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.

Two Hundred and Ten Million Skill Points

I thought I was done with these skill point progress posts.  I said at 200 million skill points that I probably had enough skills trained on my main and that I should start working up an alt because you become completely spoiled after a while by having every primary and secondary skill trained up to at least IV and usually V for any fit you want to fly.

And I stood by that for maybe seven months, turning off training on Wilhelm and running up skills on an alt I could leave behind in Delve for things like homeland defense fleets while otherwise deployed.

And then CCP added more ships to the game and my goal of being able to fly all the subcaps reared its head yet again and now I am another ten million skill points up on my main.

As I do with these posts, here is my skill point journey so far, broken out in ten million skill point increments.

• 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

And here is where I stand on skill point distribution.

Spaceship Cmd  70,558,541 (66 of 81)*
Gunnery        19,565,141 (36 of 52)*
Drones         17,036,708 (22 of 26)
Fleet Support  13,351,107 (14 of 15)*
Missiles       11,111,853 (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           3,821,020 (10 of 14)
Neural Enhance  3,810,275 (7 of 8)
Targeting       3,207,765 (8 of 8)
Rigging         1,944,630 (10 of 10)*
Planet Mgmt     1,612,315 (5 of 5)
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 210,477,704

Items with an asterisk changed from last time I checked in.

My skills broken out by levels.  Lots of level V skills now.

 Level 1 - 1
 Level 2 - 3
 Level 3 - 38
 Level 4 - 90
 Level 5 - 224

As usual, Spaceship Command got the bulk of the last ten million points, rising by about 7.5 million points since last check in.  The Triglavian menace drove quite a bit of that.  I can now fly all of the Triglavian ships from Damavik to Leshak, including the Tech II models in the middle.

A Damavik and a Vedmak

I’ve only flow the Damavik in combat so far, back when DBRB had his Triglavian roam, but I have a Leshak sitting in my hangar for structure shoot ops.

I just make a “bzzzzzzz” sound in my head when I see a Leshak burning something down

I also made sure I could fly the Monitor… not that I plan to be an FC, but just as a completionist skill.  I want to be able to fly ALL the subcaps dammit!

Likewise, the coming of the Triglavians and their new weapon systems meant that gunnery also got a boost in skill points.  I didn’t go tech II across the board there, just where I thought it might be required.  Again, Leshak is ready on that front.

In the other areas… I guess I tuned up a few skills to level V.  The only other one I remember clearly is Armor Rigging V, which I trained out of my reserve of unspent skill points, when I realized that my Guardian would go slightly faster if I had that trained.  We were on an op with Asher and listing out all the skills that might make ships go faster for the armor Ishtar doctrine we were flying and that was the only one I did not have maxed out.  I will spend skill points freely for a bit more speed.

That all got me pretty far along for the ten million skill point milestone, but I was still short.  So I trained up one silly skill.  I trained up Capital Ships V.  So, when it comes to the age old question… or at least as old as I have been writing this series of post… of how far I am from flying a titan, the answer is now “under two hours.”

It only took me a dozen years to get from about 168 days to under two hours.  That is real government project level efficiency there.

And now I am back to training up that alt.  He is nearly done with tech II logi skills.

Don’t Forget to Claim Your Skill Points

I may complain at how much skill points have been cheapened by CCP’s recent propensity towards handing them out relentlessly… they have become CCP’s hammer and every problem seems to be a nail these days… but I am not too proud to go collect them all the same.

So I wrapped up the most recent bonus week of skill points for just logging in last night.

Last handout collected… just for an alt, of course

CCP was nice enough to give us eight days in which to collect the seven rewards, so if you missed a day along the way you can still catch up.  You have until downtime (11:00 UTC) on the 24th.

If you missed two days though… well… I guess you didn’t want it bad enough.  I don’t know.  But don’t worry.  There will no doubt be more skill points handed out at some later date.  And the return of the skilling spree, where just killing somewhere between one and ten NPCs will get you some skill points, carries on.  So you can still do that.

Skill Point Bonus Time Again in New Eden

I really wish more people had picked SKINs in that survey CCP did about a year back on what sort of rewards we like.  Apparently we all put skill points at the top of our list so now it is all skill points all the time when CCP wants to give us something.

So CCP announced this morning that it is now Bonus Skill Point Week.

When in doubt hand skill points out!

The routine is the same as it has been in the past.  From today, October 16th, through October 24th, log in every day after down time (which is at 11:00 UTC) with every account to claim some free skill points.

This time around CCP did not say up front how many skill points one could accrue over the course of the week, but the usual split between Alpha and Omega clones is in place.  Basically, you get some skill points as an Alpha, but you will get more, probably a lot more, as an Omega, and the login screen will show you just how many more as an enticement to subscribe.

How to collect your skill points are covered in the announcement linked above, but I am sure you could figure it out if you just logged in to look.

This event joins the return of the Skilling Spree, which came back at the start of the month, as the events for the season.  I am sure some are holding out hope for a new Crimson Harvest, the graphically stunning event that ran last year around this time.  We shall see.

Speculation as to why CCP has decided to throw more skill points at us, what it might mean to MAU/DAU numbers, and how this might relate to the one year anniversary of the Pearl Abyss acquisition and the bonuses related to it will no doubt come up as a topic over on /r/eve.

I, for one, won’t turn up my nose at the offer of some free skill points.  The effort is low enough that I’ll log in my Omega and Alpha accounts.  I don’t think I’ll go so far as upgrading any of the latter however.

EVE Fanfest Home and the Finale of the Long Summer of Skill Points

One hates to look a gift horse in the mouth, but there are times when you feel like you’re getting too much of a good thing.

We’re all injector addicts to a certain extent it seems

And so it has been for me with CCP’s DAU/MAU boosting efforts during the Season of Skills event.  For over a month you were invited to log in every day with every character to earn some free skill points by blowing up between 1 and 10 NPCs.

10K for my alpha clone

I could see that becoming a drag if I tried to that with every character every day, so I decided to focus on a few Alpha characters that were already at their 5 million skill point limit.  The only way they could get more skill points was to subscribe, buy those special injectors (I think), or jump in and shoot some NPCs daily.

I managed to do that diligently for about a week, then started to slide.  By this week I was paraphrasing Linda Evangelista and saying, “I don’t even undock for less than 50,000 skill points.”

Sometimes the party just runs too long.

But I no longer have to think about that.  The NPC shooting portion of the Season of Skills has wrapped up and we are on to the final round of CCP asking us to log in on the promise of giving us something for free.

This weekend if the bonus skill point weekend.  On August 23 through 26 log in each day for another grant of skill points. Alpha clone accounts will get 75,000 skill points while Omega clone accounts will get 250,000 skill points if they log in all three days.

So don’t forget to log in Friday, Saturday, and Sunday in order to collect… those days being after down time in UTC, so if you’re running late you can grab the last grant if you get in before down time on Monday.

Also coming this weekend is the next stage of the EVE Invasion World Tour, with the Fanfest Home edition.  Somebody in Finland won the contest to have an EVE Fanfest event staged in their home.  No tickets are available, so we’re all going to have to watch it on the CCP Twitch channel… or watch replays on the CCP Twitch channel, since it will be kicking off in the middle of the night out here on the Pacific coast.  We’ll see how quickly CCP makes replays available.

CCP CEO Hilmar Petursson is set to present, along with Creative Director CCP Burger, about the past, present, and future of EVE Online, so I am sure we will be hearing more about the wonders of the Chaos Era and Hilmar’s depth of knowledge about the game.