Quote of the Day – But We Did It Anyway

We definitely don’t want to sell skill points

-CCP Rattati, EVE Online Director of Product, OZ_eve interview

I don’t even have the energy to care about the actual selling of skill points now.  That ship sailed last year. I’ve accepted it as the new reality.  I just wish CCP would get their messaging in line with that reality.

On Monday CCP Rattati who, among other things, has been driving the economic starvation plan in EVE Online, did this interview on Twitch, which was then posted up on YouTube for your watching pleasure. (And now there is a transcript.)

He talks about the New Eden economy for about the first ~40 minutes, then the discussion moves to monetization.  You can find that quote at the top of the post at the 49 minute mark.

The interview happened on Monday, the video went up on YouTube on Tuesday, and then on Wednesday CCP literally started straight up selling skill points.

Personal Offer!

This is the sort of self-defeating corporate bullshit that just drives me crazy.  He is the Director of Product, did he not know that this was happening the same week he was saying that?  The usual paths are that the person is lying, stupid, or believes their audience is stupid, and I can’t really pin down which this is.

Now, you’ll want to talk about context, and you can justifiably point out that this was part of a discussion about the Expert Systems feature, the “rent a skill” plan announced last week.  As part of that he said that CCP had ruled out the idea of selling skill points to new players, preferring to rent them temporary skill increases… because new players won’t understand things like skill injectors or something.  Somehow giving them skills then taking them away will be more clear.

I remain unconvinced that this will somehow be better or make EVE Online more comprehensible to new players, but the details are still vague, so final judgement has yet to land.

But, even in that context, his statement not once but twice that they do not want to sell skill points seems pretty strong, as though it would apply outside the justification for renting skills.

He was also very firm a few minutes earlier that Pearl Abyss was in no way pushing CCP to sell skill points.  In fact, he was quite adamant that PA has taken a very hands off approach to EVE Online and that they have given no direction or advice on monetization, which seems to torpedo the idea earlier in the week that the whole Expert Systems thing was handed down by them, and based on their experience as a way to monetize the Asian market.  CCP Rattati said that this was all very much a home grown, Icelandic idea.

Then again, he also said CCP doesn’t want to sell skill points in the same week that the company did just that, so one might be tempted to point out that he has a credibility problem.

Anyway, if you want to hear how everything is totally going to plan with the economic starvation and resource redistribution plan and the rationalization of the rent a skill idea, this video will help you along.  I will say that the host does push back, gently at times, on some of the statements, so it isn’t a free run statement by the company, but CCP Rattati remained firm on his own positions.

I hope this will be my last post related to selling skill points for a while, but CCP will be CCP.

Related:

• The Nosy Gamer – Slow Down the Monetization Soap Opera Please
• INN – Transcript of CCP Rattati Interview

CCP Now Just Baby Steps from Selling EVE Online Skill Points Directly

I woke up this morning to find an email from CCP offering to sell me 1,620,000 skill points for the low, low price of $43.99.

Personal Offer!

The body of the email said:

Greetings Wilhelm Arcturus,

Rise like a phoenix and make a triumphant return to New Eden with the Skill Point Resurgence offer! Until 17. May, you can get 1,620,000 Skill Points for $43.99 to catch up with all the training time you have missed. Claim your offer today in the EVE Store.

And it assured me that this offer was ONLY FOR ME.

After taking a peek over at Reddit… and confirming that it appeared to be available on all of my accounts… I might be led to suggest that this offer was not that personal at all.  It seems to throw itself at you if you just log into the EVE Online web store.

Of course, this new turn will no doubt set off a fire storm in some quarters of the fan base, especially in light of the Expert Systems announcement from last week, which already has them stirred up.  Long time EVE Online fan/player Manic Velocity went so far as to make this video about milking the player base at the expense of the game’s integrity last week.

I wonder how he feels today?

I am less concerned.  Or maybe “concerned” isn’t even the right word any more.

As I wrote in a previous post, I’ve already made my peace with the idea that CCP is going to straight up sell skill points in their online store at some point.  Past statements from the company promising not to generate skill points out of thin air to sell are distant memories.  Corporations are not people, they are not… and cannot… be your friends, and their promises are meaningless.

