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.

The Steam Summer Sale 2019 Winds Down

When this post loads, the 2019 Steam Summer Sale will be officially over, being set to finish at 17:00 UTC today.

The Steam Grand Prix

I was incorrect in my post announcing the sale back when it started.  I expected it to consist of a lot of the usual things.  Valve has been pretty consistent over the last few years with the tasks related to events which allow those interested to collect cards or levels or whatever.

This time around they decided to try something new.  And, as with many new things, it wasn’t without its problems.

The metaphor of the sale was a race, and you got to select which team to join.  Each team had an animal mascot.  They were tortise, hare, pig, cockatiel, and corgi.

Since people could select on their own, most of the population chose the cutest animal on the internet, the corgi, and so every day when I logged in the race looked something like this:

One of the least lopsided days

Corgi did not win every day.  Tortoise won a single day, and hare won twice, but otherwise it was Corgi on top for 9 out of the 12 days of the race.

Those on the winning team had a chance to win something from their wishlist.  There was some confusion as to how that would happen and, fearing they might be awarded something inexpensive, people began purging their wishlists of cheap indie games.  Since devs get stats on that, it was like an indie game apocalypse I gather.

Valve had to quickly tell people how to designate which game you would win, but I am pretty sure the damage was done by that point.

PSA! You don't need to remove games from your Steam wishlist in order to win your Top Wishlisted Game during the Steam Summer Sale – just move your favorite game to the top of your wishlist and you're good to go!

2019 Steam Summer Sale: https://t.co/4TuWeBVo1O pic.twitter.com/hNrMnTSzcY

— Steam (@steam_games) June 27, 2019

As I mentioned in the month in review post, even after I knew what the deal was I decided purging my wishlist was a good plan.

There was also a hole in the system early where there was no cap on the number of points you could apply from qualified games from which you had earned achievements that allowed people to go crazy with points, buying badges, the discount, and boosting their Steam level into the hundreds.

Oh well.  I am sure Valve learned something along the way.  And I suspect that most Steam users ignored the whole thing.  My sample size for that assertion is pretty small… my daughter and a half dozen of her friends… but I was the only one paying any attention to that aspect of the event.

On the sale side of things however, my daughter did come to me for two titles.

The first was Rust, which had been on my own wishlist before the purge hit.

She and her boyfriend play that together.  How sweet.

However, her big game for the event was Megaquarium, which is a “run your own aquarium attraction” simulator.

She ended up not having to work over the weekend and burned through the campaign mode. I was looking over her shoulder when she added the whale shark to her exhibit, the crown jewel in the game.  I think she is one achievement away from being complete on that front, and you have to do that one in sandbox mode according to her.

This was her sort of game and she gives in a big thumbs up.

I only purchased one title during the sale, but it was one I have been thinking about for quite a while.  I now own Grand Theft Auto V.

Unlike my daughter’s choices, I was struggling a bit to even get started in GTAV.  This was primarily because it seemed to be all about having a gamepad controller to play it and seemed to be trying to hide keyboard commands from me.

Not that the basic keyboard commands were completely opaque.  It is the usual mouse and WASD for movement and such.  But about 10 seconds into the game somebody is yelling at me to use my phone to detonate an explosive, but there was nothing to indicate how I should do that.  Where in a normal tutorial a game might tell me which key to use, I had to dig into the menu, find where the commands were hidden, and scroll through the list to find the right key.

Fortunately, as a single player game, all the NPCs were able to wait, if not patiently.

I think I need a long stretch of time on the weekend to get into that.

Anyway, another sale passes and another one will hove into view a few months down the line.  It is practically part of the circle of life now.

Return to Azeroth – Summer 2018 Edition

Coming and going from the game is pretty much the norm in my own personal history of Azeroth.  It was, in its way, a precedent started when I first tried the game back in early 2005.  I played a bit then went away for about a year.  Then I came back with our EverQuest II guild and it has practically been a revolving door since then.

There have, over the years been stretches, long and short, away from WoW.  Sometimes I and some friends would pop off for another game for a bit, as we did with Lord of the Rings Online or Warhammer Online.  Sometimes the game drove me out, as during the Cataclysm and Warlords of Draenor eras.

But somehow I always end up wandering back in to pick up with whatever new content Blizzard has to offer.  While I bitch about how things have changed at times, WoW does seem to be a soft landing to return to when compared to other MMORPGs.  I have been back to LOTRO and EverQuest II a few times, but the effort required to become basically knowledgeable as to what you’re doing is so steep and has changed so much over the years that it is very difficult to shake off the feeling of being completely lost unless I just start a fresh character and begin again from square one.

Not that such a venture isn’t fun.  I’ve probably run levels 1-40 or so in LOTRO more than a dozen times and have quite enjoyed it.  But mucking around in the Lone Lands for the fourteenth time doesn’t get you to Mordor.  And character boosts, something I’ve tried in both LOTRO and EQII tend to just compound the feeling of being lost, both in how to play your character and where you lay in the context of the story.  Being lost in a zone can be fun, but being lost when it comes to how to play or what your purpose is… that is decidedly unfun for me.

There is probably a whole comparative study waiting to be done about how various fantasy MMORPGs welcome lapsed users back and get them up to speed again.  I am not even sure how WoW manages to get me back on the right path.  But I now take it as read that I am going to come and go from the game as part of every expansion release and that I’ll just get by.

