If it is indeed all about money there is a pocketbook issue that might not have been considered by CCP.
Right now someone has to be subbed to use injectors and the plex has to be purchased to create the item. However, if this rolls out as the dev blog suggests you have potentially eliminated the subscriber from the equation since only the plex must be used to create the item. If all 15,500,000 remaining skillpoints are purchased via plex and none from injectors roughly 5000 plex leave the system completely eliminating ~280 days of paid subscription time per character that opts for this method and actually buys the plex to get skillpoints out of thin air.
I know thereās a one day cooldown, but itās not the same thing as long as you can accumulate the unallocated sp indefinetlyā¦ you can use initial alpha state to reach 5mil skill point, buy one of these things daily and consume every accumulated sp right after the 5mil sp mark, in order to have insta access to skillsā¦ it āalmostā ignore time, but still the game machanic that lets you āmaturateā SPs through time by spending them on a specific skill is ignoredā¦ in omega if you donāt train skills you donāt harvest SPā¦ this is totally ignoredā¦ and wrong
This might work, if you cannot buy such injectors unless you spend the unallocated sp
I feel like Iām unaware of some holiday where all game developers present their horribly broken and/or scammy monetization features. First EA, now EA guy at CCP (because who else could have come up with something this stupid?).
In my first post, I did point that out, I agree with you thereā¦ Alpha injectors getting unallocated points isnāt fair to Omegas. I donāt think itās that big a deal though.
In my experience, I never had a skill plan shorter than 1 or 2 years. Iāve always known what to train next, and those SP going through an unallocated state first wouldnāt have changed anything. It would only come into play in the rare times that my queue emptied. In which case, it seems the āfairnessā issue would be solved by getting unallocted points when there is no skill in the queue.
The alpha injectors do feel like a hacked together solution to what they are trying to offer, but itās not any more broken than skill training in general.
And to think that was to counter the concerns raised initially about the whole skill trading concept. Iām pretty sure many of us said at the time it was a slippery slope to just being able to buy SP. Now thatās exactly what we have
Just pointing out that with the addition of skill injectors, you at CCP told us injectors do not create skill points out of thin air and never would. This does exactly that.
Over time this will devalue SP, as it allows an Alpha 1 1/2 times the training of an Omega each day. This is yet another step in the ever growing pay to win direction Eve has been being pushed towards. There will always be those who will either find a way to cheat the system, or just want to dump RL money into the game rather than putting in effort.
What hurts the game the most is not what it does to the games economy but rather what it does to the player base. We are getting flooded with more and more pilots who have poor actual player skill, sitting in ships that they should not be in. This leads to less and less PvP content. You might say, but all the supers and Rorqs that get blown up by these poor players, and yes it is true, but those players are more likely to dock up than defend their space because they know they have no real skills and will only do PvE activities.
While having a way to accelerate training for newer players is a great idea, having a way to instantly inject skill points hurts the community in the end. So please donāt make an already bad idea worse by adding these alpha injectors.
So in other words, EVE now becomes a money grab by you giving an option to create SP out of nowhere for these alpha players. Stupid idea. Please rethink this before the changes next month.
Iām hanging onto the hope that someone will still veto this idea in favor of something betterā¦but it made it into a dev blog already meaning someone had to read through it and approve so that is not a good signā¦
500 PLEX / 20 PLEX for alpha injector = 25 days of alpha injectors
Its clear message to alphas who can count, to get omega clone.
Also I dont know why you could care so much about creating SP from āthin airā. All of SP was created out of āthin airā. Maybe someone could argue that it was created gradually with time, but with these alpha injectors there is time constraint also, only 1 alpha injector every day.
So, at some point it seems we are going to move from a subscription for game time to subscription for SP model. What we have now, and have always had, sounds a lot like subscription for SP but with more steps anyway. Iām not sure that the proposed implementation is the correct way to rip the fig leaf off. Iām not yet fully convinced that the fig leaf should be ripped off at all. Those āmore stepsā are also what players enjoy and can in large part derive their sense of accomplishment from. I feel like when you go into your business discussions about what value you are providing the consumer you need to account for this and right now you are not adequately doing so.
General thoughts on this implementation:
A) Daily injecting feels bad. It creates unfair expectation on the player to alarm clock things for optimal usage. Resetting at downtime mitigates this somewhat, but not fully especially for people playing around downtime.
Solution: Consider moving to a āMay use up to 5 a weekā mechanism instead. This will relieve the player of the expectation of having to log in each day and remove the āfeels badā of missing a day of logging in and feeling like you fell behind. <ā Thereās no faster way to make people quit a workout routine then shaming them for missing a day. Give people realistic, flexible goals for the dopamine hunt.
B) Selling SP for PLEX is not good. Itās not a matter of morality, itās a matter of economics.
What we have now:
Consumers obtain game time(PLEX) from CCP and value the SP generated from it according to market dynamics.
What this devblog proposes
Consumers obtain game time (PLEX) from CCP and CCP picks value of the SP generated from it
This is trying to build a socialist command economy. It doesnāt work. CCP your going to ā ā ā ā yourself to Venezuela and back on this one. Letās rewrite this in real world terms.
What we have now:
Farmers obtain corn seed from CCP and the value of the corn grown from it according to market dynamics.
What this devblog proposes
Farmers obtain corn seed from CCP and CCP decides what the farmers will earn from it.
How many governments have succeeded long term with those kind of price controls and not had economic collapse? If CCP starts selling SP directly while still selling SP over unit time, you are going to have problems. Any point you want to devalue the price of SP with a sale, you will also be haircutting the value of the time previous consumers have spent upon you. The effect is linear. (Value of SP/Length of time spent with CCP = Characterās Derived Value to consumer.) If you as a company believe that you can have a sale on the value of SP while delivering an identical derived value to the consumer of your product, then you must realize that the length of time spent with CCP as brand loyalty decreases proportionally. Also remember here that SP = PLEX. You are setting yourselves up such that any sale of SP/PLEX decreases the brand loyalty of your consumers. Thatās a bad spot to be in and explains the visceral reactions of your consumers here in this thread.
Anyway, there are a few clever ways to get around this, but Iād have to use visual illustration to explain it concisely, so I will do it later.
