Now that skill injectors have been around a bit, I’ve discovered a few… side effects…
(1) It used to be the afk cloaky camping at least cost the camper the time he purchased to run that account 24x7. No longer. Now he can use that toon (or another on that account) to farm skill points to pay for cloaky camping, thus reducing the cost of camping, increasing its likelihood.
(2) Date of birth and history are meaningless. It used to be you could calculate how many SP someone might have by their age. Not any more. A two day old toon could fly a supercarrier.
(3) Character rename. No, you can’t actually rename a character, but you can buy skill injectors, take all but 5M of the SP out of a toon, create a new one, and start with more or less the same SP level you had before, but without the name, without the history, completely anonymous. I’m pretty sure that CCP didn’t want character rename, and yet that’s what they have.
For AFK cloaking… Any fairly passive activity generated the same effect. The 2 extra acounts could run PI and several Indy jobs needing minimal weekly maintenance. Ome could sit at a POS in nul or low manning the reactions. They could even be trade alts just to add more orders that are not touched often. Skill injectors changed none of this.
As for age, that was always a rough estimate at best as you never knew if the person in question was subbed and training the whole time. Besides, doesn’t this increase risk? You don’t know, making it more of a challenge. Isn’t that good?
As for the rename… You could so that. Yet You will lose a lot of SP in the process. A good combat toon or any other activity far exceeds the lowest return valie skill point break on injectors. You would be better off selling the injectors and buying a toon which would still not let you change name. May be for a cheap alt you could but do this but the cost is still high just for a name and corp history wipe especially in a game where you could just out right sell the toon and buy another.
On the plus side, for a little isk, I was able to quickly train up a skill I was not mapped for. Saved me time and help me focus on skills I wanted instead of nice to haves.
At most you can earn 2700 SP an hour. That amounts to About 1.95 mil sp per 30 days which is 3.5 extractors of SP per month.
Now 3 extractors cost 1 bil isk. 3 skill injectors can earn you about 2.4 bil. So in the end you have 1.4 bil on profit. However look at PLEX prices. Assume plex cost 3 mil each (which is undee market value) . Multiply that by 500 and it cost 1.5 bil to plex an account.
So on the months you make 3 injectors you actually lose 100 mil. On the months when you make 4, you make 500 mil. So basically, you can make 250 mil a month as an SP farm.
Now to make an AFK cloak alt account, it would cost you 2 months profit to setup the farming alt with +5 implants. It would probably take about 4 months to cover expenses and skills on the bomber pilot too. Seems like a lot of work for a little extra profit and an AFK cloak.
Skill extraction is a gold mine for CCP. The PLEX used to buy extractors was originally purchased with real world cash. Since fewer skillpoints are injected than extracted the net effect is a skillpoint sink.
From a player perspective injectors provide instant gratification. If you value time more than money, injectors give you a way to buy time.
For someone like me, with a few fully trained industrial accounts it’s an easy way to make a lot more ISK!