EVE New Citizens Q&A

skills and skill often get confused in this game. If you are talking strictly skill points the most certainly yes if you are talking player skill then most likely no.

There are plenty of vets out there that have started newer toons and gone around and killed years old players on toons a couple months old but you are talking about a person that's been playing the game for a long time.

Another thing that you want to get out of your mind in eve is the concept of a fair fight. "fair fights" are almost non-existent in eve nor are they something that are desirable. This game is all about turning the odds in your favor. There is no level cap in this game there is no queueable PvP there are no 10 v 10 or 40 v 40 battlegrounds of players of the same "level" or anything like that in this game.

I'm not much of a PvPer but I know enough about it to know that if you want to win it's all about gaining the upper hand. You can do that with shear numbers like the blob concept or with knowlege or skill or intelligence (meaning the data kind not the brain kind).

Another thing to keep in mind is you can play this game for years and never learn to PvP or you can learn how to PvP well in a short amount of time. It's all about practice and focus. There are plenty of tutorials and videos and blogs and such out there to help with this as well as twitch streamers. Just get out there and do it and keep in mind you learn nothing when everything goes right. Experience is usually gained from screwing up. With every loss you'll become a better PvPer.

Time.

At two months you don't know anything - so the gap between you and someone who has a few months on you may be huge.

Say you have two months and they have four. They have twice your experience.

Four years from now - they could still have two more months experience than you do - but out of four years that will not matter that much.


As to veterans that have four years on you now - that is going to take a lot longer to catch up to but there is a point of diminishing returns both in skill points and experience with the game. The skill points get harder to come by as you move up a skill ladder and the things you continue to learn become more refinements on your experience than massive revelations.

So - no - you're not ever going to "catch up" with someone who started playing four years ago but it will matter less and less.

What matters more than experience though - is a players ability. Some people are just better players than other people. Put simply - a person who is an idiot, with four years experience - will probably still be an idiot when they have six. A stupid person may get a lot of mileage out of their relative experience vs. a newer player - but eventually, the newer player will become a veteran themselves and be able to out play the stupid person.

Now - the flip side of that - is people who are really good players who have been playing a really long time - those people are going to have a decided advantage over most of the other people playing the game. Still - they are only one person. If they are in command of a unit of other players, their wisdom, knowledge and experience can have a much more profound effect than if they were just by themselves. Here - leadership skills - come to matter and some people are simply better leaders than others.

So - no - your probably not going to "catch up" with someone who has vastly more time in game than you do. The thing is - there is an attrition to game players. Most of the people who were playing EVE in 2003 - aren't playing any more. Once you've been playing a good long time yourself - then you'll be someone who has vastly more experience than all the new players coming along.


To sum up:

1) The difference between you and someone just ahead of you now will matter less and less as time goes by.
2) Eventually, innate ability comes to matter more than skill points or experience.
3) Some people you will never catch up to, though you can close the gap - but then there will be all those people who came along after you did that you have an advantage over and fewer and fewer older players who are still playing the game.


.
.
.

Most of the traditional (and generally correct) perspectives and views on your inquiry have been shared. Yet a couple small thoughts:

People do quit permanently.
People take vacations from the game, dropping their subscription (and there by training regimen).
Occasionally these breaks will last a few years.
Some who begin to loathe their total clone replacement costs choose to make 2nd characters that are built for certain types of low SP game-play, particularly in characters that will have a fixed & locked set of skills.

If anything, after a certain point SP is just a key to different game-play styles. As well as occasionally a reason to not undock
(if your clone with a pair of standard implants is 80m isk to replace, and your frigate 3 million isk, how frequently do you want to get caught in a bubble and lose both?).

End of the day, - just play, figure out what you enjoy doing and get the core skills to support that. If you have the core skills for that game play? Sure, take them to 5. But do so realizing skills aren't everything, they're just part of the picture.

I can confirm this totally ...
... FIRST HAND EXPERIENCE ...
... except that SP, me, is everything! ;)