Player Features and Ideas Discussion

One of the more distorted sides of the "risk vs. reward" issue is the existence of learning implants. Learning implants are pretty much a must in this game because they increase the rate at which we acquire the most precious commodity: skillpoints. The only problem with this is that people in nullsec who PVP have significantly greater risk to their pods than people who play pretty much anywhere else in EVE.

So for literally the same reward, the risk is much, much greater. And as often as nullsec PVPers get podded, replacing +5s or +4s can add up to be quite costly. The only other option is to sacrifice training time, which for most people is a non-option.

To mitigate this risk we often use jump clones, but these are also not without problems. The jump clone timer is 24 hours, meaning that players will often jump into a clone with implants, only to abstain from fleet ops for the next day because they don't want to lose their precious clone. The end result is that the learning implants cause many nullsec dwellers to be risk-averse.

I propose a simple solution: allow learning implants to be unplugged without destroying them. This would exclude the T2 implants of course (Crystals, Snakes, Slaves, etc.), but apply to the attribute enhancers specifically.

This is dumb.

These are the trade offs. You want to pvp with expensive ****? You risk losing said ****.

People who are that concerned about maxing their training time aren't likely to be PVPing anyway.

They're just less likely to PvP, but that doesn't mean CCP shouldn't try to get them to take part in PvP when the opportunity is presented. What all these different implant ideas try to do is allow people to decide the level of risk they take to PvP. That is basically it. Currently you can't make that choice in the short term as far as all implants are concerned and gaining that limited flexibility is put behind a barrier instead of made readily available to all players. The choices left for the people interested in PvP are to put PvP above most implant benefits or not utilize such implants, to soak the extra expense of losing expensive implants, that often offer zero combat benefit for your ship/fit, or being unwilling to pay that extra cost and not PvP at all that time. The choice should be to just decide what you are willing to risk and then allowing players to do that with as few restrictions as possible. Not everyone will choose to PvP, but the added flexibility and lowered barriers will mean more people are going to PvP when the situation presents itself and that is good.

The real question you need to ask is there anything wrong with allowing people to choose their risk level on the short term? I don't see any real downsides to allowing it. The game allows it in other instances and practically no one is complaining about it. To better illustrate the problem you can think of it like ship fitting. Is it better to allow people to change fits/ships as they see necessary or do you force a 24 hour timer between non-destructive fitting/ship changes? Using a long timer between changes forces people to choose fits geared towards their main activity within that timeframe and make choosing your fit/ship have more consequense, but it will also act as an unnecessary barrier for people to take part in any side activity of what that ship/fit specializes in.

My view is, that this pointless barrier should have never been erected in the first place and people should always get to choose their level of risk when flying their spaceships. Jump clones helped with it in a limited way, but the 24 hour timer doesn't work well. I suspect the current jump clone timers were initially put in because of the instant teleporting function of jump clones, since it makes sense to limit such mode of travel. With the wide selection of role specific expensive implant sets the issue with being married to a set of implants has only gotten worse over the years. This issue needs to be fixed permanently one way or another. The precise method is somewhat irrelevant, but it needs to put the choice of what people want to risk fully in the hands of the players and lower the barrier to take part in PvP as much as possible. If you can think of any downsides to allowing this, I'd like to hear it.

I'd say remove the things entirely.

Their main reason of existence seems to be rewarding avoidance of risk.

You get the most benefit from them if you don't take any sort of risk.

Contrary to just about everything else in the game.
You take a mining barge into low-sec or null-sec and you're rewarded with a greater variety and quantity of ore.
You take a missioning ship into low-sec or null-sec and you're rewarded with higher LP payouts.
You take a ratting ship into a belt in low-sec or null-sec and you're rewarded with higher bounty rats.
You place a POS in low-sec or null-sec and you're rewarded with many more options in modules to anchor.

Other implants give additional benefits in space with higher risk by increasing your chances of coming out on top. Learning implants do no such thing.

Even if the rewards don't measure up to the additional risk taken in some cases, there still is an increase in reward. Risks may multiply by a factor of hundreds whilst rewards barely increase at all, point is that with just about every single item players can use there is a reward when risking it, however minor it may be.

I've troubling thinking of any other item that can be purchased which gives the greatest possible benefit by never undocking.

I'd say learning implants are clearly against the spirit of EvE.

That's related to the risk of living in lowsec, not having anything to do with learning implants.

Uh, he mentioned jump clones. Did you actually read the post you were replying to?

And then when you jump back to the clone with implants? What then?

Those were explicitly excluded from the proposal.


Why is that a better solution? In fact, how does that solve the identified problem?

Theres no problem whatsoever, it exists only in your head!

Look, in each moment you need *two implants* only to max your skill training. Make them 2 +3. Or +4. Now its not to expensive, is it?

Multiple JCs in the same station and more than 5 JCs would allow player to base these JCs where he wants, and yet can switch from one clone to another, as apropriate.