So I am writing this just to take note of how far along they have come.  It is just another step in the journey.  We went from skill injectors to skill point give aways for compensation to alpha clone skill injectors to skill points in starter packs to skill points in packs in general and now to skill points sold directly under the guise of a special, personal offer… that is available to anybody who logs in… in just five years.

We are almost there now, just millimeters from skill point packs being a regular item in the web store.  If I were making predictions, I would guess that we’ll see these skill point packs before the end of Q2 2021.  That the “personal” offer expires on May 17th might be a tell as to when the pretense will be removed and it will be generally available.

And that will be it, case closed.  Skill points for sale in the store all the time.

Of course, there are still things about this offer that rankle or raise questions.

• Why 1,620,000 skill points?

I suspect that if I looked I would find that specific number of skill points adds up to exactly some specific skill or set of skills in game.  I just can’t be bothered.

• Why the alleged marked down price in the offer?

That seems dumb unless, of course, the direct sale of skill points is closer than I predicted above.  Maybe this is the “special” intro price for something that will now be in the store.  There certainly seemed to be some legal questions about how you can have a marked down price for something that is otherwise not available for sale.  Of course, if the plan was to make it generally available all along, then no problem.

• What does this mean for Expert Systems?

I wrote about Expert Systems just yesterday, CCP’s plan to rent you skills, which seemed silly to me… even in light of Asian market practices… in a game where you can buy PLEX to buy ISK to buy skill injectors to get the skill points for keeps.  And now you can just buy skill points.  Seems odd.

• Is there a timing aspect to this offer?

Suspicious minds will note that we’re now in the final month of Q1 2021, so seeing CCP make this final move into direct sales of skill points feels like it could be something to juice sales a bit… because we know people will buy these skill points… in order to make their quarterly sales goals.  If that were true… and we do not know that it is… it would imply that subscribers, sales, or player retention is not going as well as Hilmar’s rosy statements about 1.3 million brand new players trying the game in 2020 might lead you to suspect.

Anyway, the writing was already on the wall, we’re just finally arriving at our predetermined destination.

So it goes.

Two Hundred and Thirty Million Skill Points

Back once more for a meaningless skill point milestone, this one being more meaningless than most for reasons I will get to further down the page.  But first, a review of the story so far, my skill point trip from starting to play EVE Online back in 2006 up to today.

• Start Playing EVE Online – August 2006
• Ten million – November 2007
• Twenty million – June 2008
• Thirty million – January 2009
• Forty million – August 2009
• Fifty million – March 2010
• Sixty million – November 2010
• Seventy million – August 2011
• Eighty million – June 2012
• Ninety million – December 2012
• One Hundred million – rolled right past with the battle cruiser split
• One Hundred and Ten million – September 2013
• One Hundred and Twenty million – April 2014
• One Hundred and Thirty million – October 2014
• One Hundred and Forty million – May 2015
• One Hundred and Fifty million – December 2015
• One Hundred and Sixty million – July 2016
• One Hundred and Seventy million – January 2017
• One Hundred and Eighty million – August 2017
• One Hundred and Ninety million – February 2018
• Two Hundred million – August 2018
• Two Hundred and Ten million – November 2019
• Two Hundred and Twenty million – September 2020

So here, in the back half of January 2021 I have crossed the 230 million skill point mark, with the points broken out in the following categories.

Spaceship Cmd     76,525,882 (69 of 85)*
Gunnery           25,214,747 (47 of 63)*
Drones            17,432,221 (22 of 27)*
Fleet Support     15,872,000 (14 of 15)*
Missiles          11,954,833 (22 of 26)
Navigation        11,346,275 (13 of 13)*
Engineering        8,939,855 (15 of 15)
Electronic Sys     8,159,689 (15 of 15)
Scanning           7,168,000 (7 of 7)
Armor              6,131,137 (13 of 13)
Shields            6,074,039 (12 of 13)
Science            5,714,282 (21 of 39)
Resc Processing    4,756,183 (22 of 37)
Subsystems         4,096,000 (16 of 16)
Trade              3,994,040 (11 of 14)
Neural Enhance     3,810,275 (7 of 8)
Planet Mgmt        3,298,275 (5 of 5)*
Targeting          3,207,765 (8 of 8)
Rigging            2,576,865 (10 of 10)
Structure Mgmt     1,446,824 (6 of 6)
Production         1,157,986 (5 of 12)
Social             1,130,040 (5 of 9)
Corp Mgmt             24,000 (2 of 5)

Total            ~230,031,984

As has become the norm for these posts, the categories that saw an increase in skill points are marked with an asterisk.

