I just had this idea now, though it’s probably far too late and should have been suggested before the release of skill injectors. Anyway, I thought it seemed like a really cool way to do skill injection, and I want to hear what you guys think about it.
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The basic idea is to preserve the skills trained in the SP you remove from your head. You would remove a level of a skill at a time, for instance you might pull out “Amarr Battleships level 4” from your head and it would become a tangible object. It would charge your SP-remover for the amount of skillpoints you pulled out, and then you could put this injector onto the market. Someone could buy it and use it to train Amarr Battleships from level 3 to level 4.
This skills market would wind up setting a wide variety of ISK prices on injectors, based not only on the number of skillpoints contained in the injector, but also on the prerequisites that go up to that skill, and even on supply vs. demand for a specific skill.
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To ensure that some skillpoints are lost in the transfer, the skill could be trained up 80% of the way, and you have to train the remaining 20%. This would also mean that it’s not instant training but instead would require a time sink by the player to train further. You could get some instant training by injecting multiple levels of a skill, for instance if you inject Amarr Battleship levels 1-5 all at once, you would get 80% of the total SP that it costs to train to level 5, meaning you’d be at level 4 instantly and even most of the way toward 5. So to inject for example Amarr Battleship 4, you would need a minimum of 80% of the skillpoints it costs to train Amarr Battleship to 3 already in the skill.
The specific amount of SP loss can be discussed as well. I don’t know what amount should be used.
This is entirely too complex why do we need a wide variety of prices for what is just the same thing in different forms. SP is SP why bother limiting it like this and the 20% loss can be huge for certain skills like Carrier V.
The injector system right now is perfectly fine. It’s simple and effective. We have different sizes now so if you only need a few skill points just get a small, if you need a lot get a large. We don’t need an entirely new market meta around speculating on what skills will and won’t be valuable.
It’s not the same thing. There’s a big difference between Advanced Mass Production 5 and Acceleration Control 5 even though they cost the same amount of SP. Would you suggest that an afterburner and an artillery turret are essentially the same thing because they’re both made with a similar amount of the same basic minerals? This is the same idea: let the playerbase build content by giving them the tools to do it. We can speculate about how that content will take form, but ultimately it will be an emergent phenomenon.
That’s the point, of course. I was thinking maybe use a higher percentage loss for larger skills like capital skills, to make it more difficult to farm capital pilots. But I’ll leave that up to capital pilots to discuss.
The advantage to this system is that you can’t build a super pilot overnight without another super pilot selling the right skills.
You aren’t taking the endless ‘Engineering V’ grind someone did and turning it into ‘Titan V’ and it makes it harder to infinitely scale SP farms, since they will require a lot more work to skill the right skills and sell them,
The disadvantage is that it’s more complex. As part of reducing that complexity I would suggest that it’s not extracted specifically by level, and instead it’s just a ‘Caldari Titan injector’ that gives you ‘X sp’ towards Titan. That reduces the number of market items by a factor of five. And allows keeping loss intact easily.
The only solid point I’ve seen in this thread is “its too convenient” and I would ask why in the hell is that a bad thing? EVE is complex enough as it is just by its basic design. Why do we need to take a perfectly good system and add multiple layers of complexity onto just for the sake of making it harder.
You said you’d let capital pilots discuss and as a supercapital pilot ■■■■ everything about this proposed trainwreck to the core.
If its so easy to just inject a supercapital pilot overnight then just go ahead and do it yourself. Unless of course the root of this lies with the fact that you can’t and are just jealous of the people who in fact can do it. Which I’m inclined to think is more the case.
Not for the sake of making it harder, but for the sake of causing emergent gameplay to grow. Since EVE is a game about emergent gameplay, it seems like a good thing to do. I wouldn’t say that EVE needs more emergent gameplay, but I definitely think it could use more. Unless you can think of some reason why this would be a bad thing, I don’t see why it isn’t a good thing.
Of course, trying to implement it now runs the problem of forcing skill injection veterans to learn a new system as well as forcing the market economy to adapt to a wildly different system. It would have been much better as the original idea for skill injectors.
Aside from the forum censor mutilating your post almost beyond recognition, I gather that you are a supercapital pilot and are strongly opposed to this idea. Why do you dislike it? I’m hoping to hear a complex answer on why it would be a bad thing as far as supercaps are considered. I want to be educated.
I don’t think anyone suggested it was easy, and I sure didn’t. I’m a bit jelly of supercap pilots, but more importantly I was suggesting making it more difficult, not less difficult, to get into a supercapital. That was, in fact, Nevyn_Auscent’s main point, that in my proposed system, supercap skills would be far more valuable on the market than the same amount of SP in, say, mining barges.
Sorry what emergent gameplay? All you’re doing is severely herding how useful skill injectors are. I don’t see what you’re worried about. New players are not injecting into capitals, experienced players on other characters are. I need to see evidence that skipping wait times on training queues actually negatively effects gameplay, not a bunch of hearsay and assumptions.
Actually my idea was to take advantage of a wonderful possibility for emergent gameplay staring us in the face. Why do you say it is awful? Multiple people oppose the idea but nobody has yet explained why.
Because what you’re describing as emergent gameplay is actually just a huge inconvenience. In a way it makes SP farms a lot more complicated, but overall it’s a negative hit to QOL and there isn’t a good reason to nerf skill injectors. This is sort of like saying “Force us to micromanage all 5 drones individually! It’s emergent gameplay!” When it reality it’s a pain in the neck that interrupts regular gameplay.
That’s a really terrible comparison. You don’t inject several times a minute, or at least most of us don’t. Skill injection is a privilege, not normal gameplay. Setting limitations on that privilege can sure be a huge inconvenience to someone who was relying on it being easy. That’s like if there was a button you press for free ISK, and I advocated for putting in some sort of minigame on it, and you said it’s a huge inconvenience that gets in the way of people’s income stream from pushing the button.
Making the game more complicated raises the bar. It’s not an inconvenience to just you. When it’s the same amount of inconvenience to everyone, it changes the meta. In some cases, it doesn’t help anyone and only manages to slog down gameplay and reduce fun. But this is not one of those cases. The only thing being slogged down by my idea is brainless click-to-pay-money-for-skills. The skill injectors are simpler than buying modules on the market. I advocated for making it only that easy and you said that’s too hard.
You’re really passionate about this, that’s admirable, but I promise you that you’re not creating gameplay, only limiting it. You need to create opportunities. There’s nothing emergent about throwing a wrench in the functionality of a service that isn’t going away
So as a person who has hated skill injectors since the very beginning, the only change that I’ve ever pushed for as far as a change goes was to lock the injectors to whatever category they were extracted from. So Armor/Shield/Drones/etc. That way when you inject them the skill had to at least match in that way. This would allow for at least some continuation of someone had to train a related skill in order for you to obtain yours. Easily done, it would just no longer by a single pool at the bottom of your screen but attached to each category dropdown.
Personally I’d just like them removed injectors/extractors because they are a cancer to smooth transitions and game balance while also forcing CCP to walk on egg shells when it comes to an already quickly adapting playerbase. But we all know that’s never going to happen, people like being able to rush into ships they are rarely ready to fly and CCP is perfectly willing to let those people pay them for it. May as well implement something to slow the spread of this cancer at least.