By now I assume most people have seen the dev blog posted

here

about the new skillpoint trading system. I understand this is a very controversial topic and I know a lot of people will not be happy with it or outright rage about it. However this is one of the things that I personally support and I might be one of the few CSM members who does, the other council members will have to speak for themselves.

“There has been a thing called the Character Bazaar for a long time now that already allows you to buy SP with ISK.”

Allow me to explain. First off, let me tackle the most prominent argument of this being “pay 2 win” for some reason. There has been a thing called the Character Bazaar for a long time now that already allows you to buy SP with ISK. People should also remember that the SP you are buying are not appearing out of thin air. This is a key element of the proposed system that a lot of people seem to miss. Someone has to put the time down to train the SP in the first place, and the rewards diminish steeply as you go up towards higher SP, effectively creating an SP sink for the game.

The system would also allow newer pilots to respec their skillpoints and change their skills if they mess up. Being able to follow the meta by respeccing to whatever doctrines your current alliance is using will be huge and is very good for newer players.

I think the proposed system will affect the price of focused characters on the Bazaar greatly. This is a good thing seeing how say a focused dreadnaught pilot character can cost over 20b, sometimes close to 30b. It will also bring the price of unfocused high SP characters up by allowing potential buyers to strip away the bad or unwanted SP and sell that, mitigating their overall expenses. You can also use the tradeable SP to move a character up in the next “tier” of character pricing by buying a battleship alt and making it into a dread pilot or buying a Tengu character and using some SP to convert it into a link alt.

Things of concern

The intervals are currently proposed as follows:

As the devblog states, these are all numbers that can change, but I would really want more levels here for a more more granular application. Perhaps it should be scaled like so: (millions of SP) 0-10, 10-30, 30-50, 50-80 and finally 80+, in order to minimize the leaps between increments of diminishing returns.

Another thing I really want to see is what pricing levels CCP decides to put these at and how they will impact the price of PLEX. Seeing as how the Transneural Skill Packets are at the moment at a relatively low SP level of 500k, I really don’t think they will be that expensive.

A lot of people seem to think that this will kill the Character Bazar, but I honestly believe this iteration will just make it more focused and lower the price of characters in general. It will also not kill the market for high SP alts.

Conclusions

I strongly disagree with the notion of skillpoint trading being the end of EVE and think it is evident that this will be good for the game once you think about it a little further. It has the potential of corporations being able to use their ISK to create newbie skillpoint packages to give to new players. It will allow your doctrines be a bit more fluid and give people the opportunity to respec into whatever doctrines are being used. I am not afraid of any added volatility in the PLEX market and I would love to see the overpriced focused character market go down a bit. The Bazaar right now has an artificial economy because of the time/sp spent on PLEX. If someone wants to spend AUR to add SP to a character to make a more focused one, they have to compete in price with people who know how to farm characters. This will bring the price down until a baseline cost is eventually hit.

“People keep spamming “pay 2 win”, but I honestly don’t know what they are talking about.”

People keep spamming “pay 2 win”, but I honestly don’t know what they are talking about. This is similar to dumping money into PLEX and buying a link alt, fancy implants and/or a blinged out ship. Like ISK, SP alone will not win you fights.

It took me a week to get 10b and buy Gorski Car, but it would have taken me two years to train him from scratch.