CCP Greyscale wrote:
- We don't want to have skills that are as in-practice mandatory as the old Material Efficiency skill in the Industry skillset
Problem is, the skill
was mandatory. For all the people who already trained it, which is just about everyone who seriously devoted themselves to industry, having that skill forced upon them in its new form will still be mandatory.
CCP Greyscale wrote:
- skills are supposed to be about specialization, not about jumping through hoops
As above, people have
already jumped through hoops. Not refunding the SP is only going to force industrialists and bazaar traders to keep jumping through more hoops by playing SP catchup and re-adjusting sale values for a now far less useful skill. Skills are also supposed to be about player choice, not retroactively enforcing unwanted specialization.
CCP Greyscale wrote:
- we dislike skillpoint reassignment as the act of reassignment incrementally devalues the perceived value of skillpoints accumulated over time
Repurposing skills into less worthy iterations also devalues the perceived value of skillpoints over time, especially when CCP is sending the message that any SP you already invested may suddenly change in operation and hence value with every new patch.
CCP Greyscale wrote:
- We are in any case too close to the release to implement a refund at this time, and that is a non-disputable statement of fact precluding us from doing so even if we wanted to (which we don't)
Even so, this still demonstrates a highly flawed development and release schedule that did not properly accommodate for testing and customer feedback. Saying "We've already spent too much effort accelerating this car to 160 mph and it's going crash in the next minute regardless of whether we wanted to slow down or not (which we don't)" still makes you a reckless driver.
In short, an iterative and incremental development model is not a carte blanche excuse to do less planning and be more callous towards preventable product faults. Regardless of how you've shaken up your content release schedule to make it 'more agile' or what have you, if the result is a loss of customer satisfaction, then you're doing it wrong.