Mirrors wouldn't change in any way. As of now, mirrors just update your skills in Sisi to what they are in TQ. EVE Online has clones for 450m SP, so if they mirrored with this new idea along side it you would have your TQ skills PLUS 100m un-allocated SP

The reason I originally suggested a 100m blanket amount was because I figure it'd be easier to code a flat reset and addition of a straightforward amount of SP's to an existing variable. I like the idea of having some no-requirements resettable 'floater' SP's on top of your existing skills, but I don't know that it'd be much easier to develop than my ideal solution of creating a new GUI with + and - buttons on each skill's line item on Sisi. So, yeah. 100m seemed like a reasonable, "that should probably cover most people," kind of number. I can acknowledge that we've got some old toons like yours in the mix, but you get where I was coming from, I'm sure.

And, yes, it would be some extra work for the dev's if they choose to do this or something like it. On the other hand, there's some good things in it for them as well. They wouldn't have to worry about who gets the SP's for helping out in mass tests and they could still dictate that people should throw certain skills into their Sisi toons so the test can go off in whatever way they want. Better yet, if people are permitted to actually reduce their skills then we could work with them by having some of us intentionally go in with low, medium, and high grades of skills so they can get whatever levels they want out of us by merely suggesting that it'd be nice if some more of us downgraded so they could see more nooby skills in action.

Look, we've already got what you've been saying here.

• Sisi is for dev's only, and by only their grace are we given the privilege of donating our time to their needs.
• Our needs are pointless.
• SP's on a server designed for testing are super valuable and should not be taken lightly.

That about cover it?

So, here's the thing: https://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Duality

Duality serves the purpose which you seem to think Singularity serves. Singularity is intentionally designed for players to use. Any questions?

You just confirmed what I told you about Duality. Things are tested there by dev's before being deployed to Sisi. Sisi is where features are attempted to be broken and manipulated by everyone who can muster an evil giggle in order that CCP can decide whether their ideas really are good or if those ideas need tweaking.

What you, and others like you, seem to be afraid of is that people will only use maxed out everythings and capital blobs will fly rampant on Sisi. To a degree, that's true. I'd like to get in an Avatar and play around with it because I'm in the majority of players who will never get to fly one on Tranqulity. You know, for fun.

You're overlooking the greater idea of the intent of Singularity: CCP was by no means obligated to put it up in the way they did, but they wanted to be awesome and give their customer base a nod whereas fiddling with upcoming features is concerned. They've done that to a spectacular degree of success and it's worked very well for some time ... but there's no reason it can't be better. You think that removing the binders we're naturally expected to have on Tranquility will somehow destroy the original purpose of Singularity while simultaneously keeping people from logging in when CCP says to people who love to test things anyway, "Hey, we've got this new thing. Everyone fleet up and see if it breaks, please and thank you?" I fail to see how this logic of yours makes more sense than the idea of CCP telling people like us to adjust our skill sets on the fly and find out what happens. We're on the test server to test things, not to find out just how badass we already are on Tranquility based on our chosen career paths.

This already happens, you say? What's the problem with now vs the potential future? Sounds like you've already got your feared cap blobs.

Let's think of this another way. If people can use whatever they want to use for free, then odds are we'll see a spike of cap usage etc for a while. People will get in them just to derp around and lose a few. Maybe current cap pilots want to see what happens when all their cap pilot buddies all have maxed out skills. Whatever.

After that's over with, it's likely that people would use Sisi as a way to figure out what's really the best thing, which means they'd explore whatever the current meta might be. In today's case, the wrecking ball or fuckyoufleet or whatever people feel like putting together so they can see just how well it works without having to lose whole fleets themselves. Given that this is likely, CCP could take this data during player-based ad-hoc testing and use it in a way separate from their current internal development cycle's needs. They could've potentially identified CPU usage spiking due to all the drones sooner than they did on Tranquility. They could've responded sooner by doing rebalances to encourage players to do something less processor-intensive from the server's perspective.

