Are Skills Valuable?

Ranavolana

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I have always assumed they were. However I have noticed some threads that seem to consider they are not, in fact only useful for chipping out & selling.

Is this the case?
 
When Mindark decides to finally put ESIs in the trade terminal so that folks can chip in and chip out without spending a fortune, yes, they will be worth something.

Why they should do so? The less chip out, the better vor MA. Also good to loot a ESI, about the MU. There are not many items left, with nice MU.
Simple answer is that as it is now, many are long timers that don't actually participate... they are only around because chipping out would cost them too much... if it was easy to chip out negativity in community might go away if all the old time non-players weren't around any more. (Honestly I think with some recent changes Mindark is subtly trying to remove these non-participating folks in a more silent way, but that's just my humble opinion and the opinion of a few folks over on entropiaplanets forum)

As for the loot answer that everyone always talks about - put better alternatives in loot instead of ESI to replace it. There ARE better ways of doing this. A few upgrade paths to a few items exist currently. Imagine if instead of ESI you could loot 'upgrade tokens' or whatever you want to call them that would allow you to upgrade ANY item in game with new better buffs, sometimes temporary, sometimes permanent, etc. If Mindark chose this path they'd simply need to just read the wishlist here on the forum since tons of ideas about upgrade paths are already out there that the community has put forth.

Lots of other alternative to ESI loot could be introduced... Deep Space Instance Tokens, Better & Buffier Items, Tokens to get access to two new npc vendors - one that holds all of the assets Mindark has repossessed from dead accounts or banned avatar accounts, and another that holds all assets for all unreleased apartments, LAs, etc. for each planet's estate broker, etc. (make it a reverse auction npc type of thing for these new token types, etc.), Maybe a new vendor for shares of a new and upcoming planet... endless possibilities.
 
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When Mindark decides to finally put ESIs in the trade terminal so that folks can chip in and chip out without spending a fortune, yes, they will be worth something.

Why they should do so? The less chip out, the better for MA. Also good to loot a ESI, about the MU. There are not many items left, with nice MU.
 
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With the introdution of max profession standings for any kind of mindark hosted events some skills lost all their value and youre paying for the esi only. I wonder how many übers would quit entropia if esi chips really became tt food :scratch2:
 
Yes.

But they only have value if you use them and only up to the point before they hinder you IE being to high a level for your preferred event category.

Having the right skills will allow you to use better gear which has value in the form of playing efficiency. If you are talking about monetary sale value though, it really depends on what skills you are trying to sell. They skills everyone has the most of are less valuable and in some cases they are worth 1/10 their purchase cost in profit.

That being said there are still some rarer skills that can get a good markup.
 
When Mindark decides to finally put ESIs in the trade terminal so that folks can chip in and chip out without spending a fortune, yes, they will be worth something.


Simple answer is that as it is now, many are long timers that don't actually participate... they are only around because chipping out would cost them too much... if it was easy to chip out negativity in community might go away if all the old time non-players weren't around any more. (Honestly I think with some recent changes Mindark is subtly trying to remove these non-participating folks in a more silent way, but that's just my humble opinion and the opinion of a few folks over on entropiaplanets forum)

As for the loot answer that everyone always talks about - put better alternatives in loot instead of ESI to replace it. There ARE better ways of doing this. A few upgrade paths to a few items exist currently. Imagine if instead of ESI you could loot 'upgrade tokens' or whatever you want to call them that would allow you to upgrade ANY item in game with new better buffs, sometimes temporary, sometimes permanent, etc. If Mindark chose this path they'd simply need to just read the wishlist here on the forum since tons of ideas about upgrade paths are already out there that the community has put forth.

Lots of other alternative to ESI loot could be introduced... Deep Space Instance Tokens, Better & Buffier Items, Tokens to get access to two new npc vendors - one that holds all of the assets Mindark has repossessed from dead accounts or banned avatar accounts, and another that holds all assets for all unreleased apartments, LAs, etc. for each planet's estate broker, etc. (make it a reverse auction npc type of thing for these new token types, etc.), Maybe a new vendor for shares of a new and upcoming planet... endless possibilities.