And so it has come to pass, one of the milestones that brings me back to Azeroth has arrived, the start of the pre-launch activities for the next expansion.  I knew the time was coming and had the Battle.net launcher… we’re back to calling it Battle.net right… up to get the pre-download going before the rush.

12.57 GB remaining to download

Since we were also hitting the first week of a new month I decided to resubscribe a bit early in order to get in some time earning prize tickets at Darkmoon Faire.  I still have my eye on that Darkmoon Dirigible mount.

But on logging back in I found that the pre-expansion activities were warming up.  There was a quest that popped up automatically that sent me back to Stormwind to speak to Mathias Shaw, the leader of SI:7.

I’m still not sure how he is speaking to me…

I headed off to Stormwind where I received the update that in turn sent me off towards Silithus.

I had to think for a moment about the best way to get there.  I discarded my old school impulse to get on boat when I remembered that Stormwind got a series of portals during Cataclysm, on of which sends you straight to Uldum, which is just a zone over from Silithus at the south end of Kalimdor.

On arriving in Uldum I went right to the flight point looking for a lift to Silithus only to find that the flight point I was looking for was missing.  I took a ride to the flight point at the north end of Uldum and then flew over into Silithus on my own.  Things there had changed.

That’s new…

Sticking out of the ground in the center of the zone was a giant sword with a pulsating point on its hilt.

Zone map for the event

I flew on to my destination where I set about a series of quests to gather information about what was going on… through the usual method of killing things… until Khadgar finally showed up.  After being used so much over the last two expansions he is feeling a big worn out as a narrative device.

But Khadgar was mostly just a sign post this time around, sending me off in search of Mangi Bronzebeard, with whom I eventually settled in to speak with on a Stormwind airship near the offending sword.

Aboard the airship…

Mangi had a plan.  He wanted to contain the power of the titanic offending weapon stuck into the middle of Silithus, a zone so unpopular that I am a bit surprised anybody noticed the thing was there, with my artifact weapon.

You want me to stick my sword where?

I guess I really only have a Malaysian knock-off Ashbringer.  You can tell by the faux Asian style when looking at it.  So I figured I ought to go along with the plan.  So I  went along and raised my weapon with a crowd of NPCs around me.

Ashbringer is absorbent

After that Mangi declared that the op was a success, that the giant dingus in the sands had been neutralized for the moment and they’d be in touch if they needed anything more from me.  Dismissed.

I was sure I much have missed something.  I logged my hunter on to run through the whole thing again, paying closer attention this time.

Mangi explaining how only my gun can contain this now…

I trigger the event and watched myself and the same set of NPCs try to absorb the power of the thingy.

An absorbing broadside

And, in watching this cut scene… one of those on the fly cut scenes that puts your character into the action… I though this time I noticed a change.  The event seemed to transform my hunter!

It turned me into a newt!

Then I realized that those were my shoulder pads, so outsized that when I turn a bit sideways they hide almost the whole of my head.  After that it was “off you go” and that was it.

What I was missing is that this event fully levels up whatever artifact weapons you have.  I didn’t notice that on Vikund, my paladin, since Asherbinger was almost there already.  But when I did the event with my mage, whose staff had barely anything unlocked, there was an accompanying achievement that clued me in.  I also did the Horde side of the event, which starts a little differently, but ends up with the same result, just on a Horde airship.

This time for the Horde

So that was it, a little bit of a lead in and/or closure as we hit the expansion transition, along with the usual catch-up mechanic that Blizz likes to throw in for the laggard crowd.  Use it quick, because that artifact weapon won’t be around after Battle for Azeroth hits.

Now I have to go and figure out what I need to do before the 8.0 update hits.  I understand that pet battle tokens and the shop are going to change.  I’d better look that up and spend my currency to upgrade whatever pets I have still waiting before the change.

And speaking of pets, at least when I was in Silithus I was able to pick up the last pet I needed in Kalimdor for the achievement.

That was the Qiraji Guardling that appears outside of AQ, but only during the summer.  So if you need one of those as well, now is the time.  You cannot get them near the wall because there is a phasing transition in the zone for the event, but if you go further in you can find them easily enough.

Kitten Time

My wife has been looking at kittens for a few weeks now.  It is the season and the local Humane Society has pictures posted up on their web site.  Then my daughter got in on the act, and the deal was pretty much sealed when she started texting me pictures of a kitten in her lap at Petco up the street.  And so we have a new member of our household.

Miles at home with us

His name is Miles.  For the moment.  Names are a contentious issue.  He came with the name Barry, which my wife was for but my daughter was against.  Miles came up after much back and forth.  It might stick, or he might end up as Milo.  We’ll see.

He is a dozen weeks old, is full of energy, and has a purr like a mini two-stroke engine that he revs up the moment we’re in the room with him.  He is all over my wife’s home office.

Now it is just a matter of getting Miles introduced to Rigby, our current cat.  Rigby is still young-ish, coming up on four years of age, and has been missing having a playmate around.  He knows something new is up and has posted himself outside the office door for long stretches to see what is up.

Rigby watching the door intently

We did have a test encounter earlier.  Rigby was in the office doorway and Miles jumped out, arched his back, hissed, and hopped/bounced in that posture straight at Rigby, who retreated in the face of the aggressive fuzz ball.  We’ll have to work on that.