As usual, Spaceship Command saw some increase.  This time around it was largely due to getting a Ninazu force auxiliary from my Reaver’s secret Santa.  I had Minmatar and Amarr carrier trained up already, but now I can add Gallente carrier to the list.  I suppose I should train Caldari carrier just to round that out, but I don’t really want to spend the ISK on the skill.

Gunnery also saw a boost as I wrapped up training all of the EDENCOM zappy weapons skills.  I’ve never flown one of the EDENCOM ships, but if the opportunity arises, I am ready.

Drones got some attention as well, largely due to the introduction of tech II salvage drones.  Dunk Dinkle spent years agitating for them, I figured I could put them in the queue and train the skill.

Navigation saw a bump due to my training up Jump Fuel Conservation V.  Jump fuel prices have gone up quite a bit with the CCP economic starvation plan and the increase in consumption due to the war.  While I don’t jump capitals all that often, it seemed like a reasonable investment and I did not have anything more critical in my queue at the time.

Then there was Planetary Management, where I trained up Planetary Consolidation to V so I could have sixth colony to neglect.  Actually, with demand and prices rising, I have actually been minding my colonies a bit more regularly.  Putting them on a seven day cycle made this a bit easier.

Finally, there is fleet support.  I saved this for last because this is the big reason for why I hit this milestone a bit sooner than expected.  Generally there are intervals greater than six months between these, often as much as a year, depending on what I am training or if I hand off to an alt.  But this time the gap between posts was a mere four month.

This was because, during the fight over the armor timer at the Keepstar in M2-XFE, I opted to be a booster for one of the capital fleets.

My Damnation in the orange of another explosion

As I finally got into the fight and was able to start boosting, I noticed that I only had Fleet Command trained up to IV, so I blew more than two million of my saved up skill points to jump that up to level V.  This was an important fight and I wanted to get the maximum range out of my boosts.

I think it gave me a whole 6km extra distance on my boosts.  Not sure that was worth it.

More surprising perhaps was that I applied skill points in the middle of the fight, at 10% tidi, with commands taking 6+ minutes to respond, and it actually worked and went through.

And, while I have used save skill points on occasion, my total has generally be 99.9% skill points earned the old fashioned way.  Now that total is tainted by the free skill points that CCP gives away.  Oh well.

As for my skill totals, they now break out like this:

Level 1 -   1
Level 2 -   3
Level 3 -  34
Level 4 -  85
Level 5 - 244

That is nine more skills trained up to level V.  And, of course, I can still fly all the subcaps in the game, which is my general goal for skills.

Now, where do I go next?  I actually have a ways to go with Salvage Drones V, so I will finish that up and then do a couple levels of Salvage Drone Specialization.  We’ll see if I ever use a salvage drone, but I will be able to if the need arises.  Then it might be time to hand off training to one of my alts.  My main alt, oft neglected, could be trained up to do PI as well.  We shall see.

EVE Online Ushers in the Holidays with Winter Nexus Events Starting Today

CCP has rolled out their plans for the holidays and, sadly, the Yule Lads have been left out again this year.  But there is still plenty planned for the season with the Winter Nexus events.

The Winter Nexus event cometh

I am not quite sure what they mean by “Nexus” in all of this.  Nexus isn’t something we celebrate around these parts, but there it is.

Nexus Login Campaign

No New Eden event can happen unless there is an associated login campaign.  Starting at downtime today, which was about seven hours ago so you’re late already, and running through until downtime on January 5th 2021, there will be 13 special gifts waiting for you.  You will need to log in at least 13 days during that time frame to collect them all, as you can only claim one a day, but you have 26 days to do it.  You ought to be able to manage that.

