Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Give me a break, most of the "time spent" training skills is waiting for the game to decide it's OK to give you access to content now that you've been a good kid and waited your turn.

Total patronizing nonsense.

That's an interesting point..... LET MY BUY SP PLEASE!!!

Tippia, I know you think your analysis of this is sound, but I've seen enough games rise and fall to have a strong suspicion (admittedly unproven) that what makes a game sustainable isn't character progression but player progression.

What are the most durable and popular games on the planet?

Nothing on-line, that's for certain.

Draughts, chess, go, various physical sports like soccer and baseball.

Even the tabletop RPG ancestors of the modern on-line RPG by and large have had considerable staying power.

These games and sports last because they challenge their players without restricting them beyond their own abilities.

Doing the same in an on-line game is a challenge that has only been attempted a scant handful of times. I only know of one game that tried, and they pulled back from complete player freedom and unlimited reward for skill, I have a suspicion that their steadily shrinking player base is due to that.

I see every sign that EvE is following the same path. It's a fun game (for now), but with the current paradigm new players will get steadily scarcer and more experienced players will simply get bored and drop off until there isn't enough of a player base to keep the servers running.

At that point few will mourn it's passing, and they'll go play a nice game of draughts.

If character progression that takes years to finish for full player access to the game is a "core mechanic" required for continuation of the game, that is an indication that the actual content being restricted is too weak to be compelling in the long term.

Which means the game dies in the end, since the weakness is being propped up by an artificial restriction that people can and do see through pretty quickly.

Good thing, then, that it doesn't take that long to access the game… it takes about a month or so.

I would support a PVP package for brand new players only that would cost extra and is a one time thing.They could select one package between the four race packages. Players would have their basic fittings skills(Electronics, Engineering) trained to 5. Depending on the race they pick the new player will get the minimum skills needed to fit T2 tanking mods, T2 small weapons, and T2 prop mods. The frig and dessi skill would both be trained to lvl 4 also for the selected race. Thats about 1-2 months of SP. I dont support buying skillpoints but if I was a brand new palyer I would support anything that had to do with more sp for me.

A month?

Pull the other one, it's got bells on it.

There's more than enough progression built into EvE just learning how all the bits fit together, they could just hand everyone a full set of L5 skills out of the gate and noobs would still be noobs and it would take at least 6 months for a normal player to get good enough at the game to compete with experienced players.

I think you are really underestimating the power of character investment, it's not a matter of progression. Progression is ephemeral, investment is tangible and works excellently to tie a player into a game once they have already invested significant amounts of time.

Every one playing at the moment has something they are aiming for, we are always training towards that one perfect setup, by the time we reach it we normally have a new skill plan laid out and a new ship to obsess over one day being able to fly. In that time between planning for a ship and being capable of flying it a player is extremely unlikely to unsub.

There may be some who are too impatient, and who can not wait a week or two to fly a battle cruiser. But then, this is Eve, do you really think they would have lasted in this game anyway? Sure, you could change the game to suit them. But then us older players would abuse the crap out of the system you introduce, ruin the game, and then quit ourselves due to the number of 3 day old titan pilots running around.


Wait, wait... you're comparing an online MMORPG to chess, soccer and basketball. Because these games all totally use the same psychological hooks to enthrall their users.

These games are durable and popular for completely different reasons to Eve online, comparing them is stupid.


This statement, when you actually try and analyse it, doesn't even mean anything. What if someone has good technical knowledge in terms of football, but is physically unfit? HURR DURR FOOTBALL TOTALLY RESTRICTS ME BEYOND MY ABILITY NERF FOOOOOTBALLZ.


Draughts: The new Eve online.

I agree with you on one point, and one point only. Eve's current trajectory in terms of skills is slightly worrying, but not because of some imagined new player inadequacy, because of SP proliferation. More and more players have higher and higher SP as time goes on, we become more and more efficient as a group at logistics/farming ISK/mining/building.

This creates issues with super capital proliferation, titan fleets, over simplified logistics etc. I mean seriously, ever seen a modern alliance's logistics? We have so many JF pilots and carrier pilots that we can move hundreds of players and their ships across Eve in a single session with zero risk, and almost every player either has access to their own carrier/JF or knows someone with one in order to move personal assets and loot.

Anyway, IMHO, that is the only issue with SP in it's current form. And it's not really one that can be fixed very easily.

…it is also the exact opposite of the “problem” suggested here, and would only be made worse by the proposed solution.

But yes, the problem with EVE is more and more becoming one where we have too few skills and too much SP, rather than the other way around.

You are obviously not an average player, and it sounds like you also had training from other exceptional players.

So you would judge the quality of the game by your personal experience at the top of it.

I know of EvE subscribers who *right now* are not playing the game because they are waiting for skills to train on their characters so they can access the content they want to play in the way they want to play it. CCP is getting their money for now, but if they get distracted by some other game it's quite likely they will unsubscribe, and if they do that they probably won't come back any time soon.

They obviously aren't you, and aren't playing the same game you have experienced, but their experience is just as real as yours.