EVE Online has a long and complicated history when it comes to the debate surrounding microtransactions. The playerbase literally revolted against developer CCP Games in 2011’s infamous Monoclegate scandal when it became known that developers were considering pay-to-win microtransactions, with the subsequent drop in subscriptions prompting CCP to later lay off 20% of its staff worldwide. The game has since gone free to play and introduced new monetisation efforts such as skill injectors, but the latest offering has players worried.
Yesterday the EVE Online account management page updated with a new Starter Pack DLC item for $5 that contains a few cosmetic skins, a cerebral accelerator, and one million injected skill points. The deal seems to have been launched to coincide with the Steam Summer Sale and is the first time skill points have been sold directly for cash — something CCP has previously steered clear of for obvious reasons.
The new Starter Pack costs $5 directly from CCP’s DLC page and is limited to a single purchase per account (loopholes notwithstanding), and it’s obviously intended for new players. Part of the outrage surrounding the pack is that it can oddly be used by veteran players too, giving them the full million skill points. It also contains a cerebral accelerator that gives a new player +20% damage for the first 35 days in-game, but this doesn’t work on characters older than 35 days.
Players can currently buy skill points in the form of skill injectors from the market, but the skill points in them are always trained in-game via normal means and then extracted from a character to be sold. CCP sells only the skill extractors as microtransaction items and agreed not to sell the skill points directly as this would constitute a pay-to-win transaction. Skill injectors are also subject to diminishing returns for older characters with more skill points.
The new starter pack has no such restrictions. CCP generates free skill points out of thin air, and your character gets a million of them regardless of the current total or account age. This prompted prominent EVE streamer and presenter Manic Velocity to announce that he’s cancelling his accounts while CCP supports this monetisation strategy, and he isn’t the only one disappointed by the pay-to-win nature of the pack.
On the other side of the argument, players on Twitter and the EVE forums point out that CCP has already generated skill points out of thin air recently when the studio gave away over a million free skill points as a login reward for an event, though it didn’t sell those. Others have noted that CCP also sells daily skill injectors for free alpha accounts that are bought directly for cash, though these are just a mechanically simpler form of skill training boosts and alphas currently train at half the speed of Omega subscribers.
Some gamers have also made the practical argument that CCP as a business and EVE Online as a game needs new players, and this pack could help entice rookies who want to get a running start. Furthermore, we know that CCP as a business needs to hit certain revenue targets under Pearl Abyss as part of the buyout deal in order to get more money from the sale of the studio to Pearl Abyss, which presumably would help EVE‘s development.
CCP Falcon posted the following response to players on the EVE Online forum, mentioning new restrictions it will be imposing on the pack and reminded players that CCP has done this before on Steam and through recruitment programme rewards without backlash:
“Hey guys, Just wanted to drop in here now I have a clearer picture of the situation and can speak with some knowledge on what happened here. We completely understand community concerns around the selling of Skill Points for cash, and we know how strongly you guys feel about this. A few changes are going to be made to this pack soon in order to square things away.
“Just to clarify things, we’ve sold starter skillpoint packs to rookies in the past via steam, and of course SP rewards are a thing through the recruiment program too. This isn’t something new, and we’re always looking for ways to increase the chances of a rookie pilot becoming a seasoned veteran that sticks with EVE for many years.
“The objective of this pack was to give rookies a little bit more leeway with their initial training and to give them a leg up when it came to branching out into their first few new ships. While it’ll have that effect, it’s obviously been implemented in a way that’s causing community concern, so we’ll be making a couple of changes. The first is that we’re currently looking at restricting the sale of this pack so that it’s available on account creation and lasts for 30 days. Similarly, we’re also looking to restrict it so that it can only be used by accounts that are <30 days old.
“We’re aware that there’s been a super strong community reaction to this pack going on sale and it wasn’t our intention to cause the pitchforks to come out. Hopefully we’ll have this resolved soon.”
I doubt this is a slip up.
