Seventy Million Skill Points and Out

I came back to EVE Online for Incarna, to see if there would be anything new that would bring me back into the game.  And, in my usual method, I picked the three month subscription.  The would have given me plenty of time to explore the Incarna expansion, had it held anything for me.

Instead, it held mostly disappointment.  And drama.  That took a while to work through.

Which meant that my subscription time has been spent doing what a lot of EVE subscriptions do, training skills.  There was enough time for me to hit another skill point milestone.  So, as I did at the 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, and 60 million skill point mark, here is where I stand at 70 million skill points.

Spaceship Command: 18,084,237*
 Gunnery:           8,358,825*
 Science:           6,808,636*
 Missiles:          6,620,426*
 Engineering:       6,583,849
 Drones:            6,455,156*
 Industry:          3,539,500*
 Electronics:       3,117,673*
 Trade:             3,271,765
 Leadership:        2,332,334*
 Navigation:        1,777,805
 Mechanic:          1,426,568
 Corp Management:   1,108,784
 Social:            1,015,932
 Subsystems:          151,765
 Total:           ~70,000,000

Asterisks indicate areas that changed since the last post.

Spaceship Command, always at the top of the skill point chart, surged forward and nearly double due to my skilling up to fly ships from other factions… mostly so I could take screen shots of them for EVE Online Pictures.

The increases in the skills listed above actually add up to more than 10 million skill points.  Spaceship Command alone went up nearly 9 million.

Since my last milestone at 60 million, the learning skills got pulled from the game, which freed up 4.8 million skill points for me to reallocate back in December 2010.

That change is also why my total known skills went from 209 to 197.

Skill level distribution now looks like this:

 Level 1:  1 skill
 Level 2: 30 skills
 Level 3: 28 skills
 Level 4: 52 skills
 Level 5: 86 skills

And, that one key measurement, how many days of training would it take me to fly a Caldari Titan, went UP this time around, by a little over a day.  I am now over 69 days away from the basic flying skill, almost all of which would be tied up in learning Capital Ships I through V.  I am not sure why the timeline went up since I last checked. It probably relates to how I set my attributes after the removal of learning skills.

But now my subscription is coming to its end.  In a little over a week, my account will lapse.

I have explored most of what I wanted to in EVE.  Potshot and I never did get that space station built in wormhole space, w-space being pretty well camped these days, and I never once poked my nose into a 0.0 system, but such is life.  By the time I was done in empire space, I did not want the commitment that 0.0 requires.

And I suppose this casts the future of EVE Online Pictures into doubt.  I have enough screen shots to get through the rest of the year at the current rate of two pictures posted a week, but after that I might have to put that site on hiatus.

The End of Learning Skills in New Eden

CCP Greyscale posted today that all learning skills will be removed from EVE Online shortly.

The skill books will be off the market by tomorrow this time and the skills themselves will be removed when they are ready, which sounds like between now and Christmas.

On the down side, I spent some time and effort a long while back training up learning skills to speed up other training.  At my last marker, I had 4,805,803 skill points in learning.  Not an inconsiderable percentage of my 60 million skill points.

On the bright side, players will be getting something to compensate for the loss of the skills.  From the post:

• All skillpoints invested in learning skills will be reimbursed, including all the fiddly corner cases. If you have 2,012,692 SP in learning, you will find yourself down those skills, but with 2,012,692 skillpoints to redistribute.
• All skillbooks not currently injected into people’s heads will be reimbursed at the old NPC sell price. The money will go to whichever character or corporation owns the container that the skillbooks are in. For example, things in cans you’ve anchored for yourself will be reimbursed to you, things in corporate hangar arrays or the “deliveries” bin will be reimbursed to the owning corporation.
• This will also involve cancelling any and all market orders containing these skills. Contracts containing learning skills will have those skillbooks substituted for copies of the Pax Amarria.
• All new and existing characters will have an extra 12 base points (ie, non-remappable) in each attribute.
• The 100% training speed bonus up to 1.6m SP will no longer be available. People partway through this bonus will lose the remaining bonus amount. They will of course gain a huge attribute bonus to make up for it.
• Miscellaneous other cleanup tasks will be performed that are not very interesting, details available on request.

Which means, if nothing else, that I should be able to continue on training at my current rate, plus I will have that 4.8 million skill points to invest in other skills.

More details about what is happening are in the post.

As to the “why” of it, all I could get out of it was that people don’t like learning skills to help learn skills.