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.