So as not to bury the lede (one of my favorite things) the title refers to the updated Starter Pack which you can get from CCP’s EVE Online DLC page. It includes one million skill points and runs just $4.99 currently.
There are, and have been for ages, some reasonably priced packs you can buy to give yourself a leg up on the game. They have come in assorted flavors. In the past they were sometimes related to professions like mining or exploring or even combat. Now they are more generic.
The reasonably priced packs
And then, of course, there is the Galaxy Pack, for the more whale-ish of customers.
The Galaxy Pack!
The theme of these packs has been pretty consistent over the years since Alpha clones showed up. You get some Omega time, to get you a taste of being a subscriber, you get some PLEX so you can buy something in the cash shop, and you get a some cosmetics, something nice to wear and/or a ship SKIN. Maybe there is an implant or a multiple character training cert, but that was about it.
Even the Starter Pack used to be mostly that. It’s previous payload was:
- 7 days of Omega, ensuring Double Training and many more benefits
- 250,000 Skill Points, giving you a head start in skill training
- Skill and Damage Booster (Cerebral Accelerator)
- A stunning bundle of starter ship SKINs
- Blood Raider apparel
For no doubt emotional reasons, 250K SP as part of the bundle wasn’t viewed as a betrayal by CCP. That much was available via a friend referral.
However, CCP changed the Starter Pack so, as the screen shot above indicates, it includes:
- 1,000,000 Skill Points
- Skill and Damage Booster
- A stunning bundle of starter ship SKINs
- Blood Raider apparel
No more Omega time and 4x the skill points now.
And some people are quite angry about that change; specifically the move to handing out a million skill points. That crossed an emotional barrier. And I can see why.
In the three years since what I called the Mardi Gras Release in February of 2016, which brought Skill Extractors and Skill Injectors into the game, the whole skill point market has put a lot of players on edge as they have expected CCP to step over the line and start injecting skill points into the game for cash.
Skill Injectors have also been blamed, and not without merit, for ruining the game already, for specific definitions of “ruin.”
The intentions were, if not pure, at least not straight up evil as presented. With a then 13 year old game based on the skill training queue, there was a large negative perception that new players could never “catch up,” could never be on an equal footing with those who started before them.
The long held vet opinion that this meant players had to learn the game and that newbies have a place in fleets in things tackle frigates and should work their way up the ladder the same way we did back in the day fell on deaf ears. Nobody wants to be told to do it the hard way, they want to fly a titan today.
And with PLEX able to turn real world money into ISK and then with ISK able to buy Skill Injectors, anybody with enough cash could fly a titan today. New players could catch up. Problem solved.
Well, sort of. The more likely scenario was this.
Iron Bank buys ALL THE SKILLS
More so than new player, old hands ended up buying Skill Injectors to boost up titan alts and now we have more titan pilots in the game than CCP ever imagined would be possible.
But this did not lead to a wide player revolt like Incarna for a couple of mitigating reasons.
First, you had always been able to buy characters in EVE Online, so technically you could buy your way into a titan pilot before, though getting the ISK was for it was a challenge.
Second, this was not introducing new skill points into the game. All of the skill points would be extracted from the current player base. In fact, because of the diminishing returns of Skill Injectors… somebody like me only gets 150K or the 500K skill points an injector contains… it was actually removing skill points from the game.
350K SP go to waste for me…
But most important was what the dev blog about Skill Injectors stated:
It’s very important to note here that this means all the skillpoints available to buy on the market in EVE will have originated on other characters where they were trained at the normal rate. Player driven economies are key to EVE design and we want you to decide the value of traded skillpoints while we make sure there is one single mechanism that brings new skillpoints in to the system – training.
The mob was mollified, if still wary.
And then CCP started straight up selling skill points they injected into the game.
The daily Alpha Clone injector
This was the daily Alpha Clone injector, which came into the game back in November of 2017. I thought surely this would be the breaking point, that the mob would come unglued and that there would be rioting in Jita and so forth.
But there wasn’t. The Alpha Clone injector had just enough limitations to be mostly palatable, or at least not worth an insurrection. Those limitations were:
- Only one Daily Alpha Injector may be used per day, per character [not account] (resets at downtime)
- May only be used by characters in the Alpha Clone State
- Can be purchased in the NES for PLEX or purchased for your regions real money currency via secure.eveonline.com
- Can be activated to immediately to add 50,000 skill points to your character’s unallocated skill pool (roughly one day worth of Omega training)
- Can be traded on the in-game market
- Does not award Omega Status
Still, the seal was broken, CCP was just injecting skill points into the game for cash.
I guess CCP had been generating them on occasion before, giving out skill points as compensation for game problems. But the lid was well and truly off last November when they added in the login reward mechanism, and gave us some skill points just to test it out.
