I have to admit it was with slumped shoulders that I greeted the latest module rebalancing and updates. It flagged almost every one of my active fits as needing to be reviewed. Thanks damage controls. That is particularly problematic for those fits in Null Sec. While I am not spending a great deal of time there, I’ve been having no luck in finding wormhole routes back to Hi-Sec so that I can bring in waiting supplies or take out loot.
I’ve ran a few of those Guristas Detention Facilities in High Sec. The resists and low signatures of the Guristas Rats means I need to setup a different sort of PVE ship to run them. I don’t think I have much time to do that since the event finishes soon. On the plus side they don’t seem to argo drones and the bounties add up even if the loot drops can be poor. I did take the opportunity to grab a couple Frigate skins at 50% off that are on offer during the event.
Trigged by having to review all my ship fits again, and prodded by the proposed increases in transaction taxes, I’ve continued the liquidation and consolidation of my unused assets. Just recently I reviewed my 5 alts and accepted I never use 3 of them, and was not likely to use them either. It surprises me just how many contingencies and options I give myself, and how my backup plans have backup plans of their own. I left one of those Alts for use for Scouting and lighting Cynos, but transferred assets from two of them to my Corp and moved them across to Jita for Skill Point Extraction.
The process is simple enough – you buy Skill Extractor’s from CCP or the Market, select 500,000 SP to take off your character through drag and drop, then it creates a Skill Injector for you.
You cannot lower your characters Skill point total below 5,000,000, so you require at least 5,500,000 Skill points to use an extractor.
I did not plan to keep the characters afterwards (I really am in a clean out mood), so I concentrated on removing the higher rank and level skills to accumulate the Skill points as quickly as possible. If you are removing lots of skills that you no longer want, it can get tedious lowering their rank to 0. The skill – which you have purchased, remains against the character so you can reapply skill points to it later. Those characters wanting no evidence of their mining or industrial past will be disappointed.
The Extractor keeps track of prerequisites and locks skills needed for something else. Hovering your mouse over the locked skill shows a tooltip, which lists those skills.
Each time you complete an extraction you get an annoying dialog box to confirm, and in my situation, a notification that there were no skills in the character’s queue.
I sold the Skill Injectors off to buy orders – given they were close to the sell orders and after taxes I’d not have ended up with much more ISK. Finally I transferred the ISK off the two characters and biomassed them. There was a lot less nostalgia doing this than I thought their might have been – but it had really been a very long time since I had used either.
I’m not entirely sure how I feel about the process. On one hand – it is just like a subset of my asset sell off. It turns something that is giving me no value now into ISK. Those SP however were generated by money I spent on subscriptions. It is not really money that I have earned in the game. In my situation it is just another variation of selling a PLEX for ISK. I know in some people’s eyes that is cheating.
So now I am down to four characters – 185M SP Main, 173M SP Pilot Alt, 44M SP Industry Alt, and a 5M SP Scan and Cyno Alt.
Evehermit 