Brain Drain

Last week I talked about how I was going to use skill extractors on my boosting alt to extract all those leadership skills and turn them into skill injectors to sell. Well this week I did it:

I left the Mining Foreman skill for the Orca, but the rest were extracted using 20 skill extractors purchased at a price of  245 million each, requiring about 4.9 billion ISK. I then sold them for about 566-569 million each, making about 11.350 billion ISK. At the end of the day, I turned those skills into 6.45 billion ISK.

Now, just need that Industrial Array dev blog...

Mining The Mind

With the coming changes to boosting, the biggest upshot is that you can't just AFK an alt in deep space and have it running the links. The link pilot will need to be on grid, actively piloting, and paying attention to the FC and the battle.

That means that my alt that I trained up with amazing leadership skills for boosting and Loki Strategic Cruiser skills is no longer going to be useful to me in fleets where I am leading. I'm OK with this.

I've decided to purchase some skill extractors and try out the mind mining that EVE offers. There is at least 5 million skill points in Leadership skills alone that I don't need for my alt's other activities such as hauling, buying, and selling. I'll probably extract the skills for the Loki as well. I'll then sell the skill injectors on the market and use the funds for the Industrial Array BPO fund, which I hope is coming soon.

Working as Intended

CCP Quant on twitter (thankfully not horrid Reddit for a change) released an infographic on Skill Trading.

Click here for full image

The very first graph on the graphic shows that in the first 36 hours of skill trading 14 billion skill points were lost through diminishing returns, i.e. 500K were extracted but not the full 500K was injected because it did not go into a very young character.

Holy brain drain Batman!

But I'd like to focus on two graphs farther down:

This first graph of Skillpoints Before versus After shows that most of the injections took place on characters below the 100 million points level, and most of the injectors injected less than ten million SP. Its hard to tell as the points are too dense to differentiate between one injection and several. But I suspect what we're seeing is a lot of people topping off core skills that they don't need to advance into new tech but want to get anyways. #GetRidOfCoreSkills

On this graph of "Skillpoints Before vs Injected Amount" we get a better view that more of the injection was done by players below 50 million skill points and the injected amount was in the majority below 10 million points, and I'd wager below 5 million points as well.

What this inforgraphic starts to demonstrate is the movement of the average skill points value for all new pilots in New Eden down for the first time in the game's history. It represents younger pilots catching up faster on older pilots than ever before.

If I was CCP, I'd call this feature working as intended. Now, if I could only convince them to drop the core skills...

The Great Brain Drain of 2016

Skill point trading rocketed onto the scene this month and I think blew everyone's expectations on how much extracting and injecting there would be. You should already be reading the Prosper blog or The Nosy Gamer blog but if you haven't been, check out these posts:

Skill Point Trading - Follow Up:

Injectors have me very worried.  In the entire lead up, I had expected that ISK/SP would be discounted vs the PLEX rate.  This would provide a negative-feedback-loop vs PLEX and would preserve the balance between Character Bazaar and Injectors.  Even CCP Quant's Bazaar Analysis pointed to this discount trend.

This positive valuation has me very concerned.  Simply put: this makes EVE free-to-play if you sell off your SP.  I think this leads to a lot of instability, since it will drive a positive-feedback-loop on PLEX demand without any sort of negative counterbalance to keep the system in balance.  Left unchecked, we could see a situation where MPCT + Extractors on all 3 slots of an account could actually net a positive return.  Whereas, if ISK/SP is discounted vs the PLEX-rate, it gives deep discounts to utility characters without making them free outright.

Now, over the course of writing this, the injector market has dipped a couple times under that parity line.  And I will be keeping a very close eye on the market over the coming days.  This heat might just be a factor of novelty, and a steady state may take a couple weeks to settle down.

Skill Point Trading: The Numbers Are In:

So is the cost of 30 days of training actually 0.9 PLEX? No. The farmer also has to pay another PLEX to pay for the subscription. After all, the purpose of the farm is to not pay real life money. Let someone else do that. So the cost of running the farm and creating skill injectors is 1.9 PLEX per month. Since the farmer can fill 23 skill injectors in six months, the production cost per injector is .496 PLEX per month. If the cost of PLEX is 1.2 billion ISK, that makes the production cost of each injector a little under 595 million ISK. Including taxes and fees, I would just assume the production cost is 600 million ISK per injector.
Does anyone really think EVE players will sell items at cost? Perhaps those who think mined minerals are free, but players who set up operations like the farm I envision don't think like that. I would expect a 20% to 25% mark-up, for a final price of 720-750 million ISK per skill point injector.

I recommend that you give both posts and all related posts a good thorough read through.

I've been shocked at the sheer amount of trading going on. I knew there was a desire for the ability and I expected the market to be healthy in terms of volume, but the quantities are staggering. In Jita:

Assuming most of those injectors were used and not resold, that 195,909 injectors that exchanged hands representing 97,954,500,000 skill points. That's almost 98 billion skill points, or around 576 Kirith Kodachi characters. 

What this represents is the build up of pressure of skill points on veteran characters that don't need the excess skill points once that certain threshold is crossed and they are no longer skill point limited but experience and ISK limited, and the vacuum of desire of new characters on the other side of that that threshold where they are still skill point constrained more than anything else. Note I did not say newer players, although that might be the case in some scenario, but mostly this is veteran players balancing skills between themselves. Ignoring the rare situations where players are simply topping up their veteran characters like IronBank.

I'm predicting right now that the market will settle in at around 1000-2000 injectors sold per day after the initial feature rush is over, representing about 1-2 Kirith Kodachis. This corresponds to what I feel the Character Bazaar supported on average.