Thats a neat idea actually. Deep space instances you can drive into with ship and crew for something hardcore like beacons with reward at the end.
 
As the game is today i would say no because MA dont lake the old system in the game for MA only wants that we are doing Events and its easy to have 100 players shooting on a mob but before when it was no Events or missions and no L-Items then you need this skills to be in the game.
 
When Mindark decides to finally put ESIs in the trade terminal so that folks can chip in and chip out without spending a fortune, yes, they will be worth something.

The moment ESI are for sale in the TT at TT value and unlimited amounts, the value of all but the most rare skills will go to zero. It takes only a few big avatars that sell out to flood the market. Lots of idle avatars with huge skillcounts are willing to chip out, blocked by ESI @ 900% and very little market volume.

MA will always throttle the ESI availability and price very carefully. The fact that nearly every item has dropped in price the last 10 years except ESI is your proof.
 
From the replies to my enquiry it seems that the only benefit of skills is that they can be chipped out & sold.
That they can actually hinder you if you like to take part in events and the skills you possess are too high for an event category.

Surely there must be some benefit in obtaining them? Or is the only use for them is enabling you to obtain and progress in a profession?

Otherwise what is the point :(
 
From the replies to my enquiry it seems that the only benefit of skills is that they can be chipped out & sold.
That they can actually hinder you if you like to take part in events and the skills you possess are too high for an event category.

Surely there must be some benefit in obtaining them? Or is the only use for them is enabling you to obtain and progress in a profession?

Otherwise what is the point :(

well depends on what matters to you.. they may have little monetary value at the moment but they are great for actual playability... skills give hit points as well and evade/dodge obviously make things easier to survive. weapon skills of course allow you to use that higher lvl weapon you've always dreamed of. If someone is just concerned about peds then yes theyre not worth much =p
 
From the replies to my enquiry it seems that the only benefit of skills is that they can be chipped out & sold.

The benefit comes in many forms.The one that's most obvious for people to count 1+1 = 2 is when they chip out and sell the skill for a certain % profit.The other angle is to obtain certain amount of skills to access certain top gear and hunt the real mobs that drop the real markup (this is not obvious for most of the people) therefore most of them can only see the 1st part and when you take into consideration some people sell free skills they immediately jump into conclusion thinking all skills are worthless (wrong on so many levels)

That they can actually hinder you if you like to take part in events and the skills you possess are too high for an event category.

They will hinder you only if you limit yourself in the 1st place.Only sky is the limit.

Surely there must be some benefit in obtaining them? Or is the only use for them is enabling you to obtain and progress in a profession?


Otherwise what is the point :(

The point is to reach to a level where you consistently access the highest amount of markup all day everyday and also stay in the highest category in events where you can also round your revenues.
 
I was always wondering if skills do something ingame besides contributing to profession/hp.
Like idk, +1% to average mining depth per each 1000 of a certain skill or something alike.
 
I was always wondering if skills do something ingame besides contributing to profession/hp.
Like idk, +1% to average mining depth per each 1000 of a certain skill or something alike.

No. Skills are simple. They do what MA says and contribute like the community has figured out.
 
Alot skills also contribute to looter skills which is also important.
 
Financially, no. When CryEngine was introduced 10 years ago, MA provoked an inflation of skills, respectively SGA came packed with, if I remember correctly, a couple of months at (not sure on the number anymore) 300% skillgain.

For me it is difficult to not interpret some changes in a negative manner. Over the years, MA has done everything possible to destroy the profit possibilities. Sweating skill used to be capped (very fast, sweat a few days and shoot a few berys and bam you couldn't sweat anymore), so sweat was, when I started (jul 2005), 3 pec a bottle. You could round up a few hundreds to start with if you stayed only with sweating. This had also downsides, namely flocks of sweating bots, but I always wondered what MA was aiming when removing the cap, destroying bots or destroying wallets? Initially they said that the purpose was making MF more affordable (which did happened), but putting syntethic MF in TT showed that there were other ways available.

