EVE General Discussion

What I can do after 9 years with an average of 2447SP/h will take a new starter a good 12+ years to do due to a lower speed cap (1800SP/h).

If the cap is set to 2700SP/h for everyone that same new starter would be at my current level after only 8 years.

They will never catch up to the people starting a decade earlier.

Exactly, so it doesn't matter what you do or change. Also, how is this a problem?

No, your logic is flawed. I thought this was about evening the playing field, removing implants and remaps? Regardless of what everyone's SP/h will be set to, newbies will never catch up to older players so given that it really doesn't matter what the sp/h is.


Or... could it be... just perhaps... that this isn't at all about equality, but about how you and everyone else want 2700SP/h without any of the downsides? That this whole "nonono, it's better for the game and the newbies, THINK OF THE NEWBIES!" is just a lie?

SAY IT AINT SO!

Ahh, politics.

Okay, here's what's going to happen. Attributes, remaps, and attribute implants are going to die. Regular combat implants are going to remain, but they're probably going to be rebalanced a bit to compensate for some of the missing holes.

SP will become a flat SP/H based on the current maximum, or something very close to it. In addition, expect a balancing pass for implants. They might take the opportunity to rework the bonuses a bit, but overall the system should remain superficially the same: Stick chips in your head for fighty power, get podded and lose the fighty power. Circle of life. Expect compensation in the form of LP for any implants that go missing.

I know all this because I have over a decade of studying MMOs in general and EVE in particular, and also because I have the cognitive ability required to whistle and **** at the same time.

The core of it is this: Due to a combination of tradition and greed, MMO companies like to keep you from being max level too quickly. They put up walls between newbie level and maxed out character level. Eve's skill system is different from the leveling systems you see in most MMOs, but the fundamental drive is the same.

What isn't the same, however, is the methodology. Eve's designers originally made the brilliant observation that the goal of the "grind" is too keep people from getting powerful too quickly. That is, it's a delay. It's about time. So why not make the progression system in Eve purely a question of waiting? It's a simple system, and you don't force people to do **** they don't want to in order to advance.

But see, here's the kicker. In most MMOs, progression speed is not a universal constant. There's no real hard cap on how fast you can hit 100 in WoW. I mean, in practice there is, but it's a soft sort of cap. In Eve, it's really hard and fast. But there's still some minor variance. Implants, attributes, remaps.

CCP wants to kill that variance.

Why?

Because it is a dominating force. You can always say "I'll level faster". You can always say "I'll grind more missions" or "I'll mine more Veldspar". But you can't say "I'll create more time". You can't magic any extra hours out of your ass. Which means if people are given the choice of "make the most of my only hard limited resource" or "do literally anything else", you better believe they're going to go with sitting in a station with a head full of +5s. It's the same logic that caused learning skills to get vaporized way back when, and it's just as relevant now as it was back then.

This is why the system is bad. This is why it's going to die. This is why the game will be better for it.

No, your precious hardcore sandbox is not going away. Nobody's getting free Titans in their inbox. This is not the beginning of the end, it's another step in the endless refining process. Embrace the change and realize it'll result in better living for everybody.

Or cry loudly. It doesn't make a lot of difference.

I know here is a crazy thought. Lets just wipe out all skill points and allow all players to start again. Then that way we can redo our skills that have been wasted on stuff that we should have put more thought into when we first started playing the game because I think it is unfair that new players have their hand held more than me.

Every time subscriptions reach an extra 1000 then every player should get an allocated skill point because we are getting more players on board this so called boring game....