Careful planning and patience would then become meaningless. I will never buy another booster again because that will become meaningless too. CCP can say goodbye to my money and the money of many others.

Not everyone in Dust 514 was, or still even is, aware of New Eden's ways. It also cannot be avoided to compare this game to the other games, MMO and RPG alike, that allow you to change out for a price. If anything, CCP would see an increase of money from those that are still learning that want a change. There are also those that are bored out of their mind from using the same thing over and over again that would like to, say, do an opposite role. The picture is bigger than a handful.

I come from EVE, where you essentially are paying a subscription for SP. If I forget to reque I get nothing, and lose money. This game will always give you enough free SP passively to get 5 standard weapons a week. If you cap and use boosters then you could get every advanced weapon in less than 2 month. When going into proto your essentially saying I'm going to take one weapon to 5 instead of taking 4 other weapons to 3, and that's fine but the difference between Advanced and Proto is such that you can't argue that proto is the only viable option.

Now for racial variants not released it's reasonable for a respec like in Uprising. The biggest change I've made with a respec is going from Min Logi to Gal Logi, but even in Chrome I never took my logi past standard in case there wasn't a respec. I also agree that if they overhaul vehicle or dropsuit skills like they did post uprising that a respec is fine and who is to say that you can't spec into something totally different. The second respec contributed to the large number of Cal Logis that eventually led to their "nerf" and people demanded a respec out of cal logi, similarly to the flaylock. It's an endless cycle in a game where things will constatly keep changing and being tweaked, there will be no end to people wanting respecs until they stop having them.

Assuming this game is still around in a year and there aren't too many new suits and weapons you'll have plenty of SP to spec into whatever you want. It only takes about 2 months to get enough SP for a new suit and weapon to level 5, play for a year and negelcting cores you at least 5 different full fits. I invest in cores and not new junk for that very reason.

I specced conservatively and have weathered the rebalancings for it. What will I do when my cores are maxed? Vehicles? New Suit? Weapon? Whatever I want, and I'll start at standard and work my way up like I did for my first suit.

Learn to save your SP or learn to spec into low risk skills.

Exactly, people need to accept that this game can't work with respecs and still stay f2p, the grind is intentional and people need to learn how to work with and around it. Nice comment.

I agree with this. I would also like to add an amendment: the respec only refunds the SP devoted to the Dropsuit Command and Weaponry skill trees; seeing how they are the trees being effected the most by the new skills being released.

A separate respec could be done for when the rest of the racial vehicles are released. That respec would of course only refund SP spent in the Vehicle Command tree.

TL;DR Only skill trees that have new dropsuits, weapons, or vehicles released for them should receive SP refunds. Trees like Dropsuit Upgrades should not have their SP refunded.

I have a distinct feeling that we'll be getting all the racial suits at the same time as the vehicle changes with 1.7 or at least shortly after and when that happens I reckon we'll all get a full respec - this is reasonable but that is it. No respec is ever warranted after (with the single exception of when the racial vehicles come out but then only for vehicle skills).

There really is no justification for respecs. No skill is useless and nothing in this game has been "nerfed to uselessness", despite what some people here seem to think. Even for the newberries with less than 10million SP, you may spec into something you don't particularly like but you're not going to have had enough SP to get very far into anything and speccing equally into anything new will only take a week or so.

In reality the only people who will actually benefit from unrestricted respecs (whether paid or otherwise) are the vets with tens of millions of SP. The reason is that they are the only people who'll be able to fully proto out weapons/suits/whatever whenever something turns out to be a little OP or FOTM. Versatility and breadth of skills will become irrelevant because as soon as you want/need to do something different, you can just move all your SP into it and forget about whatever you used to do.

If you're one of the many people who campaign for respecs purely because you're 'bored and want to try something new', then respecs will only be a very temporary relief and you'll soon be very bored yet again. If boredom is the issue, the solution is to make the game more fun and give us more game modes and other things to do.

TL:DR - Bar a couple of select upcoming events, respecs solve no problem but break a central facet of this game, permanency.

I did read your posts and it may be true that you wouldn't personally gain much from a respec because you wouldn't change anything anyway but that does not ring true for others. I clearly explained why respecs won't benefit low SP players much at all but vets stand to gain much more from moving vast amounts of SP around.

Now if you really think that players with 30mil SP wouldn't benefit from respecs, then that means that nobody benefits from them because low SP players certainly don't. Thus my point stands that respecs solve no problem.

Are you not reading what I've written? It is good for you that you have skilled yourself that way, well done, you are satisfied. However, there may be other people in your exact situation with that exact skill set up who suddenly decide, "Oh, I fancy running tanks this week" or "oh we need a tank in our next PC match". With respecs of any form, they'd be able to switch everything entirely into vehicles and instantly be out running proto turrets, mods and all the trimmings. That sort of instant max proto versatility is far superior to being able to put all of your 10million SP into one weapon, one suit and some select core skills.

In fact, having respecs entirely circumvents the whole point of versatility and diversity. Once you've got enough SP for one specialisation maxed out, there's no need to ever earn anymore SP because whatever you need/want to do, you can just move all your SP into that at a moment's notice and then change it into the next thing you need a game later. Having more than 23million (or whatever it takes to max a role) SP would be pointless. That's pretty game breaking.

Are you not reading what I've written? It is good for you that you have skilled yourself that way, well done, you are satisfied. However, there may be other people in your exact situation with that exact skill set up who suddenly decide, "Oh, I fancy running tanks this week" or "oh we need a tank in our next PC match". With respecs of any form, they'd be able to switch everything entirely into vehicles and instantly be out running proto turrets, mods and all the trimmings. That sort of instant max proto versatility is far superior to being able to put all of your 10million SP into one weapon, one suit and some select core skills.

In fact, having respecs entirely circumvents the whole point of versatility and diversity. Once you've got enough SP for one specialisation maxed out, there's no need to ever earn anymore SP because whatever you need/want to do, you can just move all your SP into that at a moment's notice and then change it into the next thing you need a game later. Having more than 23million (or whatever it takes to max a role) SP would be pointless. That's pretty game breaking.