The assumption here is that the players who are dumb enough to RMT directly into capital ships are also dumb enough to overpay for their F2P cash shop garbage.
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A fool and their money are soon parted.
While Eve isn’t pay to win, some of CCP’s decisions and changes could be, and are seen as leaning in that direction.
The less CCP tell us about their plans with regards to the cash whale stuff, the more people will speculate about them and assume the worst.
I get that CCP are in business to make money, I don’t have a problem with that and happen to like their product; it doesn’t mean that people like myself can’t question some of the motives behind the kind of thing that @Shipwreck_Jones is talking about.
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That Blazing Phoenix Pack
Should come with 30 days game time
250,000 Skillpoints
As it is now, your better off with 500 plex.
Is the marketing department at CCP hiring by any chance?
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Why are you guys all hating so hard? Eve is a game about scams and PvP. Why shouldn’t CCP rip off people in their cash shop. Those dumb whales can subsidize our subscriptions.
I like that a lot better than having CCP selling skill points at 1 kk for $5.
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Because:
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It feels like CCP pushing incrementally towards P2W cash shop items that actually matter. Yeah, maybe this one is priced to be a scam that you’d have to be an idiot to fall for, but how long before the next step towards true P2W is justified with “but they already did cash shop skill books, this isn’t a big deal”.
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It removes player interactions. Allowing direct purchase of skills for ISK was bad enough, and now you don’t even have to pay PLEX to other players to get ISK for your skill books. Even if this one is an unappealing deal the precedent is already set and if this is accepted there will certainly be more of these offers and the prices will probably be more competitive.
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We have ships for RL money, SP for RL money, now big skills for RL money. CCP is employing Salami Tactics to lull us into their vision of a wreckage and people like Scoots Choco help wherever they can to make this come true.
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It’s actually unproven that all those SP they are selling are not coming from banned accounts,
so any outrage is purely speculative and unnecessary. Considering the vast amounts of botters/RMTers banned,
it seems rather silly to assume all the SP they’re selling are NOT coming from people/bots who skilled them.
But it doesn’t. The people who buy their way up are the same people who wouldn’t have played without that anyway.
They’re also the same people who will learn that buying their way up is not going to do anything for them …
… and they’ll serve as loot pinata for everyone else, just like they always did. Always.
Nothing is being changed that makes any difference to the results. It doesn’t matter if you buy PLEX to buy a titan character …
… or if you buy PLEX and tons of SP to fly a titan. It makes no difference, because that person will not get very far either way.
They’ve already done that when they’ve introduced CrimeWatch 2.0 …
… and now they’re doing it again to get at least a part of them back since the BlackOut.
This is nothing new at all, but this time at least it’s not the wrong audience.
They’ve stated very often that they still solely own the EVE ONLINE IP. It is extremely unlikely that CCP Hilmar
would ever risk giving it away to anyone else. Contracts are contracts. They matter. If Pearl Abyss really had
their hands in this game, then this game would already be vastly different. It’s been way over a year now!
Exactly. Those people are nothing more but cash cows and that’s all there is to it.
This …
… underlines my above paragraph.
Exactly.
THIS is the reality of the modern video game industry. All these shitty Korean MMO games, as just one example, that reach the western market solely survive because there’s a couple (tens of) thousands morons with … let’s call them self confidence issues … who pay exorbitant sums. All these games are nothing but cash grabs and dumb people, who are easily milked out of their money, are the number one target for any company ever, worldwide.
The true definition of a ‘sandbox’, perhaps ?
Err, what? Why would SP be coming from banned accounts? That doesn’t make any sense.
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Of course it makes sense.
Every time they ban an RMTing account, there’s at least one character with a whole lot of SP in it. As RMTers most likely have several accounts with SP to farm whatever it is they’re farming, there’s a whole lot of SP CCP can use to sell. Of course this is all just book keeping, but it doesn’t change anything about it.
There must be thousands of millions of banned SP in CCPs records.
You can’t just ignore that it’s actually extremely unlikely that the SP they’re banning from the game …
… and the SP they’re selling again to players …
… aren’t balancing each other out.
People here are literally inventing the idea that the SP is coming from thin air …
… and no one considers that CCP is most likely simply bypassing the ingame market …
… (buy PLEX, buy injectors with SP farmed from other players) …
… and selling all that banned SP directly.
That way the balance is maintained.
All SP is coming from players.
No SP is ever created out of thin air.
Personally I never cared about this so called SP inflation people are making a fuzz about. I have no idea why they’d think that matters. It ■■■■■■■ doesn’t. From my perspective this nonsense comes from all these wannabes who think they “can’t compete with older players”. Those, and those who want to skip time skilling, are the target audience for the SP market.
What matters is the person who buys the SP and the more SP they buy the less likely it is they’re going to make actually good use of it. If there really was an actual issue with people buying SP from CCP directly, then so far no one actually managed to explain why it’s an issue in a way that actually exposes it as an actual issue.
Please point me at a proper explanation.
I’m all ears … eyes … and totally willing to learn.
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The definition of P2W is the use of real world money in a virtual game to gain an advantage
Can you also define “winning” in EVE ONLINE?
Impossible
But why does CCP need to use that SP? If CCP wants to sell 1 million SP for $14.99 they can just spawn 1 million SP directly to your character sheet. They don’t have to deduct it from some other character to “balance” the system.
People here are literally inventing the idea that the SP is coming from thin air …
Because it’s the obvious way to do it. Its utter lunacy to suggest that CCP would go to all the extra effort of making F2P cash shop sales deduct from banned characters when they have the ability to create any arbitrary amount of SP/items/whatever at will.
