Player Features and Ideas Discussion

With the recent frigate re-balancing people have been all out doing mad things and having fun, cheap fights are now on the horizon and a fresh start for old bored people is here.

Well not really, many high SP characters are banned from having fun in frigate brawls because their clone costs as much as 30 frigates, such a big no no for the old guys who could bring experience and would love to get their hands dirty because they have quite some huge finances. But even so we didn't get a nice pile of isk by inefficiently spending it on clones.

Do some mechanic with the clones if it so pleases you, i know the ability to lose SP needs to stay in game, but seriously, why can't we have fun with the noobies too? Why do we have to roll alts to take advantage of the most basic ships in game.

REMOVE THE COST COMPLETELY!!!

Or do something nice with the clone mechanic, but allow for disposable warfare clones that need no implants or anything.

As a newish player, clone cost are irrelevant. The cost of ships and modules far outweigh clone cost.

This is an issue for toons with higher skill points... and significantly higher clone costs.

This is probably not the point of the thread but the wording "skill points kept" seems clunky to me, maybe the word preserved, or maybe a phrase to indicate the amount of storage space the clone has (it's capacity in SP)

It's nice to see this issue getting some attention. I'm one of many pilots who started out in eve making progression decissions based on Everquest / WoW logic, heading straight for my first Battleship with terrible fitting skills etc. Lately I find far more enjoyment in the little ships sub BC. But my clones cost more than the hulls + fits in most cases.

I don't know if totally removing clones is viable I assume from a design perspective you want to impart a sense of value in an older more skilled character. If clone costs can't go away totally what about a one off clone cost as you pass thresholds in training to enable any farther training in that clone? Once paid individual clone losses are free until you need to make another milestone purchase.

Great. This is the # 1 reason why I don't venture into nullsec more casually as much as I used to in my early days. My blank clone is 6x the cost of the ship I would mess about with.

Clone costs are really one reason (of the many reasons) for me why I do not like going 0.0. In low sec you can avoid losing your clone with high probability, but in 0.0 you almost lose it every time you run into a bubble. This is not fun for older characters like me where even without any implants you easily spend several 10 M ISK if not even 100 M ISK for a new clone.

Maybe you should be able to have a dedicated 'Combat Clone' (as mentioned before) which is free and comes with no skill point limit (can jump in and out of say every 4 hours) but you CANNOT put implants on it?

This has already been talked about. Changing the clone location to a 24 hour cool down, much like jump clones, would easily prevent such abuse.

What people need to remember when it comes to game mechanic changes is if you want to fix one, it very well mean you have to address other changes at the same time for it to work.

If only they made some effort to reduce the disparity between the ships newer players can fly and those the super-veterans can... Something like a ship rebalancing effort...

I fail to see how you think clone cost affects the dps/tank/cap/options disparity. Total SP makes the disparity, clone costs just affects the willingness to engage and the consequence of losing.

I'm a trainee FC for TEST, which means I'm allowed to take out cruisers and frigates but not normally supposed to take out bigger ships. Here's what I've found.

New players love coming on fleets in smaller ships and are very relaxed about dying or getting podded. They are a blast to fly with and I'm enjoying the fleets very much.

Veteran players are inhibited from coming out on Boot Camp FC fleets. The perception is that it's half an hour of shooting red crosses as punishment for 2 minutes of fun.

Players with implants in are inhibited from coming out on Boot Camp FC fleets. It's generally assumed that we usually welp the fleets.

This leads to a stagnant pvp game where veterans want to fly advanced high skill ships like Zealots under FCs who have run fleets for 10 years while newbies love happy go lucky casual fleets where it's wonderful if we win but doesn't matter if we lose. And as people age in the game they turn from those fun newbros into bitter risk averse vets.

There are exceptions - I love flying with the newbros and can afford to replace 10 20 million isk clones plus 20 +4 implants per month but for most that's simply too expensive. For most older players there's a double punishment - not only is it expensive to pvp adventurously but also it penalises progression as you can't use the sort of implants that a player who never gets podded does so you accrue less skill points.

And this is in TEST which is probably where the greatest integration of new and old players happens. Most players in null simply to everything possible to minimise risk entirely or we see veteran pvpers move to low sec to keep their Slave sets safe.