Didn’t the owners of Black Desert fairly recently buy CCP/eve?
I swear I remember reading that and then thinking that this game will slowly go pay to win.
They probably want to slow roll it like they did black desert so it doesn’t put people off too much too fast.
What happened in BDO is that they said it wont be p2w and they slowly introduced first stuff that was slightly p2w but not too bad so it was acceptable. Then when people complained the people who felt it was acceptable defended pearl abyss. Then they slowly rolled more and more in and those defenders were already kind of locked in to their position of defending the practice and labeling those they argued with about it whiners. So when the most egregious things came the complaining was all just the usual noise until years later everyone accepted the game was extremely p2w but people were tired of talking about it and arguing it.
There is probably no way to prevent the game going full p2w now but just understand the company purposely uses the slippery slope incremental method so to have a chance to stop it the players would have to take a hard stance even against the smaller elements of p2w right now.
1 million skill points will not get you close to being productive. Hell I have 10 million and I still cant enjoy the good stuff, not enough skills for most corps. They are off doing shit and constantly saying you dont have the skills. Turns me off. I log in train skills, learn about what I need to get where I want, play the market for some isk then go play omething else. No one wants you. This is the downfall of many MMO’s, after years new players are left so far behind they end up no where unless they want to join some vampire sex cult. Maybe open a new server for just new players, then players are on level ground with each other. Old players can argue but what will they do to someone with 1 million skill points? Run through em like a hot knife through warm butter. Can you go to low sec and get out alive? Hell’s no. Stop whining and gank on as always.
Just gonna suggest you log in, dick around and bail. The guys you wanna roll with are dedicated and put in grind to go do what they’re doing. If you really wanted to roll you’d stay on and grind upwards.
I have a goal and work toward it, electronic warfare. I left that Corp last week. Moving to other side of country next week. So qued up skills to last and spending time with family til I leave. But over all, 1 million points dont get you no where. So I dont understand all the outrage. You need fresh blood if you want the game to continue. Some will give you a ship but freak out over some sp? Pffft retarded. Sp does not equal skill or know how.
Imagine wanting to join that game as a new player now? I guess if you actively hate yourself and want others to treat you like dookie then it’ll be your jam I guess.
Sounds like CCP really wants new blood in the game if they’re doing all that for $5.
To be fair, the entry curve/barrier is insane for a game like that. But that definitely seems like overkill/desperation.
Imagine being a dedicated EVE player since the beginning sinking over a decade worth of investment into the game. Other players might think you’re a little nuts, but you brush it aside because you can take pride in the fact that you have the highest amount of skill levels and NOBODY will ever overtake you EVER.
Oh sure, there are other players famous for destroying limited edition ships, or having a hangar of those limited edition ships. But everyone knows YOU, because you are the highest level person there is.
But then out of the blue some greenhorn casual player with less than one day of time investment into the game completely maxes out his skill levels with a whole bunch of cash.
Well shit, now you just feel stupid for wasting all that time into the game with no feeling of actual accomplishments to show for.
Will a million skill points really max a character out? That seems unlikely to me.
No, and that shipped said years ago when skill injectors were introduced.
Some whale did exactly that, spent some stupid amount of ISK to inject every skill in the game into a new character.
Eventually got perma banned for running illegal ISK casino or some such.
There were players who were upset by injectors, guy I knew had subbed to EVE since launch and he did view his SP number as an achievement.
The fact he had done nothing but solo mine in high sec the entire time was the more amazing fact to me, should get some sort of endurance award for that accomplishment.
A million skill points wont do much. Gets you able to survive the tutorial and agency missions for awhile. That wont last long. Game has a steep learning curve and newbs will waste that million on useless skills more often than not.
I don’t disagree, but the entire idea that characters are sacred pretty much goes out the window once they sanctioned character sales and then later introduced skill injectors. Like they’re past that point.
Oh yea, I totally agree. It was cute when the marketing of the game when it was first released said “It’ll take you 30 years to max out your characters”. But now more than 15 years later we’re past that halfway mark where EVE looks like it can seriously survive more than 30 years.
