Dear players,

I need to write this to explain the 1.9 Weekly Skill Cap implementation and its intent and design.

When we first discussed the possibility of stacking boosters and raising the skill cap, with the CPM, I honestly thought that the skill cap was a fixed number that was achieved faster by equipping boosters. Yeah, I just never did the math on the EOM screen, donGÇÿt think I ever capped out anyway, more than half of my 35 million SP is probably passive booster SP.

Therefore, the 750k active skillcap number came directly from me, from thinking GÇPWe need to triple it due to the 3 boosters, and we will even throw in an additional amount to make it an even 750k. It will be generous and cool.GÇ£

At that time, we were very aware that we should not devalue veteran SP by giving SP away too freely, but also still allow new players to catch up and catch a break. The scenario was thus, the veterans can throw in a single booster and ease into getting the 750k, not in a rush but during the whole week, instead of stressing out to cap. The new players or those that needed SP for an expensive skill could boost out to do so, but it wouldnGÇÿt be sustainable and up to the hard cap of 750k.

On top of that we added the ability to just do single purchases with instant boosters, just to make it less of a burden to buy a big chunk of booster time, instead of just GÇPwhen you need it and want itGÇ£. This allows for flexibility, but only a handful would ever do both, and so what, there is a hard cap (again, in my mind).

This is discussed with the CPM and devs and everything was awesome. The 750k number goes into the Patch Notes, and soon I see concerns from the community on the forums and feedback about some crazy 3 million per week numbers. And I thought, GÇPok, they are totally misunderstanding, its a hard capGÇ£, IGÇÿll explain it later in a sticky.

Then I am, by an off chance and just before we hit final QA, made aware by the dev team how it is really going to pan out. Players will be able to 3X stack, but as was explained to me, both the instant and active booster SP would not be counted towards the cap. After double and triple checking and running hellish spreadsheets with average potential SP scenarios and combinations of boosters, it was confirmed. It was too late to mess with the code, but there was no way I wanted, 750+2250(3xOmegas) + 2250 (3x Instant for all battles) + Passive, a total of 6M SP per week. That just wasnGÇÿt our intent at any stage of this feature.

The intent was, as it happens, much closer to to the old cap of 180k+540 (3xOmegas) + 540(3xInstant for all battles)+Passive ~ 1.8 million or so, very close to the previous weekly max SP gain times 3.

That sounded exactly what we wanted so we simply moved the skill cap back to 180k and pulled the 750k number out of the patch notes, very last minute. I was absolutely sure that this is what players truly expected, and I think most players agree that 6M SP per week is completely untenable. GÇPBut, noone is going to do that in the long termGÇ£, I hear you say, it costs too much, and will burn those extremely few that do so, out. So I didnGÇÿt worry at all about explaining this, if the need arose.

Until I had the 500 messages from the CPM, blinking furiously on Skype tonight, after football practice and just about to hit the hay.The gist of the messages was GÇPEveryone, and the CPM included, thinks players should be able to get 2.5 million active SP if they triple stack Omegas, but they probably assumed Instant Boosters would not be additive on top."

Well, it can be hard to admit mistakes, and learn from them, but I am willing to try and do both.

Therefore, I propose that to keep faith to those that thought the intent was 750k multiplied by stacked boosters, to immediately raise it to 750k during downtime tomorrow. The potential SP gain will be enormous, but we can monitor the situation for a single month, just how fast players are capping and gaining SP and whether it is a real problem.

Those that bought and stacked 3 boosters today, will not lose anything and be able to do what was communicated, even though that was absolutely not our intent. If you have already capped out today, please take a break and start again after DT tomorrow.

However, we then reserve our right to reduce the Skill Cap after 30 days if deemed necessary, with a weeks notice or so, so players will understand fully how the Skill Cap will affect their purchasing decisions.

I hope that this settles this issue, and lets you get back to playing the vastly improved DUST 514 of Uprising 1.9!

Sincerely
CCP Rattati

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