I feel like getting old involves an ongoing sense that everything is going by faster than expected. I feel like I just wrote a post about hitting 300 million skill points and here I am at three hundred and ten million. (Also I feel like I have made this complaint too many times already, but that I will also keep making this complaint going forward. So if it appears in tomorrow’s post as well… know at least that I wrote these posts a few days apart.)
Of course, I DID write such a post back in May. And that wasn’t THAT long ago. But it still feels closer than it should. The whole 20 year saga is laid out at the end of the post.
Twenty years and just 310 million skill points to show for it?
Well, there are three characters on my main account who have been trained up at various times, so it isn’t JUST 310 million skill points.
The state of my account mid-September
The skill points breakout from the image above is as follows:
Wilhelm Arcturus - 310,243,360 Escher Alias - 96,150,606 Percy Dovetonsiles - 30,331,122 Total - 436,725,088
No, it is 436 million skill points. That is what I have to show for twenty years I guess.
But this is really about my main, so time to dig into what I was training for the last four months or so, the last milestone having landed in the middle of May while this on hit about mid September. I have just been delayed in actually doing the post.
Anyway, the skill point breakdown.
Spaceship Cmd - 102,190,520 (81)* Gunnery - 41,342,667 (56)* Drones - 25,966,256 (27) Navigation - 20,089,568 (15) Fleet Support - 16,385,250 (16) Missiles - 12,550,911 (22) Electronic Sys - 11,928,629 (15) Armor - 11,204,549 (14) Engineering - 8,939,855 (15) Scanning - 7,168,000 (07) Neural Enhancements - 6,882,275 (08) Resc Processing - 6,433,916 (13) Shields - 6,074,039 (12) Science - 5,714,282 (21) Trade - 5,047,765 (11) Planet Mgmt - 4,352,000 (05) Subsystems - 4,096,000 (16) Targeting - 3,840,000 (08) Rigging - 3,209,100 (10) Sequencing - 2,058,211 (10) Production - 1,922,644 (06) Structure Mgmt - 1,458,138 (06) Social - 1,364,785 (10) Corp Mgmt - 24,000 (02) Total - 310,243,360 (403)
As usual, those are the total skill points in each of the major learning categories. The categories that have changed since last time are marked with an asterisk while the total number of skills I have learned to at least level I is the number in parenthesis.
Not that I have many level I skills on my list. The breakout of skills by levels right now is:
Level 1 - 3 Level 2 - 10 Level 3 - 15 Level 4 - 77 Level 5 - 298 Total - 403
This time around I don’t have a lot to discuss as I apparently spent all my time training in just two categories, gunner and spaceship command, with the split being something like:
Spaceship Command: ~6.5 million Gunnery: ~3.5 million
Spaceship Command is always at the top of the list. Every time CCP/Fenris adds new ships there are new skills in this category to go with them. Spaceship Command is, without a doubt, the category with the most skill points to be learned or earned.
In fact, looking at the list, not only has Spaceship Command rolled over the 100 million skill point mark on its own… I didn’t hit that many total skill points until some time in 2013… but it now represents about one third of all my skill points trained or otherwise obtained.
Meanwhile, Gunnery is probably in second or third place for the category with the most skills and skill points available to train. I think I was spinning up the skill for the Zirnitra weapon, the Zirn being the favored dread of those with ISK to spend. My training up the skill was probably more aspirational as I am not in the category of space rich. Still, dreads are not out of my reach the way, say, supercarriers or titans are.
So it goes.
Now the question is, as always, what to train next? Wilhelm has a queue of 20 skills currently that add up to another 30 million skill points, so I could certainly let him just keep rolling. That is probably a year and a quarter’s worth of training time, given the current guideline of about 5 months per 10 million SP if I am diligent and scoop up all the free skill points that the company throws at us.
While I have never used a skill injector on Wilhelm… he as well past the point of diminishing returns when they were introduced… I am not at all bothered by taking the points CCP/Fenris tosses out like cheap Mardi Gras beads. So there is no more purity, no more “I trained up the old fashioned way” because the company has been keen to corrupt us, to make that no longer a thing anybody can claim.
But I digress.
Wil’s queue is a lot of getting this or that weapon specialization to level V, which will get me another 2% damage boost. I could chase those for a long time.
Instead I decided to swap over to Percy, my oldest and most neglected alt to get him some skills to help run the upcoming holiday events. He needs a bit of a tune up on scanning and some more hull options… you can see he was training assault frigates IV in the image at the top… and he’ll be ready to go.
So we’ll see how that plays out.
Meanwhile, for those interested in the timeline of skill points on my main, here it is:
- Start Playing EVE Online – August 2006
- Ten million – November 2007
- Twenty million – June 2008
- Thirty million – January 2009
- Forty million – August 2009
- Fifty million – March 2010
- Sixty million – November 2010
- Seventy million – August 2011
- Eighty million – June 2012
- Ninety million – December 2012
- One Hundred million – rolled right past with the battle cruiser split
- One Hundred and Ten million – September 2013
- One Hundred and Twenty million – April 2014
- One Hundred and Thirty million – October 2014
- One Hundred and Forty million – May 2015
- One Hundred and Fifty million – December 2015
- One Hundred and Sixty million – July 2016
- One Hundred and Seventy million – January 2017
- One Hundred and Eighty million – August 2017
- One Hundred and Ninety million – February 2018
- Two Hundred million – August 2018
- Two Hundred and Ten million – November 2019
- Two Hundred and Twenty million – September 2020
- Two Hundred and Thirty million – January 2021
- Two Hundred and Forty million – April 2022
- Two Hundred and Fifty million – September 2022
- Two Hundred and Sixty million – February 2023
- Two Hundred and Seventy million – September 2024
- Two Hundred and Eighty million – August 2025
- Two Hundred and Ninety million – January 2026
- Three Hundred million – May 2026
- Three Hundred and Ten million – September 2026
That is a little over 20 years of skill points, with relatively few breaks.