Thirteenth night?

There is, naturally, the usual Alpha/Omega divide.  Alpha clones will get a set of gifts which include 80K skill points, while Omega clones will get 250K skill points as part of their set of gifts.  You can, as always, go Omega at any time an reap any rewards you missed.  They even include a nice button on the window for that.

Volatile Ice Storms

There will be traveling storms that will bring weather effects along with seasonally themed combat, mining, and data sites.  Sort of metaliminal storms with prized I guess.  These will appear throughout high, low, and null sec.  If you’re a wormholer and want to play I guess you’ll have to come back to normal space.

Can’t find an storm near you?  The login campaign includes Ice Storm Filaments that will whisk you off to a storm so you can savor its bounty or something.

Chilling Spree Daily Challenges

There will be holiday themed daily challenges that will have you launching snowballs and other tasks.  You can earn skill points and lore related items.

Opening Day Options

The login campaign will get you some snowballs and a festival launcher if you don’t have a pile of them from past years already… though, oddly, that isn’t the Day 1 reward.

Abyssal Proving Grounds

CCP’s attempt at arena combat will get its own events for the holidays.  The first event will be a team free-for-all where four teams of two players will do combat in Tech 1 Destroyers from 18 – 22 December. The second event will feature a 3v3 format with T1 Frigates running from 1 – 5 January

Stuff in the Store

And CCP has the Yoiul Star SKIN back in the New Eden store so you can have a holiday themed ship.  I kind of like those SKINs, but they are definitely better on bigger hulls.

Anyway, this all starts today, so you have been warned.  The December 10th Patch Notes update includes more details, as well as some information about some implants.

Also, they fixed the issue where people couldn’t set their death clone in an NPC station that otherwise did not have clone services available.  You can set Jita 4-4 as your death respawn again.  (Why didn’t Jita 4-4 get a clone bay added with the renovations?  They had budget for a freaking space elevator by not that?)

Those of us who have been around a while will remember the Yule Lads and their days in the winter sun back when CCP used to dial the holiday efforts up to 11.

Yule lads of old…

I wonder how many of the lads still work for CCP?

Addendum:  There is currently a known issue where the Nexus event sites are dropping Nightmare BPOs rather than single run BPCs.  CCP is aware of the issue and is asking players not to make a billion copies or try to sell them to other players as that will make their job of reverting all your dumb work slightly more difficult.  This will be fixed with a downtime patch.

Two Hundred and Twenty Million Skill Points

Didn’t I say I was done with these posts back at 200 million?  See how much you can trust me.

This time around the milestone sort of crept up on me by surprise.  I had diverted training on my main account to an alt for a stretch, but then a few things showed up that I wanted to train and I put the queue back on Wilhelm.  That was a ways back, but I swear that the total count was only about 218 million when I last looked.  Suddenly, yesterday, it was past 220 million and time for a post. (This does not count the ~3 million unused skill points I have waiting for some urgent need.)

My skill point history so far:

• Start Playing EVE Online – August 2006
• Ten million – November 2007
• Twenty million – June 2008
• Thirty million – January 2009
• Forty million – August 2009
• Fifty million – March 2010
• Sixty million – November 2010
• Seventy million – August 2011
• Eighty million – June 2012
• Ninety million – December 2012
• One Hundred million – rolled right past with the battle cruiser split
• One Hundred and Ten million – September 2013
• One Hundred and Twenty million – April 2014
• One Hundred and Thirty million – October 2014
• One Hundred and Forty million – May 2015
• One Hundred and Fifty million – December 2015
• One Hundred and Sixty million – July 2016
• One Hundred and Seventy million – January 2017
• One Hundred and Eighty million – August 2017
• One Hundred and Ninety million – February 2018
• Two Hundred million – August 2018
• Two Hundred and Ten million – November 2019

That is pretty much my career in New Eden.  This time around  a couple of the usual suspects saw most of the skill points.  My standings:

