EVE Online‘s passive skill training system lets players slowly accumulate skill points over time, and until recently there was no way to actively skip ahead of that the curve. With the recent introduction of Skill Extractors, players can now remove skill points from their characters’ heads and trade them on the open market as Skill Injectors. Other players can then buy the injectors and shove them into their own heads for a boost in skill points that can then be assigned to any skill. Tens of thousands of injectors have been bought and sold since they were introduced just a few days ago, and a few injector addicts have already come out of the woodwork.
Player Stromgren of DARKNESS. alliance used injectors to become EVE‘s highest-skilled character literally overnight, adding over 100 million skill points that would normally take 4.3 years to train passively. Stromgren gets only 150,000 skill points per injector due to diminishing returns for high-skill characters, so he needed to use 677 injectors to get to the point he is at now. At current market value, those injectors are worth around 437 billion ISK or 350 PLEX, putting the real-world value of his escapade at between $5204.75 and $6982.5 depending on the cash value used for PLEX. There’s no way to tell whether Stromgren purchased the injectors with ISK from the sale of PLEX or ISK he already had, but it nevertheless represents a huge cost.
