Player Features and Ideas Discussion

If you are considering removing clone costs altogether. Consider removing the necessity to buy them too. If they are free, upgrading clones would simply be busywork.

For a (minor) isk sink instead, consider adding a charge to set a new medical clone default location.

I would suspect you would not lose any of the isk sink doing this (as high SP characters avoid losing clones as much as possible currently). While also making it convenient for people to change clone location.

Win / Win

Having the option to store more than one clone in a station and being able to swap between them without triggering the 24hr clone jump countdown would be a very useful improvement.

Ths would be especially useful for characters that have clones with different mindlinks or weapon/tank specific implants plugged in.

Most important:

if your clone have less sp than your current clone must be a special advise like "you forget to upgrade clone" before your try to undock.

That would not be bad actually, but how soon before some complain about the cost of their implants being lost?

I support this change if it allows greater PvP.

Clone costs are a rather redundant balancing tool for younger less skilled players versus older broader skilled players.

As an 'old' character with 125M+ skillpoints, clone costs are incredibly prohibitive even after this reduction on my playstyle since I have for the last few years mostly been involved with Gallente Faction Warfare.

In FW the most common ships flown are frigates, destroyers and cruisers and for me my base clone cost is actually normally at least 4 or 5 times the cost of a fitted cruiser.

This makes PVP (which is all I actually like to do) completely cost ineffective in these smaller ships because :

i) Pod losses often happen due to lag etc anyway
ii) Enemies are more often (compared to other areas of PVP) flying the fastest scan resolution ships ie: frigates/ sensor boosted destroyers etc
iii) It takes much more loot gained from killing enemies to even cover the loss of one pod

I am also put off pvping in nullsec for exactly this same reason. Certain ships like the Interdictor that I love flying are basically a huge loss making coffin for older higher skilled characters like myself.

My perception is I find it rather distasteful that in order to cost effectively fly these smaller ships I'd need to train up a low skillpoint alt, and so am effectively being penalised for being a loyal customer/player by not being able to fly all the ships I've trained for on a par with some newer player.

The re-balancing of ships has generally been a success from what I can tell with regards making more ships useful, accessible and quicker to specialise for, however the incongruity of clone loss still makes flying a lot of these ships a penalty for some like me.

10 years of Eve means you have a lot of older skilled characters out there so clone costs would be better set at some flat rate in my opinion, so this reduction is a welcome start, but does not rectify this outdated mechanic.

Eve is now a mature MMO - I'm sure the demographics see a wide range of character ages/skillpoint players playing the game - most ships can be specifically trained to a near maximum within 6 months and in PVP I generally assume everyone I fight will be maximum skilled and this holds true for the majority of PVP.

The idea that one character has a massive advantage in PVP over another due to character age is now completely flawed and the clone cost mechanic was there to support that for the immature Eve. It is time to remove that poor legacy mechanic of increasing clone cost IMHO now Eve has reached maturity.

Thats my feedback. Cheers.

Thanks, even though it's not that much of a change.
Could you please put away the exponential cost increase?

I'm close to the Tau clone and besides fun PVP fleets i'm not doing much (as in living off of savings, not earning anything).
And i surely would prefer to burn my isk on ships alone compared to overexpensive pods.

Even after the change a pod (without implants) will still hurt me more than a Tech-2 frigate.
When i don't have a proper ship at hand for a fleet i will probably still not mind to bring tackle and rather log.

Some problem. My main char will continue to be in station. These price changes will make no difference in my willing to undock in anything less expensive than my clone.

I think CCP is worry of loosing this ISK sink but I think I have a possible solution:

I think the solution to this problem could be found by doing the opposite. Each clone upgrade to the next level should cost x more times what it costs today, then any clone replacement should cost a base fee of 1M isk. We shift the cost structure for the moment of the upgrade and that is it.

Only CCP can do the math to check if this is possible, we need to check statistics and determine how many times a player with skill points x was killed in x period of time. Then calculate an average and determine the base multiplier for the clone upgrade.

In terms of ISK spend, players will spend the same as today and CCP will not loose ISK, but in practice it solves the undocking problem and in long term it also increases CCP sink because players will be killed much more.

Finally, to avoid huge costs each time we need to upgrade a clone, CCP also needs to review the list of clones available and the skill points associated to each one and round them. We need a much small progression skill points jump between clones (until we reach 100M points) and something that makes more sense when we look at the clone window.
I think that until 10M points the clone progression should be make in jumps of 1M, then until 100M in jumps of 5M and after that in jumps of 10M.

I only scanned through some of the responses, so if this was brought up before then forgive me. However I think this is a great step. I am thinking about taking advantage of this but in combination with another feature.

Currently we use closer alts in wormholes. Quick way to take a low skilled pilot to ram a lot of mass though a wormhole to close that last little critical bit. If they get caught on the wrong side of the wormhole then simple self destruct. you loose a 5 mill cruiser but nothing else. Because it doesn't take much training to make a closer alt, 3 days tops, you can keep the default clone. However you can't really train up a lot of other skills. Since your going to be blowing this pilot up a lot, you don't want to buy a clone. However if the price is cheap enough I might use the new plex to train another character on my account to add a few more skills to make the closer a little more useful in the hole. I will never get him up to very high because of clone cost but might still give this a try.

Worst case scenario I lose one of my closer alts and gain another utility character.

The topic is 'costs too much'... and perhaps affects game play.

Didn't your cruiser and fittings cost a lot more?

+1