Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Completely against the spirit of the game and also completely unnecessary. Fights do happen in FW area, here is some evidence to support my outlandish claims: https://zkillboard.com/related/30045316/201401110100/

That particular fight involved every single class of ship from Frigates up to Capitals. If you aren't getting enough PvP, you aren't looking hard enough or perhaps aren't taking enough risks.

So a vet's new alt, with purely focused PVP skills, full pirate implants, a decent fit and the best modules available who gets put up against a day three newbie in a laser rifter is a fair fight then?

*sigh* Total skillpoints =/= more powerful.


Posting my usual skillpoint spiel.

- 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 ~20% 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...
- you are using a false metric for "power" and "ability" OP. Having more skillpoints is not indicative of a pilot's ability. It just means that the pilot has more options in what he/she can do.

- 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 2 or 3 months of focused training) the gap between you and an older player begins to narrow quite significantly.

Why does the agent provide a ship? Why not just provide a target? I don't like the idea of ships just appearing out of nowhere.

You are closer this time. Think 3-dimensionally. Vets doing lvl 1s get matched with other vets. Newbies, with, say, less that 10 million skill points get matched with their peers doing lvl 1s. One would assume the ships in the missions would be generic (generic = like the Gnosis, anyone can fly it, no prerequisits).


Ships are provided to make for a fair competition.
The target is to eliminate the competition.
The Agent reclaims the racial ships at end of mission (just like large collidable objects disappear after missions now) and pays the ISK reward and loyalty points.


Maybe you aren't aware of how missions work.

My focus here is on the stratification of players. This can be an introduction to risk-free PvP, and also be potentially lucrative. And, except for mission invaders, it keeps at bay those vets who rely on their positions of superior power.

So I can accept a mission, cancel the mission and keep the ship and modules? Free ships, free minerals, or free isk. And I could do this as much as I want.

So once they're happy witht he confidence they've gained in this risk free fair fights only !!!11 simulation, they go try out ACTUAL PVP, and...


Get trounced. Every single time. because what they thought was a method for teaching them to PVP was actually nothing of the sort. So they go back to the risk free arena, and we slowly end up with less and less PVPers in this game. Which wrecks the markets, which wrecks industry....

This idea will rub many of EVEs PvP crowd the wrong way because it seeks to eliminate the victimization factor they enjoy.

Rather than base the mission off skill points, base it off skill ranks. Pilots will qualify for entry in recruit mission so long as they have level 1-3 in a select set of related skills. At level 4 in any mission skill they are moved up to the vetran versions of those missions.

Personally I would find it hilarious if missions like this became available with fit ships based on how many local 'materials for war preperation' missions have been completed.

However... The mission could be set up that you need an appropiate ship with limits and requirements on fitting to accept the mission. Upon accepting the mission you are given a mission flag that acts as a key to the mission gate, and ship swapping and fitting on that becomes unavailable until win, lose or abandoning the mission. Basically your pod is glued in that particular ship and fit until its over one way or another. That is a lot of convolution to short circuit EVEs normal behavior... But it could be done.

I'm against all ideas that involve this in any way. There is nothing that is "fair" in Eve. Eve does not support happy clappy lovey game play where things are nice and even and all that rubbish. Eve is a game with bad people who have silly ideas about it being good to win and if to win that means, stomping on the sand castles of little children while threatening them with some bike hairy bikers and stealing their candy, then some kids aint gonna have a sandcastle any more and they'll loose that candy.

If you want to PvP against your peers then guess what your peers want to pvp against you but they'll have some predators ready to come stomp on you the moment they have a point. Also ships should never be given away for any reason at all ever.