Back in the olden days you couldn’t buy or transfer skill points. The first game mechanics that allowed that to happen were the Skill Injectors. In order to somewhat balance it and reduce potential community backlash, the decision was made that Skill Injectors would have diminishing returns the more skill points your character has.
Fast forward to today where skill points are being sold everywhere in vast quantities. You can buy them with cash or with PLEX/ISK, directly or in temporary promotional bundles.
Now, the skill points that you buy for cash or in NES are applied as is: you buy 1.000.000 skill points, you get 1.000.000 skill points. But the diminishing returns on skill injectors are still there.
My question is: Are the diminishing returns part of a skill points transfer policy that is now pretty much serving no purpose, or is it still needed? Keep in mind that skill extractors can be bought for ISK or cash, just like direct skill points.
SP purchased for cash or plex is not an endless amount of SP. You may only purchase each bundle once every so often. I bought these for a fresh alt at the beginning of September, and am currently unable to purchase those particular ones again. I know it’ll reset eventually, but I’m not sure how long that timer is.
The diminishing returns of LSIs is necessary because without it you could create an infinite number of alts and just splash skillpoints from one to the other without real cost, just the need to purchase extractors. This in turn would mean you could avoid anything negative about a character for negligible costs and just rotate skills every so often to another account.
Dont get me wrong Id love to be able to move skillpoints around willy nilly but youd get some really strange use cases as well as wanton imbalance and abuse.
The maximum earnable SP for an Alpha is less than the minimum SP you need to use an extractor. They’d have to inject 10 daily skill injectors just to hit the point they could use an extractor, which would still have diminishing returns.
That’s why I said “earnable SP.” I’m not saying it can’t be done, I’m saying you’d have to be utterly stupid to do so.
Daily Skill Injectors, AIR Daily Goals, and event rewards allow them to surpass the SP cap. Once you spend any SP above 5m cap, you need these things to get that SP back. No one is putting that much money or effort into an Alpha just to extract all that effort, no one smart anyway. Anyone who would do that is already Omega, where that effort reaps much greater rewards.
There’s probably people using daily login rewards during events to farm SP for extractors with alphas, but that’s effortless, just takes the time to log in each account and collect the rewards. They probably get 2-3 a year doing that per account.
