Mad Skills

The recent DevBlog regarding skill trading is certainly worth a read. I'm pretty impressed with how CCP have gone about this; initially floating the idea with the community and taking the best feedback from that discussion to come up with what looks like a pretty efficient model. I'm not going to get into the nitty gritty of it, you can read the DevBlog for that, but it does get the mind racing about how one can best take advantage of this new mechanic in the service of Bob.

Rather than creating skill points from nowhere, this system will actually reduce the total skill points on New Eden as space rich bitter vets purchase blocks of 500,000 skill points from other players and then inject only 150,000 into their heads. Frankly, I don't have a problem with that, this mechanic is borne out of making new players more useful early in their EVE careers and all Bob wants, all He thirsts for, is the unwilling sacrifices of more capsuleers. Anything that increases that likely hood is a good thing.

Of course, it also means there may well be a glut of inexperienced players flying ships they have the skill points to fly, but not the know how. How is that not awesome? I mean, don't you just love curb stomping the guy who just bought a 100 million skill point character but has no clue what to do with it? I know I do. I have fond memories of a friend buying a high skill character, fitting out a faction fit Proteus and dying horribly to a gate camp in LowSec. Close examination of his blaster fit Proteus showed Imperial Navy Heat Sinks in the lows! Many guffaws were had at his expense and I now remind myself that it's been years since I brought that up with him. I'm such a terrible friend.

Characters with less than 5 million skill points will of course reap the best rewards, paying no penalty for the skills transfer. As such, sending your low skilled scan or PI alt a few million skill points from your own main, or someone else's for that matter, will be a pretty handy option. Creating a cloaky cyno camping character will just be a matter of ISK and people will have no clue how many skill points your character has based on their age in game. The meta game has lots of potential here. The only unknown at this point is the ISK factor.

Considering a PLEX currently sells for around 1.2 Billion ISK and one month of training should net you roughly 1.6 million skill points, I expect these bundles of 500,000 skill points will sell for around 400 million ISK once the market settles from it's initial over exuberance at the shiny new thing. Of course, a lot depends on how much the Extractors are going to cost and at this stage, only CCP knows.

Depending on the cost, I see myself dropping some pretty serious ISK on short cutting some Leadership skills so I might get the most out of the Command Destroyers. Other than that, I just look forward to the ripple effect. What horrible skill will you sacrifice your hard earned ISK to circumvent?