Skill Discussions

Your own anecdote completely proves that you don't need to wait 2 years before you start having fun.

Your friends seem to have had the idea that they did, though. From whom did they get that idea? Someone they all knew who stubbornly insisted that they needed 45M SP to start playing.

Who can the mystery villain be?

Who is he?

As a 3 week old noobie I would say there isn't a problem with SP. I got lucky and found a null sec corp willing to take me in and train me on day 1. From what I've gathered this is not a unique thing. Last night I flew in my first alliance destroyer roam. I lost a couple of ships worth maybe 4 million isk but was part of a kill on 20 misk ship and I had a blast doing it.

The common misconception ( I held it too ) , seems to be that a low SP pilot will be useless for PVP fleet actions. What could probably be made clearer is just how useful a rookie in a cheap fast tackle frigate can actually be.

Sure I would love to flying a mile long juggernaut of doom, and in time I will, but for now I can have a great time participating in battles zipping around in my Condor. I would suggest changing your focus from " I want to fly a huge ship and kill things" to "I want to join in and help my fleet to victory".

EVE is a long game, with long goals, long consequences and a really long lifetime. I imagine changing this would only diminish if not destroy the very reason we all play it. There's no shame in admitting a game isn't for you and moving on.

As for what is being done, I have no clue CCP is rather close-lipped or vague about whether anything is being done.

All you can do is keep bringing it up and try to gather a following.
The more players agreeing with your views, the more likely CCP will hear you.

I have two Mains that are both about 1 1/2 years old.
I have had a blast with them the whole time.

Every time i would get a new skill trained to a point that it opened new options of play it is like Christmas.
The first time i could do cruisers, then battle-cruisers, then battleships, T2 guns, and a month or two ago strategic cruisers, it was a bit of a rush . In fact, the rush still has not worn off on the strategic cruiser. I love my Cloaky Lokis.

There are so many things to do in EVE that by buying an avatar, you are missing a lot of the content.
This is not like WOW where the game is played only at the top level.
There is no endgame for you to become part of.

And without the experience that goes with the skill points, you could be mistaken for someone that knows what you are doing and led others astray. That would not be good for wanting to keep new players.

Posting in a stealth 'Reset skill points!' thread.

The game is designed to be hard so scrubs will leave. EVE has more subs (alts or not) than ever. Go play an easy game. CCP is on the cusp of ruining the game as they bend over for the slow crowd.

...this entire thread is one big whine about there being an opportunity cost in SP.



This is funny, given that the OP has repeatedly whined about how he can't train for combat and mining at the same time.



Except... it's not. There is an initial appearance that that is the case, but it's entirely illusory and the smarter folks figure that out pretty quickly. The preternaturally stupid ones who can't figure it out head to the forums to complain. Guess which one you are?

The list of things you can't do without "months of training" is extremely short, which is why I've repeatedly asked the OP to specifically state what it is he and his friends were unable to do without "years" worth of SP.

Remarkably, he has yet to actually furnish a response to that question, opting instead to copy+paste the same drivel over and over and over again.

In some ways I agree with the OP, as the boredom of level one mission running caused me to throw in the towel a little over a year ago, after only about a month of gameplay and training. But I picked the game up again about two months ago and just threw myself into it in any way I could. And now I'm having an absolute blast with my 4.5 mil SP player.

In fact, I clearly remember the day I quit playing a year ago. I spent most of my hard-earned ISK on a Celestis, fit it for exploration, and proceeded to take it out to low sec sans any sort of cloaking device. No need to explain what happened - you can easily figure it out. But what I've realized now that I'm back in the game is that my SP had nothing to do with that or any other debacle. I lost that ship and quit because I didn't understand a damned thing about fitting, the right ship for the right job, life in low sec, and of course EVE Rule Number One.

Yes, Eve has a treacherous learning curve. It's hard. If that's not for you, there are plenty of games that will hold your hand and let you use end-game equipment in a few hours. Personally I love games that challenge me and don't try to hold my hand until I'm a capped level god with uber equipment fighting a bunch of equally-fit 13 year olds who obtained their god-characters after a week of playing.