If there really was an actual issue with people buying SP from CCP directly, then so far no one actually managed to explain why it’s an issue in a way that actually exposes it as an actual issue.
Buying SP at all is bad.
Buying SP directly from CCP and bypassing the players selling SP is really bad.
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Exactly. The advantages they’re supposedly buying solely exist in the heads of those who try to buy them.
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Nonsense. Buying SP is a direct increase in your character’s power, beyond what you would be able to achieve through in-game means alone. The fact that some RMTers suck at EVE and lose despite buying advantages doesn’t make it any less of an advantage.
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That’s true, but if there is a reason to keep some sort of balance,
as to avoiding creating SP out of thin air,
then I’m pretty damn sure they’d pull SP from all the banned accounts.
What extra effort? There’s no ■■■■■■■ difference.
In the end it’s all just book keeping.
You subtract from one side and add to the other.
Imagine all these banned accounts would have sold their SP on the market.
People would be buying injectors, getting these SP.
There’s no ■■■■■■■ difference!
There is just as much reason to believe that CCP is selling banned SP for some balancing reasons …
… (which I don’t personally believe in, because SP inflation is ■■■■■■■■) …
… as there is reason to believe they’re creating them out of thin air.
Fact of the matter is that, if there is some sort of balance to be maintained …
… then they’d be taking SP from banned accounts instead of creating them out of nothing.
Just like they’ve openly stated that they’re pulling PLEX from banned accounts …
… when they needed to influence the PLEX market somehow …
… which happened, as far as we can vaguely tell.
This is a lot like “Ganking new players is bad”.
I’ve asked for an explanation!
Why is it bad?
But, again, why? Why does it matter if they’re creating SP out of thin air vs. moving SP from banned characters back into the game? That’s some weird moral principle about the “purity” of purchased SP that makes no sense at all from a development point of view.
What extra effort?
Having to code a way to transfer SP between characters and ensure that everything is always balanced and the pool of banned SP never runs out. It’s pointless extra work from a coding point of view and there’s no benefit to it.
Just like they’ve openly stated that they’re pulling PLEX from banned accounts …
… when they needed to influence the PLEX market somehow …
… which happened, as far as we can vaguely tell.
I would be highly skeptical of this claim, if it has even been made. It would be much easier from a developer point of view to just spawn PLEX onto the market as needed and lie about it coming from banned accounts.
Because this is a game, not a contest of who can spend the most IRL cash. It devalues legitimate in-game accomplishments when someone can do the same thing by handing over their credit card and buying advantages using out of game means.
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I wish I could write shorter posts without wasting an hour thinking about how to condense the meaning into less sentences.
My apologies.
It matters for those who believe SP is being created out of thin air. All SP has an in-game time equivalent.
You spend time, you gain SP.
People are complaining (remember, it’s pure speculation!) how no time has been spent gaining these SP CCP is selling and I am presenting a scenario which shows that the SP they’re selling is coming from those who spent time accumulating it. In the end, even if CCP does not care about looking, there’s SP leaving the game through bans and there’s CCP bringing in SP by selling it.
At this point the complainers will say “but CCP is surely selling more SP than they’re removing from the game!” which,
yet again, is fruitless speculation achieving nothing and leading nowhere.
As much as people claim that CCP is selling SP from thin air …
… I can claim that CCP is selling SP from banned characters.
In my scenario no SP is being created out of thin air and the in-game-time-balance is being maintained.
They don’t even try thinking about this!
They’re just diving right into the speculation, believing it as fact!
We’d need to ask someone who knows accounting better than me … or the both of us? From the little accounting I’ve learned, I’d say that the fact that PLEX has a real world value for CCP makes it unlikely they’re going to spawn PLEX out of nothing, because then that would have to show up in their books. It would definitely be like throwing away money.
The PLEX they’ve banned still show up in their books. They’re not consumed. They don’t count as income. It makes more sense to use banned PLEX, because then these PLEX can be booked as income, which they aren’t unless they’re being consumed. Again, that’s accounting.
A bought PLEX might put money into CCP’s wallet …
… but they don’t count as income unless they’re being consumed.
That’s an explanation. Thank you.
It’s flawed, though, because the talking about “advantages” ends there where people buy stuff …
… instead of there where they actually make use of this so called advantage.
I’m not seeing how anyone is ever gaining an advantage.
They’re just skipping time. That’s not an advantage!
What’s the advantage anyone gains from buying SP directly, instead of from the market?
What’s the difference to buying a character?
I’m not buying into the “SP out of thin air” crap at all.
It’s short sighted and not particularly well thought through.
Independently of me believing if CCP creates them out of thin air …
… or if they balance it out with banned SP …
… I think this whole idea is rather silly and nonsensical.
It’s like saying that people who have more money have an advantage.
Well, yeah, they ■■■■■■■ do!
Does my bigger wallet count as an advantage over “your” smaller wallet?
Well if it does then that’s too bad, but that’s how it is. I have the money, others don’t.
There’s literally nothing I can do about it and not spending it,
because of other people who aren’t that fortunate just screams guilt-tripping to me.
Btw … thanks for your great posts! 
I expected far worse, but it seems I deserve better than what I’ve seen from you.
Apologies for the long post. I hope it’s coherent.
I’ve been distracted quite a bit, it’s loud outside and I have to take care of other things in between.
Ya, seeing few day old toons flying fully T2 fitted cruisers all the time. Just inject to win. It used to be that player age had some indication of combat ability, but that has been completely thrown out of the window.
Cant say that i like this side of EvE too much…
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