In rookie chat they said remote injection was so much cheaper. That I didn’t need to go to Caldari space to find my Caldari Drone Specialization at a reasonable price.
Well, I followed the advice and ended up buying the skill at a 1000%+ mark up. When clicking it, I hadn’t seen the tiny white text above the blue button. I assumed that after clicking ‘Buy and Inject’ that it would confirm the price and then proceed. Nope, it just goes straight to buying and took my isk.
Skillbooks are obviously spawned and supplied by npc stations. Unfortunately there is nothing in game that will tell you about their markets. If your not in a region that supplies them, then your SOL for trying to track down their source. Maybe there is some deeper meta based on lore and naming that lets you piece together where they are but new players, the ones looking for new skills, are not going to know that while learning to fly their ships and how to make isk.
To me, on a menu with no resizing options, with the price text taking up about 1% of that while a big blue buy now button takes up 10% is bad. That button should really be translated into ‘please scam me now.’
I would very much like some safeguards in place here. Add an extra window that warns the player that they are buying a skill for x% above the spawned price. This system is in place for buying over priced items in a region you can see, and should be used here for all of New Eden. Skillbooks are not items players can make and are required by new players to play the game. They are not like other markets with destructible, these skills are permanent additions to the character.
And yes, scams are a part of Eve, but I don’t think they should show up this early in the player’s experience. Let them learn the way they want to learn, and not by forced trial of fire. That said, the worst part of this is that they might not get the chance to learn at all. There’s no directive in the game telling a player to leave their current region, so they may never have the opportunity to know better and would continue getting scammed. Skillbooks and how they spawn are a total mystery to new players.