Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Premise: I use t2 rigs a fair bit. Do I have rig skills at 4? Mostly no. Am I ever going to train them up? Probably not, I can live with the drawback. This was a good change by CCP.

Leading me to:

Problem: newbies often feel catching up with older players is just overwhelming, and the time needed to get up to their level is for some a real turnoff.

Proposal: make flying anything, fitting anything, using any implant, ammo, drone etc possible for any subscribed account, regardless of their SP. Introduce heavy penalties to effectiveness that are alleviated with skill training.

This is something I been thinking about since Rise was talking about permadeath characters - I think this might be a better way forward for introducing a more F2Pish element to eve without sacrificing the benefits of having invested many years into the game.

Genius? Dumbest thing you heard all day?

If you think about it, it's how everything already works.
For example, missiles have about 60% penalty to range that can be alleviated with skill training.

Ofc, we still have prerequisites currently.

Any post that ever suggests this exhibits no knowledge about game design, nor motivation. Honest question: why support SP at all, from a game design context? Is it not the reason that many fresh subs probably get bored with the game?

Well, why is this question relevant with the topic? What's the point of meta modules if T2 modules and ammo are accessible with probably much fewer negatives inherently, because of increased range and base damage? OK, so how would that improve with no SP completely? Well at least with that there's no balance problem, just the ISK array per module, including from availability.

Yet rigs have no actual effectiveness penalty without the training, yeah, just no penalty reductions? That's not quite this suggestion; but even with that, what would be another option for penalties?

Basically, a more narrow idea is splitting up all training through the factions (without adding SP). It would seem much less, maxing out a ship, if the stats required 1/4 of the SP. Yet again, does that seem like it would attract the popular and of the chain reaction that comes from social media? For completeness, SP seems the problem with content completely, as fewer skilled characters equates with fewer effective corporations and alliances and with less industry across stations. I would charge CCP with checking not only the PCU, but also ships in space as a measurement of game health -- upon the obvious appeal, and applications, of more effective gameplay per character.

Ewww that idea... Sounds nice! So we don't need to train SP anymore, so mostly everything is Gnosis like. And for all the ammount of SP which already been trained we would have a buy out programm with CCP 1m SP = 1000 Aurum.

That's odd. The fresh character might feel that their best option is flying a titan.. and that seems beneficial for both their interest, their gameplay, and the company from their sub. That effects basically none of a veteran experience, but a lot of theirs.

----double post------------

I think you need to pick one. Either players who rush to Battleships are weaker because they lack skills, or there isn't really a gap and the only difference is experience.

The penalties are already there, just remove the lvl5 (and perhaps lvl4) unlock requirements, those are unnecessarily restrictive.

I think new players need to not feel pressure to fly larger than a frigate, but it makes sense to me that you have access to a wide variety of fitting options right in your first few hours of play. That is why I suggest bringing back basic modules and making them be sold by NPCs for ISK in some systems.