Skilling itself used to be tough. In one year of playing pretty hardcore, with available weapons of those times, you could maybe reach lvl30 in a best case scenario. So farming skills was a thing, chipping out completely at lvl20 at some point netted me 5k and not only once.

Mining had no amps, so skilling in mining was even slower than hunting. Mineral Sense (lvl30 prospecting pros) was the thing for the ubers (like, 10 people ingame in 2006), and chipping out at lvl10 prospecting (lol memory, 12ish), when unlocking CGA, was roughly 3k.

All skills back then used to ACTUALLY have a value. Before the introduction of critical hits, mobs were always hitting for maximum value and alot faster (like is Cyrene nowadays), armours had higher decay (ghost or jaguar were for insane jetspenders), so evade-related skills were pure gold. Did I mentioned that extracting skills used to give you more from same deposit? Claims had a quasi-static number of pulls, and it was your mining skills deciding wether a "great" is less or more than 50 ped (and consecutively a global). Yes, "great" back then was 50ish max, abundant 30ish max etc.

We had no "SIB" bullshit, all weapons had permanent skill requirement maximized at 100. So going from jester d-1 to justifier mk2 was really a thing requiring effort and careful picking of mobs, worth maybe a couple of months of shooting. Nowadays you can be in 2 weeks lvl20 or something.

The game was alot more rough and more expensive, but it had meaning. There was a meaning hunting for almost every material, there was scarcity and actual trading, not some ignorants staying in Twin and putting prices from their backs.

What MA achieved is killing off almost completely the economic meaning of their initial proposal: an alien planet open to the daring, willing to put in effort and to think. They slowly dissipated this into two branches: pure gambling and useless grinding, with some carrot hanging in front of the nose that sometime maybe you will win a mayhem and sell a gun which in itself has no discernable purpose save for a short-term vicious circle. But after 10 years of Mayhems, what's the plan, what these weapons will do?

By creating skill inflation, they made readily available very high turnover, which is very two-sided: it is not possible anymore to lose 100$ in a month shooting with something like ArMatrix 5 (if such thing would even exist). But in same time, the base game and setup helps you with nothing. One week of grinding molisks meant 5-700 ped in MU only from teeth (aside from hides, wools and paints). Nowadays, one week of grinding molisks means the extraordinary chance to "win" the shrapnel conversion.

You don't pay as much anymore for the same level of turnover, but people are pushed into levels of turnover which are extreme. Already at level 30 nowadays you can shoot some $ per day which were simply impossible 10 years+ ago.

Opportunities for profit (I mean PROFIT, the one which you can withdraw to your bank) are meaningless compared to 10-15 years ago even at uber level, costs at same level of skill are a small fraction of what them used to be and so on. It's sort of a waste of time, which has the formal excuse that you could potentially at some point make a $, but is laughable compared to what was happening with a fraction of the population, servers, systems etc

Do skill serve a purpose? Yes, within the system itself of course they do, it is obvious. Depending on your level, ok, messi is at the top, but already starting at lvl60 or so you can do pretty much whatever you like wherever you like without the concern that this mob might trash you.

Does this freedom has anymore real economic meaning, does it really open opportunities for actual profit? Not so much.

For anybody who witnessed Entropia for more than a few years, it should be obvious that the paradigm 10+ years ago was "how to profit". Nowadays is "how to minimise your costs".

For me it is sad, but I will never quit Entropia. MindArk minimised costs, destroyed almost all profit venues and left in place a system where people to waste their time for cents instead of competing for $. For them is win-win, the ideal player is the one constantly paying something similar to a MMO subscription, but without any kind of profit chance.

