if someone wants to dump that much isk on sp they have been able to do that before.
not to mention that the value of these things is going to end up being considerably less than the 7 large injectors that you theorized, i’m betting its going to be closer to twice the value if that, because while yes the demand for them is going to be high from the 80m+ demographic, most people who are over that threshold don’t actually have a huge amount of skills left to train, at least not enough to be worth dumping 7+ billion isk on it (if they where willing to pay that much for the sp, then they would have done it already)
your big market is going to be the 50m+ market, where they are only getting 300m per injector since thats where many people consider the ROI to no longer be worth the cost, and makes up a much larger demographic of the market not only in player count but also that is where you have more players who have the isk to spend and still have quite a few skills that they would like to speed up. and at that market point you are only getting an extra 2-3 injectors worth of SP out of using the item, so to be worth it for them the price would have to drop substantially below that margin (otherwise like with the 80m+ players, if they where willing to spend that much isk for that amount of SP they would have done so already) which, coincidentally, also brings the value of one of these special boosters below the price of a plex.
If huge SP increases can be gotten for free or at a tremendously reduced price via the serial use of many of these boosters, that is a problem. Some people may not care about the problem, but some people do.
Setting aside all discussion of SP, you can still profit obscenely with the boosters just on their inherent value alone. Suppose instead of being valued at 7 large skill injectors, the market values them at less than half that, say 3 large skill injectors. Reasonable. That is 2.4b isk @ 800m today for each injector (that price will surely rise). Plex is now about 1.6b, so simply plex some new accounts, receive the booster, sell it for 2.4b or more, abandon the new accounts completely and profit 800m per new account plexed. It’s a huge injection of free isk.
Problem is, most people with high SP dont bother injecting as much as people with low SP.
People with high SP already have the skills they want. In all likelihood they dont need to skill Medium Projectile Turret to 5 to get access to T2 projectiles because they already have that skill.
Most of whats left, is going to be a bunch of level 4 skills that they passively train to 5 because theres nothing else to train.
And thats the thing. Something with less demand, will have lower prices as people scramble to sell it. It will not be worth the 7 large skill injectors. Not even close. Factor in the fact that almost all omegas are getting this, and the market will be saturated.
If people actually are willing to pay the price of a large injector for a single booster that allows you to inject 3 times, then the market will fix itself over time. Unfortunately, i highly doubt people will be willing to pay that much because they’ll sub and get their own boosters. At most these boosters will be worth 300-400m each, and after the first few days they’re given out they’ll probably drop down to 100-200m
The booster is more valuable for characters with more than 80 mil skill points and as was pointed out the higher the skill point total the less like to inject. However, if that subcap pilot with 80 mil SP has decide he wants to fly a carrier this is basically 7 free injectors. The players between 5 mil and 50 mil is basically get 4 for the price of 3