There are a lot of good things to be said for this approach, and the main arguments balanced against them just don't seem to be quite as functional from where I'm sitting. Would you get people setting some skills to max, well ... yeah. That's kind of a given. On the other hand, you kind of already get tons of people just mindlessly blasting each other with the best crap they can buy from the 100isk store.

See, that's exactly what I'm saying here. During a mass test, CCP could dictate that people have certain things at certain levels and the people who give a crap about mass tests would be only too happy to comply. It wouldn't take anything away from CCP, but it would have a long term investment benefit for them by keeping them from having to manually administer quite so much once the feature were done being implemented. During any other time, CCP gets to see what people are flocking toward and they can use that information as they see fit. If people are allowed to get literally whatever they want on demand, then the pinnacle of one's intererests is immediately revealed in such an environment. There would be perfect data sets on what people are striving to achieve as opposed to what they can do with what they currently have. There would be much less guesswork on where development dollars should be spent based on what people love to do and what people are actively avoiding doing.

That's in large part because you're allowed to use Sisi for your own purposes. Not for CCP's purposes, but for yours.

I'm not saying every new meta will freak CCP out and make them change things, but there's no reason they can't be caught off guard by something because people who wouldn't normally be able to do a thing ... can't actually do that thing. They, therefore, can't exacerbate the symptoms of it in a risk-free environment before it might potentially get out of control and call for an emergency patch. Does this happen often? No; CCP has a very firm grasp on what people will probably do because they've been at this for 10+ years now. Just because it doesn't seem likely doesn't mean it can't be a potentially useful side effect of the whole point of this thing - Sisi is equally important for players and for CCP. To think otherwise would be foolish. To think that CCP doesn't want us to try abusing the rules of the game in a test environment is naive.

The test server rules are basically telling people not to be total jerks to each other. Don't camp gates, don't fight around stations, etc. I'm talking about people manipulating the inherent rules of the game itself. Things like finding the fastest speed tank imaginable that can still reliably deliver at least 300dps or whatever.

New twist on old idea: during the mirroring process, give players who do not have a minimum threshold of SP's (say, 60-80 millon or something) the difference between their actual SP's and that threshold in unspent bonus SP's while also doing a free-form reset or skill reduction thing in one manner or another. We might also consider a minimum bonus SP pool size, too. 5-10 million sounds reasonable.

This would give new players the ability to see what all the fuss is about with regards to things which would be currently waaaay beyond their abilities on Tranquility while also giving the system some leeway in keeping notes on who attends mass tests and adding additional permanent credits for those who assist either on Sisi or by making good suggestions in the forums or maybe by clearly going above and beyond in storyline events. For the storyline event part, it'd be nice if there were a right-click option on Tranquility so CCP staffers can '+1' the action of a guy and leave a kind of invisible note in his character profile which would be waiting as a bonus on Sisi during the next mirror ... or sooner.

For those players who do not generally choose to assist in various ways but who like to use the test server anyway, reducing their skills could just dump their SP's back into the unspent pool so they can enjoy some flexibility while also not getting as much as those who actively try to help out in various channels. It'd be nice for everyone in general to get some SP's for just logging in at least once per day on Sisi since keeping that training queue active just isn't a real priority. Testers of any sort would get at least a little something, but people who really contribute would get more. As far as I know, there's no established rule which says doing things on Tranquility can't give you some kind of perk on Singularity.

Also, just so it doens't sound like I'm backtracking ... this incentivization for attending tests business is apparently a big deal for a number of people. I think it's silly, but it is what it is for you-know-who-you-are and I thought I'd try to come up with an idea which a person with this attitude might endorse as a thought experiment for myself.

New twist on old idea: during the mirroring process, give players who do not have a minimum threshold of SP's (say, 60-80 millon or something) the difference between their actual SP's and that threshold in unspent bonus SP's while also doing a free-form reset or skill reduction thing in one manner or another. We might also consider a minimum bonus SP pool size, too. 5-10 million sounds reasonable.