Spaceship Cmd   75,646,193 (68 of 85)*
Gunnery         21,207,181 (46 of 63)*
Drones          17,036,708 (22 of 26)
Fleet Support   13,351,107 (14 of 15)
Missiles        11,954,833 (22 of 26)*
Navigation       9,660,314 (13 of 13)
Engineering      8,939,855 (15 of 15)
Electronic Sys   8,159,689 (15 of 15)
Scanning         7,168,000 (7 of 7)
Armor            6,131,137 (13 of 13)
Shields          6,074,039 (12 of 13)
Science          5,714,282 (21 of 39)
Resc Processing  4,756,183 (22 of 37)
Subsystems       4,096,000 (16 of 16)
Trade            3,994,040 (11 of 14)*
Neural Enhance   3,810,275 (7 of 8)
Targeting        3,207,765 (8 of 8)
Planet Mgmt      2,983,941 (5 of 5)*
Rigging          2,576,865 (10 of 10)*
Structure Mgmt   1,446,824 (6 of 6)
Production       1,157,986 (5 of 12)
Social           1,130,040 (5 of 9)
Corp Mgmt           24,000 (2 of 5)

Total         ~220,227,747

Values that changed are marked with an asterisk.

As usual, Spaceship Command say the bulk of the skill point gain, going up by about 5 million, or half the total since the last checkup.  This started when the EDECOM ships showed up back in June and Asher suggested that we might try doing something with them in Reavers.  So I can fly them all now, and have most of them to level V.

EDENCOM Skybreaker

I have not, in fact, flown any of the EDENCOM ships.  I have not even SEEN one of them in space.  Asher said that sourcing them would be a pain, and that they were not very good in any case, so it fell off the Reavers plan.  But should that change, I am ready!  Maybe next week’s update will make them more viable.

That plan also explains the pop in the Gunnery number, since the Vorton Projector that goes with the EDECOM ships falls under the Gunnery category, as do the supplementary skills.  That ate up a good two million more of the points trained.

Missiles got a small jump, shy of a million, but I honestly cannot recall what I trained there.  Probably one of the advanced skills to boost Tech II damage.

Trade saw some training, this time for the Advanced Broker Relations skill that came in with the March update.  And Planetary Management went up when I decided it was time to earn some ISK and I thought maybe PI would be a plan.  But I am bad, I forget to check on it for weeks at a stretch, so it probably hasn’t even paid back what I have invested in it.

As for Rigging, I know exactly where that went.  Or I thought I did.  I remember putting some skill points into Armor Rigging V when I figured out it would give me just a little bit more speed when flying and armor rigged ship.  But I wrote about that last time.  So my guess is that Launcher Rigging got the points this time around, since that is the only other Rigging skill at level V.

And that covers my last ten million skill points.  My level distribution is currently:

Level 1 -   1
Level 2 -   3
Level 3 -  37
Level 4 -  89
Level 5 - 235

As for where to go next… it looks like Black Ops V is the current skill being trained, another one for Spaceship Command… and a lot more level Vs after that.  Maybe I should swap back over to my alt again.  I can fly all the subcaps on my main again, so until CCP adds some more I’m probably good.

CCP is Just Going to Keep Selling Skill Points for Cash

Just over a year ago there was some controversy and push back from the community over CCP introducing a Starter Pack that was effectively selling skill points to players, something that seemed very much against the grain of past statements from the company used to justify the introduction of skill injectors about the importance of skill points in the game coming only from training.

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.

CCP was apologetic and promised to change that (and, many months later new packs came out), but did point out that this was aimed at new players and that the starter pack could only be applied once to any account.  But it could still be purchased and applied to any account and, doing the math, spending five dollars on a million skill points seemed like a pretty good deal, so I am sure that CCP dragging its feet on removing that starter pack was in no small part influence by the fact that it was selling pretty well.

But the story so far has always included some rationalization.

Skill injectors were rationalized because the skills were all created in the game via normal training along with the fact that you could always buy characters in the bazaar.

Alpha skill injectors, daily skill point boosts for free accounts, were rationalized as they only added as many skill points as they player would have received in a day had they been subscribed, making it a mini, daily subscription.