Nobody wants to sink 30 years into a game, so now they’ve added character sales and skill injectors and etc to lure new blood to the game.
I think this is the first mistake, treating playing video games as an “investment”. The second mistake is to take pride of accomplishment with the amount of SP you gain from passively training… and then get disappointed when realities of economics change.
No different then golf?
While the metrics don’t match THIS is what it means to be a corrosive player. You log in years after the party starts and expect same experience that vets have. Devs cave to match those desired new demographics, vets bail, new folk move on to FOTM rinse repeat. You can claim toxic all day if you want to but you gotta carry the corrosive nature of your own attitude toward gaming and how it’s bringing the scene down. And it is very much doing just that.
I love the idea that it’s fine to sell skill injections within the game, but this is somehow different. Existing transactions involve paying money for a subscription to generate skill points, paying money for a skill point extractor, then selling the points to someone who paid money for their PLEX. What, are players worried that this will somehow unleash a wave of hypothetical skill point inflation or something?
Eve is as pay-to-win as anything can conceivably be; hence, if that’s not a problem for you usually, it’s hard to understand caring about this.
We definitely got here through small steps, each with its own reasonable rationalisation. It started in something like 2006 when people were paying for a friend’s subscription in exchange for ISK. CCP allowed that and couldn’t tell the difference between that and people straight up selling game time codes for ISK so they allowed that too. This was one of the few trades that CCP would ban for scamming in, so PLEX came about as a formal system to facilitate it.
Character trades were permitted very early in EVE’s life too, and people seemed OK with it. Later when skill injectors came in, the argument was that it was just like character sales but more granular, allowing you to decide where the skills go but ensuring the skills were always trained normally in-game. I even made that same argument at the time. Then the daily alpha skill injectors came in selling SP directly for microtransaction currency, and the argument was that it was just the same as a training speed boost but more flexible (one day at a time) and alphas train slower than usual anyway.
There are people who considered PLEX pay to win and quit, people who drew the line at skill injectors, and people who will now jump ship at the sight of starter packs. And there are people who largely don’t care, either because they think EVE was pay to win before and this changes nothing or because they don’t think this is a big deal.
This is really splitting hairs.
You can buy PLEX for real life cash, then sell PLEX for in game currency, then buy skill injectors for in game currency. I mean I can take a lump sum of cash and just go buy fully skilled out characters as part of the character trading market even.
Like the P2W topic is always stupid. It comes down to a real basic question: If I had $50,000 to spend on your game how far would that progress me in the game? In EVE’s case a $5 skill package doesn’t amount to shit compared to the amount of PLEX I could sell and instant wealth/character advancement I could get out of the other $49,995.
The only reason people are quitting is because they were looking for an excuse to quit the game. Nothing is functionally changing in the game with this addition. They just saw an easy thing to be “outraged” at and smashed that eject button.
Honestly, a million skill points might sound like a lot but it barely gets you into a good spot with Battlecruisers and their loadouts. Especially don’t see the issue since it is a one-time purchase. Didn’t hear complaints when they were giving away a million skill points (only to subscribers; f2p got much less) for just logging in.
If I understood correctly the issue is veteran players can purchase these $5 starter packs and inject a million skill points into their 100M SP characters with none of the usual penalties.
If not limited a single purchase one could buy $100 worth and get 20M SPs to add to a character of any age, an offer that might even tempt me to throw down a few hundred and get that titan training I’ve never pursued.
It’s limited to one per account. There’s a Reddit thread about a workaround that would let you do it as many times as you like, but it’s not actually possible to do it because it involves petitioning a GM to move your character each time and abusing these systems is a bannable offence.
The fact that veterans could activate it was definitely part of the problem, considering it was intended to be a starter pack. The thought process here is that CCP may have known it would work for veterans and did it anyway because they’re actually far more likely to buy it than a newbie. But Ironwi is right that a million is very little to an older player.