Skill injectors are here, and they are hot. Jita’s population on day one of skill injectors crushed its previous record by 1,200 pilots. Over 3,600 pilots sat in system ready for the market to open. The trading was fierce all day, and by day’s end, 35,000 injectors traded hands, and the profit margin was largely stabilized.
Injectors were the new kid on the block, but PLEX was also trading eight times the normal rates. Despite this, the prices didn’t move much, hovering at 1.25 billion ISK. Both injectors and PLEX are encapsulated time, which like CCP bond notes (debt), already paid for by someone else. We pay each other to move them around amongst ourselves. In this sense, they are unique and really only affected by what CCP decides to charge for those notes, and the value we put on time.
“Everyone is liquidating positions to get in the skill trade business” – Lockefox, EVE Prosper
Players valued time highly and irrationally. Buyers came prepared, selling off their stockpiles of minerals, components, and PLEX. The amount of Tritanium on the market doubled in a few days, and PLEX prices softened after a spell due to surplus stock on the market. Much of the liberated ISK went into purchasing SP.
Skillpoints were selling such a strong rate a player could earn enough SP in a month to buy a PLEX, and have 200 million ISK left over. That is free-to-play, if you were not interested in progressing the character any further. Lockefox picked up on this trend on his EVE Prosper show.
EVE Prosper – EP052 – YC118.2 Release
What were those skill used for? Some tried put themselves on the skill point leaderboards:
| Rank | Top 10 Before | Million Skillpoints | Top 10 After | Million Skillpoints |
| 1 | Dr Caymus | 287 | Stromgren (new) | 349.3 |
| 2 | Cynon Demarr | 277.9 | Spaceman (new) | 291.7 |
| 3 | Kain D’Worker | 270.9 | Dr Caymus | 287 |
| 4 | digitalwanderer | 269.5 | Cynon Demarr | 277.9 |
| 5 | Dosperado | 269.3 | Kain D’Worker | 270.9 |
| 6 | Towaoc | 266.2 | Dosperado | 269.7 |
| 7 | Anonymous | 265.3 | digitalwanderer | 269.5 |
| 8 | Karol Kei | 264.3 | Towaoc | 266.4 |
| 9 | Thirdstorm | 262 | (Anonymous) | 265.7 |
| 10 | (Anonymous) | 261.3 | Karol Kei | 264.3 |
These were taken from http://eveboard.com/
The majority of purchased SP went was injected on the spot, with an average 30% loss of SP.
One the selling side, one of my corpmates was selling an 80 m SP character on the bazaar for 20 billion (25 billion buyout) but decided to extract his skills instead, and sell them on the market. One hour later, he was 48 billion ISK richer, net. He got his Titan then next day and celebrated buy buying a 2.5 billion ISK skin.
“I had a pilot buying skills worth 5 billion isk, to fly t2 logi in my fleet. Now that’s heartwarming… And the corp who bought extractors and handed them to their old guys. They extracted some skills, and handed them to their noobs ” – Corebloodbrothers, Volition Cult
While all this extracting and injecting was happening, I started out thinking about value, but ended up making emotional decisions. The skills I extracted were parts of the game I was angry at, and the skills I left alone were very pragmatic or sentimental, reminding me of my past experiences.
Skills came into sharp focus as they were directly compared to the hundreds of millions in ISK they were worth. I began to think in terms of consolidating my SP wealth into a few characters to cut down on my character management burden. Then I thought of spreading bottlenecked tasks among many alts, like BPO research or market trading. By the end of the day I called everything into question: My SP, my wealth, my time spent playing EVE, what I did and who I did it with. Everything was on the table. The last thought I had was starting over, from scratch, with a bag of gold in hand.
At some point, the emotional buying up of SP will cease, and players will settle back down after counting their SP wealth a few times. Still, a calm SP market will make EVE a different place, with a lot more freedom for those that can afford it. In the meantime there are a lot of sales out there now on minerals, PLEX, and more. It’s a good time to be rich.