I will still be here even when they will plug off, always hoping that at some point they will actually deliver an economic biosphere with meaning, at least a part of the meaning it had 14 years ago, instead of the glorified social media it's currently.
 
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For me it is sad, but I will never quit Entropia. MindArk minimised costs, destroyed almost all profit venues and left in place a system where people to waste their time for cents instead of competing for $. For them is win-win, the ideal player is the one constantly paying something similar to a MMO subscription, but without any kind of profit chance.

They 'destroyed' profits by making game easier to play: trading was killed by global chats, search ability on AH and MU history. We didn't have such things when I started in 2007 so trading profession for real thing back then. MU drop is caused mostly by better information sharing so ppl jump on profit opportunities and drive MU down to 0 pretty fast: things like vixen gears comes to mind and how ppl behaved on that spawn when you could profit on it. Some MU opportunities was removed by community request: nove/blazar loots covered 10% of my TT losses back in 1.0 days (on small mobs) but ppl complained about it so MA happily limited them to caly punies - it didn't affect ppls TT anyway but we lost that high MU loot :( 2.0 is another example - lower losses for ppl ignorant about eco at expense of eco-aware ppl. And you could be profitable in 1.0 with cheap setups like chon+a101 - way harder today.

I think it's still play to profit game, we just don't hear about these opportunities anymore because ppl learned to keep they mouth shut. The moment you write about some mob being profitable, you end up with few ppl hunting them next to you, most likely 5m away from you so they KS you and in same time accusing you you KS them :confused: <- this happened to me really. And then they undercut you on AH driving MU down. And don't think you can not compete with them on AH to keep MU intact. If you try they will happily relist their positions while driving yours to expire. So after few short weeks after ppl are aware something is profitable, profit is gone again.

There is still some profit possibilities left but they one I sit on right now is not obvious. You would have to hunt my mob for many months to see positive trend due to high variance drop of stuff that makes that mob profitable + high variance in demand for that stuff. With such high variance most ppl quit before they see profit. But I still have some competition - ppl passing by sometimes check me on EL and if they see me globaling on same mob for over a year some start hunting them too to figure out why I hunt them :) They eventually quit because they can't last few months to see profit but before they do they annoy me by hunting freaking 5m away from me even if spawn is 1000m+ long - damn green dot magnets :laugh: Like it's not the mob being profitable but exact spot I stand to hunt them :mad:

Back to original question: skills matter way less than they used to. Evade was very valuable when armor decay was not returned, now with 95% decay returned it's still positive to avoid that 5% loss but 20x less important than it used to be. It used to be very important to reach lvl 100 to get access to eco non-SIB guns but now with FEN and mayem items you can bypass than with extra ped locked in MU. And what's left of MU on skills is killed by ppl willing to give you their skills for free (if you provide ESI) in order to stay in some desired category.
 
Agree with your point too, but EU was not a game, never been. The core purpose of it was money, plain and simple. It is of course cheaper nowadays, but is cheaper to play, that's my point exactly. There's a sea of worthless pixels framed as "resources", "weapons", "mobs", "blueprints" in a game which is not THAT much of a game. Strictly as a gamer, Entropia is one of the worst paradigms I ever saw. But I remained with it exactly because it's not a game. Or, better said, it wasn't a game. That's the problem, that it became mostly a game.

Surely some profit opportunities will always be there as long as the pegging to $ remains, it's a mechanic necessity. But their importance nowadays it's greatly reduced. People were hunting drones for gazz and argo for iron, not to check some mission of arguable economic relevance.

P.S.: it wasn't the people "complaining" which changed to loot 2.0. It was MA's own ineptitude to foresee what stacking of buffs will do to dpp and their damned love for strongboxes.
 
Never sold and never bought any skills, so if they are valuable from PEDs p.o.v, they
aren't for me.

When it comes to being useful, yes skills are that, and in many ways.
Guess I'm glad that I'm a HSP when playing EU... ;)
 
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