Starter packs were rationalized as being for new players and being once per account.  Sure, you got some cheap skill points, but it wasn’t an unlimited deal.

Which brings us to today, when CCP announced their new Training Boost Bundle.

Training Boost Bundle

You get, straight up, 1.5 million skill points and an Expert Cerebral Accelerator, which gives you a +8 stat boost to speed up your training for 12.5 days (1,080,000 seconds).

The accelerator in game

I guess the rationalization here might be… um… at least these skill points aren’t as cheap as they were in the starter pack?

But it is still a deal if you simply want to straight up pay cash for skill points, especially for older characters.

My back of the envelope, rounded numbers for easy mental math, calculations are that in Jita/Perimeter you can find PLEX for about 2.6 ISK million per and Large Skill Injectors for around 725 million ISK per.

When purchased in lots of 500 PLEX is about 4 cents per unit and you need to sell about 300 to buy a Large Skill Injector, taking into account taxes.

That makes a Large Skill Injector about $12.

To get 1.5 million skill points you need to buy three injectors, which is $36.  You have to decide if the cerebral accelerator is worth the extra four bucks, though I imagine it is.

But that is only if you have a relatively unskilled character.  You get less skill points per injector the more skill points you have.  If, like me, you have characters with more than 80 million skill points, then you only get 150K skill points per injector.

That means you need to buy 10 Large Skill Injectors, which will run you about $120 in PLEX, or three times the $40 asking price.

So, for old hands, the Training Boost Bundle might not be a bad deal… though even that assumes you aren’t earning enough ISK in game to buy your injectors without having to spend any real world cash.  I’m not going to spend the money, but somebody will.

Skill points are now well and truly available for sale in unlimited quantities.  No need to go through the PLEX to ISK to injectors rigamarole, just buy the skill points directly.  It is likely cheaper and clearly easier.

Welcome to free to play, where the inevitable result is pay to win and where whales keep the game running so the cash shop needs to cater to them.

Are you going to quit?  Are you going to give up all the effort you have invested in the game over this?  Is this the step too far, the line crossed?

Probably not.  I think most people will bitch about it… /r/eve is in an uproar as expected… and then carry on.  I am not going to quit.  Hell, there is finally a war on, the game is good for me for a bit.

So what then?

I suppose we need to mark it up as a life lesson, a reminder that what companies say in a specific moment in a given context will be ignored or forgotten the moment it no longer directly serves their interest.  A company’s promise is an empty and worthless thing.

Just remember, when CCP says something to reassure you, like that it is important that skill points in the game should be earned or that asset safety is important because otherwise nobody will keep their stuff in citadels, if they are not actively lying to you in that moment, they will go back on their word the moment it suits them.

Welcome to EVE Online.  Know the risks.

CCP Quietly Starts a New Login Campaign in EVE Online

More skill points!  I am skeptical of CCP handing them out freely, but never to such an extent that I won’t log in to get mine.

When I saw the mention of a new login campaign in the patch notes I figured there would be another news post or dev blog about it.  The point of a login in campaign is to get people to log in, right?  And to further that end one might wish to advertise that treats were being given out, to thus encourage that logging in behavior.  So I was going to wait for that to hit.

But this is CCP and sometimes logic simply does not apply.  Still, free skill points… eventually… but things have otherwise changed for this campaign.

The first sign for me was a post about the new campaign over at Evehermit.  Working from home as I was, I was able to go check on this myself immediately.  I found myself with an Omega login campaign window.

Omega rewards for me…

“Oh ho!” I thought, “Maybe CCP is keeping this on the down low because only Omegas are getting something special?”  But that didn’t make a lot of sense to me.  In past campaigns one of the key elements has been to push the fact that Omegas get better rewards in the face of Alpha clone players.  When I logged in an Alpha to check, they have their own campaign screen.

Alpha rewards for our Alpha friends… and no push to go Omega? Odd!

The reward is a random drug of some sort… in EVE Online we’re pretty pro-chemical enhancement… with a short duration which gets applied to the character you redeem it to immediately, so maybe don’t redeem it until you need it I guess. (Is this a bug? We’ll see tomorrow.)