And then came the 16th anniversary where any Omega logging in for 16 days got ONE MILLION skill points. At that point you could argue that CCP was just printing skill points for cash… cash via Omega subscriptions, but cash none the less. CCP created skill points were now the norm.
Which brings us to today and the Starter Pack and the straight up “give me five dollars and I’ll give you a million skill points” deal.
Things have moved along incrementally. If you have accepted everything CCP has done up to this point it is a tough be taken seriously if you argue that this is the breaking point, that CCP has gone beyond the pale, that CCP has broken faith with players, that the Pearl Abyss cash shop gold ammo power selling apocalypse is upon us, because we were practically there already. Why didn’t you say something before?
And, Jin’taan’s unlikely work-around aside, you can only apply one Starter Pack per accoun., (Along with some other fresh restrictions, threw in only after people began to object loudly.) So what is the big deal?
The flip side of that is how the incremental changes have continued on, which means that they will likely continue on going forward.
Today is it just the Starter Pack, which you can only use once per account. But if that is okay, if we accept that, then how soon until skill points are part of the Meteor Pack or the Star Pack? How soon until that $99 Galaxy Pack comes with a Skill Injector or three filled up with skill points CCP created just for that purpose?
That is not at all a stretch. CCP has been close to this in the past. They used to sell industry packs that came with Aurum, the old cash shop currency. At one point Green Man Gaming was selling those for a dollar each (they were normally $10) and there was no limited per account. So seeing that happen with skill points is very easy to imagine. After all, CCP didn’t add them to the Starter Pack by accident. Somebody thought that was a good idea, and nobody objected to it. Somebody within CCP will always be looking for ways to boost revenue, and skill points are always going to be there as a temptation. CCP edged back some when it got push back, but the company is certainly looking for that next step forward.
It is hard to stand up to any incremental change because it can be argued away as not being radically different from what you had accepted before. But in the face of an ongoing march of incremental changes that set a pattern that appears to lead to an unhappy conclusion, it doesn’t seem exactly radical to reach a point where you can see the pattern and feel the need to push back on it. At some point the frog realizes that boiling is in its future.
So I get why somebody like Manic Velocity, a passionate member of the community, has found his breaking point with this move. (I wonder what would have happened had he made it onto the CSM.) It isn’t that the move is so radical, it is that it appears to be yet another step on the path towards a game we won’t like. Sometimes you reach a point where you just can’t go along with it any more.
Most people won’t mind though. Some people will complain. On Reddit there will be threads about betrayal, predictions about the next steps, and calls for protest that will be ignored by the vast majority of the community.
I’m aware of the situation, but I am unlikely to walk away from the game. I see the path being trod, but I am of a fatalist bent and cannot see CCP deviating far from that path as time goes forward. We can perhaps slow their pace, but in the end they will get there. CCP will continue on down this trail. They pretty much have to. The game isn’t growing, they have no other products, past attempts at other products have failed, so what is left? Monetize harder!
Meanwhile, the retention rate of new players will remain weak. I don’t think CCP is capable of addressing that, and I am skeptical that there is anything they could do in any case. And as time goes forward the older player base will erode… from tiring of the game or from whatever outrage comes along… which will also hurt new player retention… until the population hits a tipping point and the economy starts to collapse.
Then there will be huge inflation as the endless ISK from NPC bounties chases the dwindling PLEX supply while the Jita market deflates otherwise as fewer and fewer players buy ships and modules and ammo and what not.
CCP will step into try and stabilize things. They’ll hit NPC bounties hard, but that will just drive more players away by then. They will setup NPCs to sell things again, putting an effective floor on the price of minerals the way shuttles used to, but driving out miners and industrialists. Pockets of null sec that can maintain self-sufficiency will keep fighting, throwing excess titans at each other and dropping low power Keepstars with abandon as the PCU dwindles. It will be hilarity, a Mad Max post-apocalyptic spaceship demolition derby, in the midst of tragedy.
The last gasp will be CCP putting out a fresh server so people can start anew. That will be fun for a bit, but it will kill TQ and signal the beginning of the end. CCP won’t change their ways and all the old problems will crop up, in weeks or months this time rather than years. We have seen that in every retro server. The go back in time only accelerate it.
Eventually a few old players will be sitting around chatting in local about what a great game it was. What other online game let you do even half of what EVE Online did? What a wild ride it was while it lasted. And then Sadus will remind us that WoW was the first MMO.
Or maybe it will all work out. We’ll see. Either way, CCP has a PLEX sale going, because of course they do. It is the end of the fiscal quarter and CCP has to make Pearl Abyss happy with their numbers.
The Triglavian’s only known weakness: PLEX
Because if they don’t make Pearl Abyss happy… well… buy some PLEX today or we’ll be buying skill injectors and gold ammo tomorrow.
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