Learning Skill Removal!

  Yes you read that right. They have finally broken down and decided to remove learning skills altogether. It started with ceasing the NPC selling of the books. According to the Devblog, this change will be around December 14th, so quite soon. What exactly will this all mean? Here's some details:

•  ALL LEARNING SKILLS WILL DISAPPEAR
  • We're not kidding. In your head, in your hangar or in your anything else, they're gone. Vamoosh. Deleted. Sent to the big recycle bin in the sky. Etc etc.
• All skillpoints invested in learning skills will be reimbursed, including all the fiddly corner cases. If you have 2,012,692 SP in learning, you will find yourself down those skills, but with 2,012,692 skillpoints to redistribute.
• All skillbooks not currently injected into people's heads will be reimbursed at the old NPC sell price. The money will go to whichever character or corporation owns the container that the skillbooks are in. For example, things in cans you've anchored for yourself will be reimbursed to you, things in corporate hangar arrays or the "deliveries" bin will be reimbursed to the owning corporation.
• This will also involve cancelling any and all market orders containing these skills. Contracts containing learning skills will have those skillbooks substituted for copies of the Pax Amarria.
• All new and existing characters will have an extra 12 base points (ie, non-remappable) in each attribute.
• The 100% training speed bonus up to 1.6m SP will no longer be available. People partway through this bonus will lose the remaining bonus amount. They will of course gain a huge attribute bonus to make up for it.
• Miscellaneous other cleanup tasks will be performed that are not very interesting, details available on request.

  So it seems this will be quite similar to the SP redistribution that we did for the extended downtime a while ago. If you are too new to remember that or have forgotten, here's how you can do it when it comes time. 

  It's a very long post with some tricky things to go along with it so I urge you to head over there. One thing of note for newer players is that they no longer have accelerated training speed after this change. But this is a big thing for everyone. It means starting characters have all 20s and Charisma has 19. Of course, this drives me nuts because my new Orca alt is trained only in learning skills and a few others, so that was all a major waste of my time. *sigh* oh well. This means I can get that much faster to a Falcon with the reimbursement. 

  For now I shall continue my training and worry about all this later. Back to Turkey Day!

-Mem