So the real appeal has to be the skill point give away.  But this time you have to be in it for the long haul to get some.  There is a bar down at the bottom of the rewards screen that fills in some when you redeem your reward.

The tool tip

However, the bar didn’t fill up very much when I grabbed my reward.  I added just 6K points to the 150K point total I would need to reach in order to cash in.

Not very far along

That is just 4% of the total.  I hope this ramps up a bit as it goes along.  There is no mention of how long this login campaign lasts, but if it is 6K a day that implies as much as a 25 day-long trip to claim those 150K skill points.

And on the Alpha front I got 2K towards a 50K total, so again the time frame could be the same.  We’ll see tomorrow.

Another Bonus Skill Point Weekend in EVE Online plus a Skill Point Event

I woke up this morning to find that CCP had declared this weekend would get you bonus skill points for logging in.

Bonus skill points are the best skill points

I am not sure why this weekend was picked.  Maybe it celebrates the new person joining the community team.  I don’t know.  But whatever.  More free skill points.  I won’t turn my nose up at that.

The event follows the usual routine.  For each of the three days after downtime you log in, claim your skill points, pick which character gets them.  Omega accounts get more skill points than Alphas.

The give away mix

Alpha accounts get 45,000 skill points if they log in all three days, while Omegas get 130,000 for their login effort.  If you are Alpha and want all those skill points, there is a handy button to click to upgrade to an Omega subscription.

And if that isn’t enough free skill points for you, there is always the new variation on the Skilling Spree event going on, Skilling is Just a Means of Communication.

A tribute to a classic Permaband song

In this the daily task of blowing up NPCs has been changed, so now you get skill points for blowing up other players.

10K skill points for getting top damage on a kill mail

This event runs through to downtime on April 16, 2020.

So there are skill points to be had in New Eden.

Capsuleer Fortitude Reward

CCP is giving out some more free skill points.  This time they are throwing us another pile in compensation for the outages that were caused by the DDoS attacks earlier this month.

Reward Award

If you log in between now and downtime on March 9, 2020 you will be able to claim those free skill points.  If you are running an Alpha clone you get 100,000, while if you are an Omega subscriber you get that plus 250,000 more, for a total of 350,000 skill points.

Always a class divide

Since this is coming through the login reward interface, if you’re an Alpha clone but are just dying to get those extra 250K skill points, you can subscribe and claim them.  It doesn’t matter if you were an Alpha during the outage, you just have to go Omega before time runs out on the offer.

Something in the back of my brain says I should be angry about CCP selling skill points this way.  If you’re a high skill point salt that is one and two-thirds of a large skill injector for just $14.99, or 500 PLEX.  Probably not a great price, but a price none the less.  And who cares anyway?  We’ve long since crossed that bridge and burned it behind us.

So don’t forget to log in and grab the free skill points.  I know I will drag out every account, because who knows when I might need it some day.

New Packs in New Eden Still Selling Skill Points

Just about seven months ago a controversy got stirred up about a new Starter Pack for EVE Online because it was selling one million skill points for the low, low price of five dollars.

The reasonably priced packs… we’re talking about the one on the left

This seemed very much against the grain of a statement from CCP in a past dev blog about the nature of skill points in the game:

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.

Here were packs with a million skill points, two skill injectors worth, being generated out of thin air and sold for cash.

CCP was quick to point out that players could only buy the starter pack once per account, though the math of getting a million skill points for five dollars even once was pretty compelling.  As I calculated out, for a veteran player who was only getting 150K skill points out an injector, this was like getting seven large skill injectors for five bucks.  An unbeatable deal, and there was even a bit of a rush to go buy the things due to that value.

The rush was also due to CCP responding to protests the next day in a dev blog in which they promised to do something about the starter pack.

And then they did nothing for seven months.  I was going to put up a post every month that the starter pack was still available, but I only did that once.  The crowd had moved on… there was the Blackout and the Drifter attacks and the cyno nerfs hitting after that, driving players out of space much more effectively than just breaking their word again about selling skill points.

Time passed.

