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 close 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 not 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.

Winter 2020 FML Season Results

The Winter, or Awards, Fantasy Movie League season wrapped up this past weekend.

At one point, early on in the season, I was considering a mid-point summary as it looked like another interesting contest.  And then the week seven results came in.  I was holding off until then because that put us past the halfway mark.  But it was also the week that the race pretty much ended.

It was the weekend that Bad Boys For Life opened and the FML crew missed the mark on valuation.  If you did not go with two screens of it for your anchor you were likely out of the running for the season.  Bhagpuss and I were on the Bad Boys bandwagon, but everybody else gave it a pass.  That opened up a huge gap between second and third place that nobody was able to overcome.

The week seven results

That was enough to keep me in second place for the rest of the run despite my doing a less than stellar job on my picks.  I rarely ever forget to pick.  I tend to go in on my phone and make a default, first gut pick on Monday evening so I have something, but more often than not I forgot to go back and revise that first pick.

Bhagpuss, on the other hand, was quite the masterful movie picker.  While week seven helped him, he was in no danger from me for most of the season, the gap between us having become insurmountable not too far into the season.  The top five overall scores ended up looking liked this:

1. Too Orangey For Crows – $1,142,690,223
2. Wilhelm’s Qeynosian Kinetoscope – $1,052,491,511
3. Cyanbane’s Neuticles Viewing Party – $975,743,041
4. Po Huit’s Sweet Movie Suite – $960,290,604
5. Joanie’s Joint – $925,665,488

Bhagpuss was solidly in first place, and I solidly in second.  However, that does not really tell the tale of the season.  You need the alternate scoring for that.

As with last season, I awarded points to the top five finishers, with first place getting 5 points, second place 4 points, and so on.  That scoring ended up looking like:

1. Too Orangey For Crows – 49
2. Cyanbane’s Neuticles Viewing Party – 28
3. Po Huit’s Sweet Movie Suite – 28
4. Wilhelm’s Qeynosian Kinetoscope – 25
5. grannanj’s Cineplex – 25

That score is the result of Bhagpuss coming in first place five weeks, and second place an additional four, out of thirteen of the weeks.  That will keep you well ahead in the alternate scoring.

Meanwhile, my second place in the total score was largely supported by my picking Bad Boys as my anchor in week seven.  Otherwise I did merely a passable job of picking, winning only one week and coming in second only twice.

And so it goes.  Congrats to Bhagpuss for his decisive win!

This week sees the start of the Spring 2020 FML season, which also sees the debut of a new Pixar title, Onward.  At this end of the week it seems like a mistake to anchor on anything besides that.

I will keep the league running.  I am not sure how much I will cover the season, but maybe the mood will strike me.  The Coronavirus might make this an odd run.  I don’t think people have stopped going out to the movies quite yet… they certainly were keen to mob stores this past weekend, as they wiped out supplies of toilet paper, paper towels, soup, and frozen pizza… and bottled water for some reason, like the government is going to turn off the water supply… but a bit more bad news and interest in going to public events might see a serious decline.

If you want to join in, you need to make an account over at FML.

After that, search for the league TAGN Movie Obsession.  The password to join in “George” without the quotation marks.

Burn Jita 6 Video in 4K

I was away last week, through the weekend, which meant I completely missed Burn Jita.  This is the first one I missed out seeing.  But there is some video up from the whole thing, including this MiniLuv production.

I love that point when CONCORD blows up all of the Coercers in on pass, lighting up space with a string of explosions like holiday lights.

Switch Day Arrives!

Today is the day the Nintendo Switch is finally available!

Nintendo Switch, for your TV and elsewhere

I am generally not much of a console gaming person.  Our Wii, heavily played for a stretch, now gathers dust, while our PlayStation 3 is pretty much exclusively used to stream/play video.

I am not even a big Nintendo fan.  I already had a personal computer long before the NES of such nostalgia was available in the US.  And while I have a 3DS XL, it should have “For Pokemon Use Only” stenciled on the side.  I bought Mario Kart for it at one point, but only played it a couple of times.

I am still interested in the Switch.  It doesn’t quite have the lure that the Wii did a decade back when the combo of a new user interaction paradigm and a low price relative to its competitors made it extremely attractive.  This time around you can find XBox One and PlayStation 4 packages priced below the Switch base price of $299.

But Nintendo has gone in a different direction from the Xbox and PlayStation Bobbsey twins.  I am not sure it is the “New Era in Console Gaming” that Nintedo is claiming, but it is a divergence.  There is no hard drive, the unit having returned to the use of cartridges to distribute games. (Which may leave an unpleasant taste in the mouths of some.)  Nintendo has also fiddle with the controller idea again with a new gimmick.  And then there is the portability aspect of the unit.  As somebody in a single television household, not requiring the TV to play games is actually a pretty big bonus.

All of that is interesting, and the price isn’t a huge barrier to entry.  It is the games that will make the decision for me.  I haven’t played the Zelda series, so a new entry there doesn’t help much, nor will the inevitable Mario titles.  A REAL Pokemon title might lure me, or a Pokemon title that integrates with the 3DS like the Wii and the DS connected.  So I am just keeping and eye on the whole thing.

How about you?  Is the Switch on your list?  What is the big selling point?

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