As you all may remember, on the 16th of February this year, skill trading was implemented into EVE Online. This had been a controversial story ever since it was announced, people for and against it arguing both sides of the case, but has actually become of skill injection?
It has become even more easy for players to skill into what they want, with a neat little skill injection calculator being available at injector.nimos.ws, allowing the user to select a skill and see how many injectors it would take to be able to train it, making it great if you need to know how many more injectors you need to fly that Thanatos you accidentally bought on contract in Jita.
However, at the time of writing a skill extractor, the item used to extract 500,000 skill points from a character that then turns into an injector, is currently costing around ~250 million ISK in Jita on sell orders, with the injector costing around ~690 million ISK on sell orders. This shows that a great deal of profit can be made through skill trading, and has opened an opportunity for older characters to extract skills they don’t need any more to earn that bit more ISK, but also gives new players the chance to catch up with older players, if they are willing to expend the ISK to do so. This has changed the ball game of being able to judge how old a character is by their skill points, meaning new players with no idea what to do but tens of millions of skill points could be flying round in titans that they have no idea how to fly. This is where the new player organisations such as EVE Uni come in, to guide new players through this scary time of unlimited potential for money, and the PLEX + Injector combination could create more kills like two month old players dieing in officer fit titans.
Of course, as with many new features, this has provided the opportunity for players to show off their financial power in New Eden. Shortly before buying 600 Machariels off the market, the character known as “I want ISK”, or “Eep Eep”, bought over $28,000 worth of skill injectors and took a new character with only the starter skills and gave them every single skill in the game to level five. This was of course possible because of how ridiculously rich he is, being the creator of the “I want ISK” EVE bank and “Casino” and multiple times showing how many trillions he has in liquid ISK, but that’s beside the point.
The point is, skill injectors have had an undeniable impact on the markets and spacelanes of New Eden, whether it be vets getting even more rich through skill farming, newbies training into ships they are not ready to use by using injectors, or players showing their financial power through them, like them or not, they’re here to stay. At least, for the foreseeable future.
