Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Copy pasting my standard Skillpoint rant:

- All skills cap at level 5. No matter how many years you have played the game, you cannot exceed that limit. And lower level skills (ex. [Racial] Frigate) are very quick to train relative to more advanced skills.

- (*this is the important one*) Only a limited number of skills affect any one ship, module, weapon system, and specialty at any given time.
Ex1: You are a newbie facing someone with about 20 million SP... but how much of that overall SP is actually combat related? He/she could be a HUGE industrial player with limited combat skills.
Ex2: A veteran player has just trained up the skill Large Hybrid Turret to level 5. That skill in no way affects the skill Small Hybrid Turret and thus the veteran will be no better or worse than before at the frigate level.

- Getting a skill from level 4 to level 5 only adds on an extra 2% here, 5% there (exceptions apply). If you simply train up all the skills within a specialty to level 4 (which takes a fraction of the amount of time it takes to get those skills to level 5), you will find yourself flying at about 80 to 90% of the effectiveness of a multi-year veteran with those same skills in that specific specialty at level 5.

- Getting a skill to level 5 is supposed to be a painful train. Many players (yes, even veteran ones) opt to avoid doing it and instead train up other skills to level 4 (again, because it's faster).

- Ships and weapons have been balanced against one another.
Ex: A battleship can potentially instapop a frigate... but the frigate can fly very fast, making it difficult for the battleship's weapons to track, especially at very close range... then again, the battleship can deploy drones to deal with the frigate... and the frigate can shoot the drones down... however the battleship might have a Large Energy Neutralizer fitted to nuke the frigate's capacitor power every 24 seconds... in which case the frigate could use a Small Nosferatu that sucks out capacitor from the battleship every 3 seconds... etc. etc.

- High tech equipment (ex. T2, Faction, Officer, etc) will not give a player "I WIN" abilities. It simply gives a player a linear edge at an exponentially higher cost.
Ex: A group of two or three T1-fit frigates that cost about 500 thousand to 1 million ISK CAN kill a faction frigate worth about 50 to 100 million ISK... provided they are using the right mods in the right configuration and know what they are doing.


tl;dr...
- the point of the skill system is to force you to learn the game's mechanics and nuances in cheaper equipment and ships... that way when you DO gain access to more expensive equipment and ships, you know HOW to use them properly (and won't cry as much when they die).

- you DO NOT NEED to have level 5 in any specific skill to be "competitive." Having level 5 in a skill is simply an edge (exception: when it is required for something else).

- more SP is not indicative of a pilot's ability. It just means that the pilot has more options in what he/she can do.

- no one ship is superior to everything in the game. Even Titans, the largest ship in the game, has an Achilles heel; smaller ships.

- Having more skillpoints is not the "end all, be all" point of the game and there is more to PvP than just "enter battle, F1- F9." With good player skills (not character skills) even a Velator can kill a Battlecruiser. Skillpoints can't teach/give you this.
(NOTE: granted, the Velator was piloted by a veteran player... but the Tornado pilot wasn't a [complete] scrub either. The fact that THIS is possible means that a newbie with enough experience (player-wise... not SP-wise) can pull off something amazing (the guy pulled off the same thing against an Oracle later on)).

- once you have your "universal" core and support skills near or at maximum (which takes about 3 or 4 months of focused training) the gap between you and an older player begins to narrow quite significantly.



Exploit found: have a friend pod you over and over again to gain skillpoints.

Dust has a terrible skill system designed to force you to play the game by limiting passive SP gain, as well as being micro transaction based in what is essentially P2W via accelerates SP gain. So, please, not in my EVE. I'd much rather Dust copied EVE.

so I pod alts, get sp for it and have a nice day.

Now before you say noob alts won't give much....allow me to introduce the bitter vet alts. We (well I am just jaded at 4yrs, I don't get my bitter card till a few more years) tend to have decent sp alts. This alt for example I farmed a good 9 months on to make everything short of t3 and some combat skills to grind missions back in the day to reach level 4 agents before ccp shifted data core favoring to FW (I do miss my passive core farming....sigh, lol).

We'll say 5%....I shoot this char at 5% with main and, well, I am not seeing how your noobs catch up in sp totals. Players of many years can just farm sp on good alts. Get bored shooting this all, I have another 6-7 month alt as well. And some 2 monthers for covert cyno lighting. Basically if your reply is well limit times you do this, I got alts to cycle as I ride out cool down timers.

And TBH I have crap compared to true hardcore bitters. Know some whose alts my main still needs 2-3 years to "catch up" too. We are talking 5+ alts easy. This not hard to do if here the first few years of eve.


Not going to go through usual stuff on this. Shah hit most of my usuals. Will say even the biggest baddest bitter bet can die with just one simple action. Noob tackles them and lives long enough for backup dps/added points to bring them down. The death of a titan even can begin with one lone dictor pilot. Tons of sp, assuming not a true titan alt years of gameplay as the players main. And its locked down by a t2 dessie that if focused trained can be done somewhat quickly.

Guys, I think I did a pretty terrible job at describing this if you think you can just pod your alts and become an instant know-it-all.
The idea is that you would get a small amount of SP that would suffer from diminishing returns.

If you wanted to actually gain a substantial amount of SP you would have to go out into the galaxy and actively seek players you have not already podded to continue to gain SP. Someone also mentioned the idea that noobs would give fewer skill points. That could also be a ISK deterrent, attach the SP gained directly to a percentage of the podded characters skill points or clone type.

Also, split the SP gain among the gang that did the podding, to deter blobbing for SP. This might actually encourage solo PVP.

Add in a timer that resets the diminishing returns, following the way do in Dust with their bonus.

Lastly, to the guys that say "No Dust in mah EVE", I didn't even want to see the healer class in eve, but alas the logi is and has been here to stay for quite some time. The game changes and Dust does have merits as a game.

I was thinking along the lines of 0.01%/0.02% of the SP total podded, not a ton, but enough to speed up training with enough activity. And with diminishing returns in effect, who cares if you pod yourself? I would imagine that podding yourself in public would come with its own interesting consequences, like people having a new method to figure out who your alts are and probably making fun of you on the forums for podding yourself habitually.

A disco BS in Jita comes with its own consequences.

This is needed to refute one of the most common arguments against EVE that I hear and to encourage more PVP while giving people a route to actively increase their skill points.

Gosh ! Eve is already more easy years after years...
That is a bad idea ! Don't do that !

i play dust, and that's a terrible idea.

Okay, giving you the benefit of the doubt, can you think of any way to make it so that rich, old, vet players wouldn't benefit as much?

Not without adding a massive list of arbitrary restrictions. It's an idea that gets proposed fairly often, and as far as I know, no-one has figured out how to stop people abusing it.

Here's one thing they can adopt from Dust 514: reimbursement of SP when they make radical changes.