Today, ‘Team Size Matters,’ released their devblog about some upcoming changes to skill injectors that will be arriving on May 23rd. In short, the change will be similar to how Plex has been broken into smaller chunks, allowing a pilot to inject small amounts of skills for a lower price.
Last year’s introduction of skill injectors brought about a major economic boom. For the first time, it was now possible for players to inject skills as opposed to waiting for them to train. While some regarded this negatively, as a move to a more “pay to win model” the continual comedy of new players injecting things like supercarriers never fails to entertain.
A major way skill injectors affected the economy was also in how they changed the character bazaar – a marketplace where players could sell their characters to other players in exchange for ISK. This market was historically based on ‘usefulness’ of a character’s skillset but suddenly, with the release of skill injectors, characters with ‘wasted skills’ became just as valuable as everything else. As a result, the once volatile character bazaar market that had prices based more on usefulness as opposed to flat SP costs began to level out as the price of skill injectors settled in with the price of plex. Since most players cash out plex to buy skill injectors, there was a gold rush on buying characters to ‘gut’ for skill points so that easy ISK could be made.
The main downside to skill injectors is their cost. Currently, at over 700 million ISK per injector, they are mostly bought and paid for by cashing out PLEX. With the introduction of these new injectors, now one-fifth the size of current ones, CCP is hoping that for an easy ~100 million, more players will try it out (like a gateway drug).
Here is a summary of what’s changing in bullet point form:
- Renaming of the current Skill Injector to ‘Large Skill Injector’
- Introduction of a new injector called ‘Small Skill Injector’
- Adding right-click option to break Large Injectors into 5x Small injectors or combine 5x Small Injectors into 1x Large Injector
- Using a Small Skill Injector will award a maximum of 100,000 skill points and will give the following amounts, depending on total SP on the character using the Injector:
- For characters with less than 5mil SP: 100k SP
- For characters with 5mil – 50mil SP: 80k SP
- For characters with 50mil – 80mil SP: 60k SP
- For characters with more than 80mil SP: 30k SP
