You Must Unlearn What You Have Learned

I sure hope you didn’t have any serious attachments to your Learning skillbooks, because very very very shortly they will be disappearing from EVE…. foreverrrrrr…

CCP Greyscale (see what I did there, with the picture? whee..) brings us the news in his latest epic dev blog. Here are some highlights:

  • As of downtime today, all NPC sell orders for the eleven skills in the Learning group (hereafter referred to as “learning skills”) have been CANCELLED. They’re really not much use in the long run, we don’t want to complicate later steps with unusual inflows of skillbooks, and it might go some way towards limiting the amount of scams that we know you’re going to be running. Please, think of the children newbies.
FURTHERMORE, as of a patch which should arrive on (or about) the 14th of December:
  • ALL LEARNING SKILLS WILL DISAPPEAR. We’re not kidding. In your head, in your hangar or in your anything else, they’re gone. Vamoosh. Deleted. Sent to the big recycle bin in the sky. Etc etc.
  • All skillpoints invested in learning skills will be reimbursed, including all the fiddly corner cases. If you have 2,012,692 SP in learning, you will find yourself down those skills, but with 2,012,692 skillpoints to redistribute.
  • All skillbooks not currently injected into people’s heads will be reimbursed at the old NPC sell price. The money will go to whichever character or corporation owns the container that the skillbooks are in. For example, things in cans you’ve anchored for yourself will be reimbursed to you, things in corporate hangar arrays or the “deliveries” bin will be reimbursed to the owning corporation.
  • This will also involve cancelling any and all market orders containing these skills. Contracts containing learning skills will have those skillbooks substituted for copies of the Pax Amarria.
  • All new and existing characters will have an extra 12 base points (ie, non-remappable) in each attribute.
  • The 100% training speed bonus up to 1.6m SP will no longer be available. People partway through this bonus will lose the remaining bonus amount. They will of course gain a huge attribute bonus to make up for it.

Obviously it’s not all doom and gloom, the 12 extra base points will help a lot and you’ll have all that extra skillpoint stuff to remap as you see fit. Assuming the big brains at CCP have done their math correctly, all of this will even out skill training for people, and those of us who’ve been around forever won’t really need to care.

The change seems a bit rushed, and even the blog admits that in more than one place, but we’ll just have to wait and see how this all pans out.

Sources:

Michael Lastucka

Also known as Winterblink in-game. Warp Drive Active's overlord.