Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Learning implants are not evil or unfair. However, they are unnecessary and they give new pilots a bad first taste of EVE. Why bad? Well, new pilots immediately find out that getting into the ships they want to fly takes time. The learning implants reduce that time, and newbies will focus on getting those implants as soon as possible once they find out about them. However, they are relatively expensive for a new player and after they plug in the implants, they don't want to lose them.

For a beginner, those implants represent more than just the gametime they spent to get them. They mined or ran missions for days to get them, and to lose them would not only set them back tens of millions of ISK, it would gimp their character progression. After a new players gets these implants in his head, he becomes extremely risk averse. The idea of being podded is pretty scary to a newbie when he's carrying so much in his head.

After having learned this new behavior, a new pilot is much more likely to avoid going into lowsec or nullsec. This is generally bad for EVE. Aside from the obvious implications this has on new player experiences (they get really bored saving the damsel and killing Kruul and quit), this is not good for the EVE market. PvP is an ISK sink, and ships getting blown up creates demand for new ships.

I'm not saying that getting rid of learning implants is THE solution to getting more hisec bears out of their shells, but it would help new players be less risk-averse. Not everyone likes to PvP, but the way things are now, I don't think newbies are being given a fair chance to try it.

I'd agree with the OP

I'm currently looking at my SP/hour and going hmm I'd like to try some FW but hmm that's going to dmg my rate if I get podded, I pretty much have OCD when it comes to these types of things so I'm sitting here going just one more skill before I take risk it, no just one more!

At this rate I might still be saying this in two years time

I don't like them either. They're a pretty heavy disincentive for me to do anything in w-space or null. It took years just to get rid of learning skills though, so I'm not holding my breath.

No of course not what would be the point of that.

So what about hardwirings? They give significant bonuses to your performace and ISK earning potential, while being just as available and potentially costing even more than attribute implants. Not using them gimps you when competing against people who do use them, meaning pretty much everyone these days. If you just remove learning implants, people are going to stick performance implants in their place at the start, be unwilling to risk them and we will be pretty much back to square one.

This topic has been discussed to death though, if you want to see all the arguments and ideas, just read this thread.

Grudging agree with the OP

When i first started this game i was fearless. I went all over nullsec in a noob ship and did not care what happened. Once i got my +5s i did not leave highsec for 6 months and now i spent most of my time in a clone with no implants.

There's these things I heard about, I think they are called.... J... Ju... Jump ... Jump Clones? Yeah, that's it! Jump Clones. You can get implants in one, and have no implants or cheaper implants in another and use one to PVP and one to not PVP.

Get this: I also heard you don't need standings to install them in your nullsec corps station and that there are corps in the market section that let you join, get jump clones, and leave. Free.

I also heard that +3s are cheaper than +4s, and +2s are cheaper than +3s, and so on. A wise man once said: don't fly what you can't afford to lose. Implants go in your pod and you fly your pod so it applies.

Oh and no one makes you have implants.

What

The Jump Clone thing is over-rated. Yes if you want to do something risky you can go use the jumpclone, but now you're stuck in "low risk, low SP" mode for 24 hours. And stuck again in "high risk, high SP" mode for another 24 hours once you switch back.

Someone else brought up hardwiring. The difference is this. Hardwirings make me better at what I'm doing "right now". On that basis I can take them or leave them easily enough. But learning implants make me able to do "new things" in a few weeks/months. And being able to do new things is what keeps the game interesting.
My time spent in game peaks every time I "unlock" a new skillset, and drops off pretty fast if I spent too long trying to get the next one.

Andski already made this post and did it better.

And yes, I agree with the idea.