When in doubt, give skill points out!
-Unofficial CCP Motto
As I noted earlier in the week, CCP is giving us more skill points as part of their summer event. The first day out of the gate I was able to claim 275,000 skill points.
First day Omega reward
And while the first day was big, there are still more skill points coming over the next six day.
More skill points coming
The question is what should I do with them?
Bitter vet problems and looking a gift horse in the mouth, I know, but here I am.
Traditionally I have hoarded free skill points, let them accumulate on my main and primary alt, as a buffer or back up in case I suddenly needed a skill one day.
Holding on to them
I am not sure why I might need a skill right away… dreams of running across a capital ship where the pilot has ejected come to mind I suppose.
And given that you can buy most skills remotely now, I guess if I ran across a Nyx sitting idle and abandoned, I could buy the Gallente carrier skill remotely (which auto-injects it as well), apply some skill points, and jump on in to make off with my new found prize. But even with the profusion of super carriers, and idle Nyx or Wyvern is still an unlikely find.
Furthermore, the skill points necessary to hop aboard one of those are pretty trivial compared to the skill points I have socked away. Gallente Carrier I, the skill I would need to make off with that imaginary Nyx, is about 2 hours of training time with my current attribute configuration. But I have easily a month worth of skill points to hand.
The problem is that I don’t have any skills that I really NEED otherwise. My main is past the 200 million skill point mark and, while I returned him to training to catch up with the Triglavian hulls, so he can keep his “fly all the subcaps” badge, he is otherwise mostly just filling in the corners, getting to level V on some skills that might marginally improve his ability should he, for example, suddenly take up flying a black ops battleship.
The only hill left to conquer, when it comes to being able to fly ships, is titans. And for titans I need Capital Ships V, which would run me more than two months to train. I could dump all my horded skill points into that and be just 35 days or so away from flying a titan… but what if I run across that theoretical abandoned Nyx? Won’t I feel silly if I’ve spent all my skill points then?
So I am unlikely to spend those skill points without need, but I also have more than enough to meet any immediate need or abandoned super carrier. Where should I put them?
I can always put them on one of the two alts I have on the same account as my main. But I have always had an odd relationship with alts on a single account.
One of those alts is actually somewhat useful when it comes to skills. After my main hit 200 million skill points I swapped training over to him, so he is around the 30 million skill point mark and can fly frigates and cruisers and at least one of the doctrine battlecruisers at this point. He is trained up enough that I got him in our corp and put him in the 1DQ1-2 Keepstar with a couple of doctrine ships so he could be available for homeland defense fleets.
The problem is that you can only have one character actively training at a time, and when the choice is between my maintaining the versatility of my main in a world of the ever changing meta that can see flavor of the month doctrines come and go before I can buy the appropriate ship (or, more commonly, just after I buy the appropriate ship), or work on training up an alt who is about 170 million skill points behind… well, most of the time it is easier to just jump clone (or death clone) myself to where a fleet is happening and be done with it.
This is less of a problem on my primary alt account. There my primary alt clocks in at close to 150 million skill points and can fly most sub-caps, but hasn’t wasted time with areas like boosting or marauders or black ops battleships, areas I pursued with my main and then never used. I also have a secondary alt there who has about 40 million skill points and who acts as my high sec ferry pilot.
She… my only female character in EVE Online… can fly most of the subcap hulls, but not active a lot of the modules, so buys and fits ships in Jita, then flies them out to an NPC station near wherever we are deployed to contract them to my main or primary alt, who then pick up the ship.
Between the two of them I can find a use for the extra skill points… or I could, if I didn’t feel the need to hoard them obsessively. This is a personal failing. I am one of those people who gets a special potion or something in a game and then never uses it because I might REALLY need it at some later date. My bank in several MMORPGs have such items, kept until I got so far past when they might actually be useful that I just put them away and forgot about them.
So of all of the gifts we’re going to get over the week of free skill points, the ones I will use immediately are the cerebral accelerators. Those actually speed up your current training queue, and I have long training queues on every character. And I won’t even have to worry about which character to use them with, since only one character at a time can be training. (Unless you buy the multi-character training thing, which I did not.)
All of which is a lot of tsuris over what is probably a non-issue for most EVE Online players. But I accidentally let the post I had planned for today go live a day early, so to fill the empty day you get to hear about my skill point angst and how I over think these things.
I am usually much better when CCP gives us SKINs. But if they just GIVE us SKINs, then we won’t buy SKINs.
So what do you do with your free skill points? Do you save them like I do? Spend them on things already in your queue? Find some special skill you might otherwise ignore on which to lavish some skill point attention?
