Either allow extracting SP until a higher SP threshold far above the 5M an Alpha can train, or allow extracting only after being Omega long enough to do so.
10M SP, or two months of Omega.
Either would make farming Alpha accounts for SP far less effective.
From my description how it makes just no sense, i would really like to question if this is really done at all or just again a theoretical concept by someone jealous who hasn’t thought it through to the end.
If it was or were a thing at some point and massively done, i would have suspected to see a massive drop in large skill injector cost due to oversupply. But no, large skill injectors seem to be rather stable at about 700-800m isk over the last 6 years.
Well, many players have your outlook on this matter. Some don’t, I guess.
That is a nice observation, but don’t you think that people who would play the long game of gathering free SP on Alpha accounts and extract with extractors sold in sales would have the patience to slowly sell such injectors like anyone else over the year instead of quickly dumping it?
I’m not saying you’re wrong, I’m just not seeing you’re right either.
I too have no idea about the stats of how many people exploit alpha accounts for such things, I just know it’s possible to exploit Alpha accounts like that.
And in case Alpha accounts are exploited in numbers which is problematic, I’d rather have such things restricted mechanically with for example a minimum duration of Omega before extraction or an increased lower SP limit for extraction than to see a limit in number of Alpha accounts, which the opening post is asking for.
But you’re right, if hardly anyone is doing it I’d also be happy with no changes at all.
You skill it up to 5m
You have 1 Million Free SP.
You add 1 Million Free SP during Omega.
You extract SP.
For example.
There are probably many other ways
What you write is just normal gameplay. If i have to get full Omega time to extract that time in skillpoints afterwards, then this is normal gameplay and no farm that somehow generates skillpoints for free. Because you paid for them by Omega.
And even if i got with your math of an additional 1m SP from wherever. Those would take quite a while…more than about 3 months at least.
But well…let’s assume we have those 1m SP and the 1m SP of the 1 month Omega. How much isk is it?
You can only fill up 4 large skill extractors with 2m SP. Each one takes 500k SP. And with current market prices even if you get good one on orders, you can make only a profit of 285m isk per injector, giving a total of 1140m isk. And you paid almost double for the 1 month Omega at about 2245m isk and on top you can’t repeat it next month because those additional free SP are missing and you would only have the trained ones.
So you are at a net loss of at least 1105m isk.
So why and where do you think this “farm” is profitable? What trick did i not include in the calculation?
you miss the 1 week free omega that CCP tends to give out with each expansion. The one a week ago was 10 plex for a week. so 50mill isk investment for 285mill for the extractor sale. People spin up hundreds of these accounts and profit every expansion
That’s a valid but different approach that doesn’t scale very well and involves the same work as for everyone else playing the game normally. The passive farming as stated in the last example is then completely gone and also it was not 10 PLEX, but 25 PLEX last time.
You need to login all those accounts one by one during login reward campaigns that yield only about 250k SP for each account in Alpha state and are run about 4 times a year or something.
As for “farming” the daily SP: you can also only do this with one account and character at a time, otherwise it violates the Alpha account login rule.
By doing the dailies you are then in fact playing the game. One char by the next, every single day. This is a lot of tedious work and also time consuming at scale. And you can’t do anything else while you do it, due to Alpha state.
I am sure that people do it, but to me it doesn’t look like fun or passive farming income. You are at a heavy time invest doing it.
While I agree with you, I can afford to sub 3 accts. Maybe some can’t afford that but have the time to spend?
Lets say you make 400m with a single Alpha Account.
Lets write an script which creates 10.000 Accounts.
If just the extacting takes you 30 seconds (log in etc. loading time.. bla bla bla)
This would be straight nonestop:
| Accounts | Time |
|---|---|
| 1000 | 8,33 Hours |
| 1500 | 12,50 Hours |
| 2000 | 16,67 Hours |
| 3000 | 1,04 Days |
| 5000 | 1,74 Days |
| 10000 | 3,47 Days |
For the Following Rewards:
| Accounts | Billions |
|---|---|
| 1000 | 400 |
| 1500 | 600 |
| 2000 | 800 |
| 3000 | 1.200 |
| 5000 | 2.000 |
| 10000 | 4.000 |
I can´t proof it but neither can you which they don´t do it.
Don’t just oversimplify it and use a random unreflected number from your head for the required time please.
Instead please actually do it with at least one account to actually measure all the time and work involved from real experience:
Firing up a client and login time alone takes more than your 30 seconds.
You need to distribute isk (or skill extractors) among them.
You need to do all the training and skill injection.
You need to actually fly the characters around to where skill extractors are.
You need to do all the account work of linking for rewards.
You need to do the extraction.
You need to hand back items or isk.
…
I surely have forgotten more things like maybe training implants and going through character creation and website account management and Email confirmations and twofactoring and whatever else.
Aside from the totally illegal point of scripting it, which in itself will take ages, there is much more time involved in the actual process of doing it.
And you really believe CCP/FC won’t notice and shut down this ‘smart’ plan before you make a single ISK out of it?
I also forgot to add: How many times exactly has the “free” days promo already been changed? It never was the same each year as far as i remember.
This time it got raised to 25 PLEX for active Alphas. Active means you logged in the last 30 days.
Only if you haven’t logged in for 30 days you were eligible for totally free days.
So in any case good luck with also estimating the surely again changed conditions for next years promotion or if there is a promotion at all.
this is stupid Alpha players cannot extract skills for two reasons one you can’t go over 5 million skill points two you cannot go under 5 million skill points you technically can go over 5 million but you will have to use Alpha skill injectors which would be less cost-effective because you lose your ability to passively train after you hit over 5 million skill points so the skilled Farm thing is butt kiss and 98% of the things veterans want to do with new characters cannot be done with an alpha character and the few things they can have very little impact and they can’t run them at the same time as an Omega character without getting banned
Alphas can train up to 5m SP, then redeem the recruitment link 1m SP to get to 6m, then buy one of the big discount omega weekend packs that coincide with certain events such as expansion launches to extract two LSI worth of SP.
With which FC will be very happy as they are getting revenue from selling the Omega pack…
I have several Alpha accounts as well as my two Omegas, and most of my Alpha characters are getting very close to their absolute 20M SP limit; with the AIR rewards and regular login handouts of SP, there really is very little need to buy Alpha injectors these days. Frankly, an Alpha can be an excellent PVE character on around 12M SP, and be able to fly pretty much any Alpha ship on around 15-16M. I wish people would stop calling them trial accounts: CCP made a very clear business decision some years ago to allow Alphas to become long term free-to-play options, having decided to seek revenue from microtransactions rather than subscriptions, and very deliberately started advertising the game as F2P. So all the whining about Alphas is pointless; commercial decision by CCP as was, tough if you do not like it.
Alpha injectors are inexpensive. They can use regular injectors also
it takes about 150 days for those two large skill injectors if you go about doing things in that suboptimal way
I don’t doubt there might be a quicker way, this is just the one that’s immediately obvious to me. But it doesn’t really matter, because that 150 days is still an investment that always pays off, you can make unlimited alpha accounts, and setting them up is quite quick. Nobody’s doing this one account at a time.