Earlier today CCP posted an announcement about new “value” packs for capsuleers and I am happy to announce that you can no longer have access to a one-time straight up buy of one million skill points for five dollars.

Instead, you now have access to a one-time straight up buy of 250K skill points for ten dollars.  Or twenty-three dollars.  Or fifty dollars.  Or ninety dollars.

Admittedly, a much less appealing deal.  I don’t think people will be rushing out to grab that in the numbers that ran after the starter pack seven months ago.

But yes, the new range of “value” packs, which come in Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum levels, all include 250K skill points.

The January 2020 Value Pack Selection

If you are only interested in skill points… and frankly aside from PLEX or Omega time there is little else of value in these packs… the best deal is the ten dollar Bronze Pack.

The Bronze Happy Meal

60 PLEX won’t buy you much in game, though I suppose you can just sell it for ISK.

Oddly, if you are looking for value for money, the more expensive packages might be better deals, depending on what you want out of them.

The four packs are:

• Bronze – $9.99
  • 60 PLEX (~$2.50)
  • Cosmetic outfit
  • 4 frigate SKINs
  • 250K SP
• Silver – $22.99
  • 30 Days of Omega ($15)
  • 110 PLEX ($5)
  • 4 destroyer SKINs
  • 250K SP
• Gold – $49.99
  • 60 Days of Omega ($30)
  • 500 PLEX ($15 or $20)
  • Vedmak SKIN
  • 250K SP
• Platinum – $89.99
  • 90 Days of Omega ($45)
  • 1500 PLEX ($45)
  • Drekavec SKIN
  • 250K SP

The only things of value, in my opinion, are skill points, Omega time, and PLEX, and the latter two are the items you can buy, and likely do, buy from CCP.  So you can look at the amount of PLEX and Omega time you get as an off-set to the price paid for the pack.

For example, with the Bronze pack 60 PLEX is about two fifty… you cannot buy it in increments that small… so the offset price of the pack is about $7.49 for that 250K of skill points.

In the Silver pack we get into Omega time and PLEX increments we can work with.  We’ll give Omega time its highest value, $15 a month, and you can get 110 PLEX for five dollars, so that gives you $20 of value in the Silver pack, meaning you’re paying about three bucks for the 250K SP.

With the Gold pack things start to get interesting.  60 days of Omega is $30, and 500 PLEX is worth a month of game time, so another $15.  But to buy 500 PLEX costs $20, so you could value it that way as well.  So the offset is $45 to $50, making the 250K SP somewhere between $5 and the few cents I glossed over to get even numbers.

Finally, the Platinum pack gets you 90 days of Omega for a $45 value and 1500 PLEX, which in game time is another $45, meaning that you can get something close to $90 of value out of a $90 purchase and have your 250K skill points on top of that.

The thing is, you can only do it once.  All of the new packs are one per account.

That assumes you want to do it at all.  I am not convinced.  I don’t need the 250K of skill points… CCP just gave me that many last weekend for just logging in… I am not burning for some PLEX and I’ll buy my Omega time the old fashioned way I think.

So we went from a five dollar starter pack that was a really attractive deal that caused a good amount of outrage to a set of less attractive deals… that still have the stigma of selling skill points.

I don’t know.  I get that CCP needs to make money and these “value” packs are a way to boost income and that, due to the nature of the game itself, they walk a fine line in trying to offer something of value versus breaking the game and outraging the core fan base.  And skill points are a bit of a hot button issue for many players.  But what else is CCP going to throw in there?  Ships?  Already trained skills? (This certificate good for Amarr cruiser IV)  Even more cosmetics?

Meanwhile, there is that Best SKINs of 2019 pack for fifty dollars that contains nothing like any of what I would consider the best SKINs, for ships I don’t fly, all priced well beyond a point I would pay.  For fifty dollars straight up cash I want something like the whole Purity of the Throne Amarr SKIN sub-cap collection or all of the Caldari Ghostbird sub-cap SKINs.  But that might just be me.

Anyway, people are disappointed that CCP is still selling skill points, but the outrage seems weaker this time.  Either this isn’t as bad or we’re all just worn still out after a summer of outrage.  Or both.