Ten years ago today, on Mardi Gras 2016, we got the YC 118.2 update… CCP was in a mood about naming updates during that era and kept changing it up… and with it came skill extractors and skill injectors. For just 1,000 Aurum you could buy an extractor that allowed you to yoink 500,000 skill points out of your character, turning it into a skill injector that you could sell on the open market.
Skill Extractors – Base Price
Your first question here in 2026 is likely something along the lines of “What the fuck is an Aurum?” and all I can say is that the cash shop was different back then, before CCP made PLEX the sole RMT currency.
Anyway, CCP would sell extractors for real world cash as well.
I can remember it for you retail…
If I were to make a list of the top five most controversial things CCP has added to/done to EVE Online… and you had best bet I have that post sitting in my drafts folder waiting for a day when I am bored and looking for an argument… then skill extractors/injectors would absolutely make the list.
The argument for them, as made by CCP, is that a lot of newer players felt behind because the mechanics for acquiring skill points meant that they could never “catch up” to veterans who had been around since launch.
And I can confirm that I had heard that argument before, often put out there as a criticism of the game by people who only wanted to throw mud at it but who never had any interest in actually playing.
It was a classic “won’t somebody think of the children!” play.
But the accept that CCP really believed that you would have to assume that they had never heard of Malcanis’ Law. Just as a reminder, here is its original rendering:
Whenever a mechanics change is proposed on behalf of ‘new players’, that change is always to the overwhelming advantage of richer, older players.
Yeah, that one. And putting skill points on the market meant that very rich players immediately benefited. Within days soon to be banned RMT casino operator Iron Bank had raided the market and injected himself with enough skill points to get all of the then available skills in the game to level V.
Also showing off with that wallet balance
Just for comparison, after 19 years of playing EVE Online I had a combined total of 409 million skill points earlier this year. Ten years ago I was closer to 180 million skill points.
So there is Iron Bank waving his e-peen at us, with max skill points, 100 trillion in RMT ISK, and clone grade alpha… alpha clones were something different back then, don’t get me started on that… because he was never going to undock and go into combat. That is Malcanis being proven right yet again.
Because in Jita, skill extractors were going for 300 million ISK on the market while full injectors were going for 650 million ISK. In 2016 those were not ISK amounts that new players had rattling around in their hangars.
The only way a new player could get their hands on that would be to either buy PLEX and sell it on the market for ISK… the obvious “this is all just a CCP cash grab” route… or to go to the illicit RMT sites to whom people like Iron Bank were selling their again soon to be banned casino ISK.
Casinos were such an obvious pipeline to illicit RMT, and that CCP let them run as long as they did… which is to say just long enough for that illicit ISK to fund the Casino War against Goons… makes one question either the depth of their intelligence or their claimed impartiality. Or both. It could be both.
But that is another tale. Back to injectors.
So new players, while no doubt buying ISK in some way to get injectors, were not the primary beneficiary of this move in any way. It was the old hands with lots of ISK and a yen to get another titan alt boosted up, something that used to take more than a year via the old skill queue method.
Now you could get a titan alt in a matter of hours… possibly minutes… in Jita.
Yes, CCP did try to but up a barrier for the rich by reducing the amount of skill points you got as you accumulated more skill points.
- < 5 million total skillpoints = 500,000 skillpoints per injector
- 5 million – 50 million total skillpoints = 400,000 skillpoints per injector
- 50 million – 80 million total skillpoints = 300,000 skillpoints per injector
- 80 million skillpoints = 150k skillpoints per injector
And that certainly inhibited somebody like me, a middle class pilot in New Eden, no longer poor but nowhere close to space rich. But this was no barrier to the actual space wealthy.
Add in the soon to arrive Rorqual mining upgrade… remember, people were asking for the Rorqual to have a role, not to turn it into an infinite null sec money cheat… and there were cheap and abundant mineral to build all the supers and titans that those freshly injected characters.
You want capital proliferation? Because that is how you get capital proliferation.
CCP eventually started bitching and moaning like the players somehow tricked them and pulled up the ladder so no new players could afford to get a titan… and for quite a stretch nobody would undock a capital because the CCP Rattati economic strangulation plan wasn’t just driving down player numbers, it was making capitals too expensive to replace.
And all of that would be controversy enough for a CCP feature. That would get it into my top 5 list. CCP being dumb in a game breaking, blew up in their face sort of way… well, blew up in game, I am sure it made them a lot of money, which was the goal in the first place. It also spawned a whole skill point farming industry which doubled as a CSM election vote selling platform, because why not make some additional ISK on all those subscribed characters?
So top 5 controversial, but a contender for the top spot? Not yet!
