In the latest Dev Blog for EVE Online, CCP Greyscale talks about the upcoming changes which will remove the learning skills completly from the game and compensate by boosting the attributes points.

Ok, so about a fortnight ago (that’s two weeks for those of you who don’t speak Proper English), CCP Zulu (our august and esteemed Senior Producer) decided he was totally and completely fed up of being asked when we were going to get rid of learning skills, and told us (Team Yggdrasill at your service, m’lud) that he wanted them gone. And there was much cheering. And then someone asked “when shall we do this?”, and verily did he reply unto us “by Christmas, or I’m going to give you lot a right proper bollocking and no mistake”. And then we went away and dug through the big stack of plans we’ve made to deal with this in the past – “just as soon as we find time to do it” – and found the best one, and then figured out how to implement it in the time available.

THEREFORE, let it be understood that we have now the following plan:

• As of downtime today, all NPC sell orders for the eleven skills in the Learning group (hereafter referred to as “learning skills”) have been CANCELLED. They’re really not much use in the long run, we don’t want to complicate later steps with unusual inflows of skillbooks, and it might go some way towards limiting the amount of scams that we know you’re going to be running. Please, think of the children newbies.

FURTHERMORE, as of a patch which should arrive on (or about) the 14th of December:

• 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.

Read more: http://www.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=824