no, more SP is not better than less SP.
The person with the extra time to log in could be using that to make the ISK that buys the SP. So it need not automatically be a case of ‘wallet mining’. What I find bizarre is how much people complain about SP purchase giving ‘advantage’…yet almost nobody complains about the advantage someone has by having more time to grind. It’s as if people are blinkered and only see ‘advantage’ if there’s money involved.
I’m going to answer this one even though it wasn’t asked of me.
You can’t force this question into a yes and no answer.
Two people can have the same amount of SP but one of them might have had a less focused skill plan so can fly lots of different ships and the other could have perfected the skills needed to fly a single doctrine. Which one is better?
One person could have double the XP but have spent a lot of it getting into a ship that a patch, a change in the in game cost, or a shift in the meta means no one flies anymore. The other could have half the XP but it’s all in ships that are currently in the meta.
One person could have more SP but have focused on a single race like gallente and armour/hybrid skills, while another have less SP but focused on Minmitar and projectile shield skills. (I’m going to call this one, minmitar is better, in rust we trust)
The point is forcing a yes/no answer to this question is ignoring the complexity of the issue.
If all things are equal and the two players have the same amount of in game experience, the same ships, one account each and they meet on a gate will it be the person who bought a skill pack to get them into trajectory analysis v that wins? The answer is still maybe because there is chance in everything and this is just one example amongst many.
The SP available for sale are a drop in the ocean. All the SP packs bought together are not even enough to get you through your magic 14. The chances of you meeting someone on a gate that would have been on an exactly even footing with you had you not had a spare 20 quid to finish of drones v are so incredibly small they aren’t valuable to the discussion.
What is valuable to the discussion is that everyone’s eve experience is different. Some people are time wealthy can plex accounts and grind resources, some people have an income that’s comfortable enough to allow them to pay for their accounts and buy a SP pack or injector if it means undocking with their friends in a new doctrine instead of missing out during their scant and valuable free time. There are even people that drop vasts amounts of real money on plex so they can buy capitals or whole fleets of ships for their corps.
I could sit here being bitter that their real world money gets them great ingame advantages, or that the kid with zero responsibility gets to mine 15 hours a day and play for ‘free’… or… I could be grateful that one is keeping Eve’s lights switched on and the other is fueling the in game economy.
Tldr: There is nothing overwhelming about the amount of SP for sale. They are a drop in the ocean of the sp needed to fly everything ‘well’ and the sales are keeping the servers running which to me is positive.
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If you weren’t so busy getting your dictionary out every 5 seconds you’d instead have correctly construed that I don’t care. If I can buy an ‘advantage’ then good ! I think you have spent half the thread arguing with yourself and getting your own knickers in a twist. I’ve never said buying SP is bad…I’ve simply disputed whether there is actually any advantage in most cases.
And yes…individual circumstances are relevant.
You’ve been so hell bent on beating the drum of some particular ‘definition’ that you’ve lost sight of the wood for the trees.
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I’m not going to buy SP for the advantage. I’m going to buy it so that I can use some ships and modules earlier than I otherwise would.
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The point is that you are over simplifying it. The circumstances in which it is an advantage are so specific that if you ignore the complexity then you ignore them too.
If you have an advantage then it is relative to something else. Even if it’s just relative to the vanilla experience you would have had without it. The level of advantage you can buy with SP is less than the advantage you get from subscribing to Omega. Which is the baseline. It would be more accurate to say that the unsubscribed are at a disadvantage.
The majority of SP use is to get you into a ship or to allow you to use a fit. This is in a game where people have been playing for decades and still can’t fly everything available.
You can try and strip everything back to simple logic and say technically the game is pay to win. However it’s disengenuous to say that advantage is meaningful in a game that is largely structured by how we the players chose to play it. Intel channels offer infinitely more advantage, experienced fleet commanders offer more advantage, healthy skepticism offers more advantage. Hell a friend of mine who has never used a skill injector or bought a sp once in his over a decade of playing lost a carrier the other day because he trusted the wrong person. 2.5 million skill points wouldn’t have helped him one jot but skepticism would.
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Precisely. And if you are already capable of flying those ships…where is the ‘advantage’ anyway ?
A good example would be someone who has trained only for Caldari ships and can fly a battleship…but is suddenly moved to a corp wing that flies Amarr ships and the person has zero Amarr ship skills. Are we seriously to believe that someone who can fly a Caldari battleship can’t fly an Amarr frigate at all ? What conceivable ‘advantage’ or ‘winning’ are they gaining by buying the SP to get the Amarr skills to fly ships they are quite capable of flying ?
Pay to win sounds good but I doubt I’ll win anything with the SP I’m buying, not even a fight.
I will be able to use ships and modules before I’m supposed to tho and that’s much more interesting than an imaginary win.
I’ve spent the past 400 posts trying to tell him that.
It’s only in someone’s head.
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Oh I know that. It seems to mean pay4advantage. I will have an advantage over another noob by flying something earlier than he can but I don’t think I’ll have an advantage over a veteran.
I’m fine with that. Thank you for correcting me.
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That’s not what I’m saying at all. Individual circumstances are irrelevant. However the complexity of the game is not. The point being that the advantage provided in the game is too small to be noteworthy and is only useful in such specific circumstances that it’s almost irrelevant.
That’s not my logic at all. If the SP in the game gave you 10x damage we wouldn’t even be having this discussion. That would be absurd. The continuation of my logic would be the gold ammo wouldn’t make the overall game pay to win if there was only a tiny specific circumstance in which it could be used and it could be bought anyway with in game currency/resources.
Literally went on to say this myself. That’s what relative to the experience you’d have had by not buying it means…
I’m not sure how many ways I can explain that the specific scenarios aren’t relevant except to illustrate that the game is big, complex and trying to force the the yes no answer isn’t helpful to the overall discussion.
There are way more examples of how having extra SP in the quantity available doesn’t help you than there are of them helping you. There is a reason they are limited.
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The cost of 9 days off the skill queue is equivalent to that of a good battleship. I’d argue that you are actually losing a battleship !
Since you don’t play EvE, and have no idea what you are talking about, you invent a scenario literally everytime you talk about the game.
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The definition was never in question. The purpose of this thread is to discuss wether selling SP is good or bad.
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It’s a choice. I cannot pay for both. I choose the SP over the battleship because the battleship can go BOOM, the SP can’t.
On the actual topic of the OP, I’m completely fine with monetizing SP sales. Is it some version of “Pay2Advantage”? Yeah, sure, but one I’m fine with in game. The way I see it, if I can sit down and have absolutely everything in the game without buying something from the game store that someone who immediately spends $2000 can have, I’m fine with it. I realize he will get it faster, but I don’t care about “pay4conveniance”.
I have absolutely bought SP packs and injectors when I started. I wasn’t dumb with them and immediately skill into something reckless, but I also didn’t like waiting 15 days for awesome skills like “Tactical Shield Manipulation V”.
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I understand that, thank you. I agreed with OP that selling SP is a good thing.
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The wait for some of those skills is way too long. I have seen 19 days and others are 45 days! I don’t feel like mining for 45 days. Missions are okay but I’d like to fly T2 ships too.
20€ for a month to use a T2 ship and have fun is okay, as long as it’s not every month. I’ll get that T2 ship destroyed in an hour then wait for another 2 to 3 months to buy another one and apply what I learned then.
At least that’s the plan. We’ll see if I can stick to it.