No, the icing on the cake for all of this was from the Skill Trading in New Eden dev blog, in which CCP Rise wrote:
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 emphasis is from the dev blog. That is what CCP chose to highlight. That wasn’t me.
And by now you see where I am going with this, right? You know what the game is like now? You know you can go to the web store right this minute and buy skill points for cash. Look, this is there right this minute.
Psst… wanna buy some SP?
And here it would be very easy to get into my usual “corporations are never your friend” routine, or go into how every corporate promise has an expiration date, that being the moment it is mildly inconvenient for them to maintain the illusion that they had any intention of honoring their statements in the long term.
Or I could go into how anybody paying attention called this as the eventual state, that CCP was ALWAYS going to end up just straight up selling skill points directly to players for real world money and how the fan boys and the CCP stans who defended the company at every step to this point… and it did go drip by drip… until we reached today where not only is selling skill points normal, but CCP just hands them out in game like the cool house on the street at Halloween.
Is there a login event? Have some skill points! Did two daily AIR tasks? Take some skill points! Managed to do the AIR task a dozen times in the same month? Well, that is a lot of skill points for you! Watched a twitch stream? Well, maybe it will be some skill points!
The game and the relationship with skill points for both the company and the players has changed dramatically over the course of a decade. Ten years and a day ago everybody in game only had the skill points they trained up. Now there is no purity. Nobody is saying “no” to CCP handing out skill points.
Those would both be viable ways to close this out, either “CCP lied again” or “We told you so!”
But I am going to go even deeper and and place my transition into a true bitter vet on one event in particular.
Any regular reader should not be surprised to learn that I am not a fan of CCP Rattati’s tenure driving. There are certainly many reasons not to admire him and the job he has done at the helm of EVE Online since the departure of CCP Seagull.
But much my own distaste for his style goes back five years, to the point when CCP finally just went ahead and started nakedly selling skill points for cash, when the last bit of pretense of caring about their statement from 2016 fell by the wayside. Because the very week that happened, CCP Rattati was on a podcast with TheOz and said this:
We definitely don’t want to sell skill points
-CCP Rattati, EVE Online Director of Product, OZ_eve interview
On Monday he did the interview. On Tuesday it got posted. And on Wednesday, CCP started selling skill points.
I can choose to believe that the director of product was completely unaware that this was going to happen, that he was either incompetent at his job or wasn’t really in the role he said he was, or that he was a lying liar who lied and said that just because that was what he thought The Oz or the audience wanted to hear.
And it wasn’t even in service of anything really. One could argue that the ship had sailed by that point, that CCP had already done us dirty and started straight up selling skill points nearly nine months earlier, in which case that statement looks even dumber.
But it doesn’t really matter. None of the choices reflect well on him or speak positively towards his running the game.
That, however, was my introduction to the veracity and character of CCP Rattati, the person still at the helm of EVE Online. I believe he even got a promotion since then, no doubt for his fine work on the New Eden economy.
That doesn’t mean he is a bad person, that he cheats at cards, kicks puppies, chews with his mouth open, or ends sentences with a preposition. I’ve known plenty of very nice people who ended up in leadership positions and who maybe shouldn’t have been there. I’d certainly say that about myself.
And, of course, we’re just talking about a video game. It is even a video game that serves an audience that arguably thrives on overcoming adversity. If you don’t enjoy that, you’ve probably quit already.
One of the finer aspects of being in the Imperium is that it has an organizational philosophy of taking the dumb stuff that CCP does and trying to turn it to our advantage. The Imperium is at its best when we’re down, its finest hour was arguably at the Siege of 1DQ when we were backed into one constellation and had two thirds of null sec camped on our doorstep with us rising to fight them every hour of every day. It was one of my favorite times in the game. Adversity can bring out the best in people… though not in everybody.
But that doesn’t mean I enjoy seeing CCP make objectively bad decisions. I don’t want to fight the mechanics.
This last decade of CCP changes has turned me from a fairly optimistic player to a card carrying bitter vet when it comes to what the company has planned and what they favor. That is the lesson of this debacle; how to turn your base into skeptics who distrust your word.
So welcome to the ten year anniversary of the real start of that process!
Now I am thinking about getting back to that top five list of most controversial changes to EVE Online. I have four 100% shoe-in moments for the top of the list… if you can’t guess at least three of them then do you even lift bro… and then probably a multi-way tie for fifth place. Or maybe a few honorable mentions. Feel free to throw out in the comments what should be on a list of the most controversial things CCP has done in EVE Online. If nothing else, I’d like to see if I am missing any possibilities.
Related:
- CCP Dev Blog – Skill Trading in New Eden
- CCP Dev Blog – Skill Trading Launch and Offers on AUR, Subscriptions and Plex
The Ancient Gaming Noob 