I'm now a full-time explorer living in low sec space, and I'm there about 90% of the time, other than the occasional trading run to sell my loot. I can't fly any T2 ship. I can't use T2 guns. In fact, only about 50% of my modules at best are T2, and that includes drones. In the past month alone I've pulled down in excess of 1 billion ISK without losing a single ship to pvp. In fact, the only ship I've lost was a LOLfit exploration Thorax, which is nearly as funny an image as the exploration Celestsis (Note to budding explorers: Don't try to solo a low sec 4/10 with a gimped Thorax wielding t1 guns and a cloak/salvager/probelauncher/codebreaker/analyzer. it is spectacularly bad).

Anyway, I've learned that surviving and thriving in EVE is far more about understanding the environment than it is about having the best equipment. I've learned about creating safe spots, and the cloak/MWD method of giving the finger to gate camps, and (thank the good lord) the d-scan button. I've made friends with some locals, and we exchange intelligence about our low sec patch. I'm at the point now where I laugh at some of the idiot "pirates" trying to scan me down, and have almost as much fun taunting them into a game of cat-and-mouse than I do actually making ISK. And if it backfires and one of these jokers pops me? Oh well. next time I won't make that mistake.

And finally, one point that that I don't think I've seen anyone make in this thread yet - if you gimp down the SP requirements for new players to get into more ships and professions, you might make it more noob-friendly and gain subscriptions on the front end, but how many veteran players will you lose? "From Noob to Titan in 66 days!!!" Great. What do I do on day 67 when I'm already tired of battles between fleets of titans (and only titans) in every freaking system, all piloted by 13 year olds? oh yeah, I quit and find something else to do with my time. You have to bring in new players, sure, but you also have to keep the vets engaged and interested. These are the things that make this game great.

I have trained new players for a lowsec PvP Corp in the last months. They started PvP after about 1 week, had their first kills a few days later, organized their first WH raid without veteran help after 2 weeks and asked "Are we going to kill something?" after 3 weeks.

Yes, Eve is hard...

Weird how people are bashing on the OP, even going to the point that EVE is not for him - despite the fact that it apparently IS, as HE is having fun with his ISK-generated toon. His problem is that it apparently isn't for his FRIENDS. Please note the difference.


There's a ton of half-assed 'solutions' to the problem of EVE's SP system scaring away noobs, that are no solutions at all.


Let's please have a look at the newb that finished his trial, MAYBE his first month of play, got a nice impression of the game and just ran into the SP wall, because he learned about EVEmon and skill plans, i.e. WHY did he run into that wall?


1.) Forget about what role and fun he could have in CORPS, especially PvP corps. IF we are talking about a mature player, maybe he just wants to be somewhat AUTONOMOUS before he starts looking for a corp he actually FITS in. (WoW had to introduce all kinds of in-game incentives - guild perks - to more or less FORCE people to start actively looking for guilds to join, as a ton of people were happy playing solo and occasionally teaming up with others!)

2.) Keep in mind that the player will look at financing his playtime via PLEX med- to longterm. The system is there, therefore there's a good chance one of the reasons the player chose to try out EVE is because of that.

3.) There's a good chance the player will want to do what he is most familiar with at that point from the tutorials, i.e. mission running. He will probably have set his eyes on a battleship of his choice (because of 2.)) - and once he figures out a plan in EVEmon to fly that ship well, THAT is when he will run straight into the SP-wall-of-QUIT-GAME.

1-3. will probably not apply to the hard-core PvPers that are happy with being the tackle monkey (and don't mind paying for their 'fun' either), nor the people with a trader or miner mindset, but I sincerely believe that they apply to the majority of new players out there.

Now the question is...do we really want to ONLY play with PvP maniacs and die-hard economists, plus a few regular people who stuck with the game against all odds or do we want our game to offer a perspective for more people than that minority?

Nothing worth doing is ever easy. I do agree though that new accounts should get double training speed for the first month or something.