Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Anyone who's met me in game knows that I'm not usually one for kicking up a fuss and crying about **** anywhere public. But I think this one deserves some special attention.

As a 6-month-old newbie, I created a humble afktar alt, with starry-eyed dreams of flying a badass triage Archon with a character I'd trained myself. Well here I am, over two years later, and said alt has just finished Amarr carrier 5. I picked a triage pilot off the market a couple years ago when I ran into some isk, and I'm now the proud owner of two perfect Archon pilots.

...at least, I was.

See, I was pretty psyched with the introduction of FAX machines. Splitting the triage role from DPS always made sense to me. I was looking forward to being able to fly both ships in the future. Today, however, this appeared in markets across New Eden. The price, I'm not too concerned about. It's the training that horrifies me.

Now, let's do some rough maths. A pilot with perfect remaps and +4s trains about 2600sp/hour. To get my two Archon pilots to the same utility they have now, I will have to train for a total of 156 days on both accounts. That's 6 PLEX, or 33 skill injectors. So either 7.2bil per account if I'm patient enough to train, or 15-20bil in injectors (300k sp per injector).

Bear in mind that I only have Amarr carrier 5. Anyone with all carriers to 5 will have to train for 328 days to maintain the same utility post-Citadel that they currently have today.

So, a quick message to whoever decided that this would be the best way of doing things - go **** yourself. Seriously. You want me to choose between spending 30-40bil ($250 of Aurum) or just spending 14-15bil on PLEX and sitting on my arse for 5 ******* months?

Now, I'm usually one of the people that laughs at supposed CCP cash grabs when a change comes around, but after this monstrosity hit /r/eve front page last week, I'm more than willing to take my tinfoil hat and duct-tape it to my head. This is a blatant cash grab aimed at pilots like myself that are dedicated enough to this game to persevere and spend the cash to get the skills. You are abusing the trust and dedication of an already-diminishing player base for your own ends. In the hour or so I've been on comms today I know of a couple of triage pilots who plan to just unsub until this mess is sorted out. I'm sure there's more out there.

CCP, if you are reading this: I really hope that this was just a poor balance decision on your part, and that you'll realize how much this fucks over a fair few of your players. Honestly, this is probably more likely. But if I'm right, and your greed is coming first over your players, then shame on you.

/rant

tl;dr Cap pilot mad about training more skills.

I chose to say, screw triage and carriers and just cleared out all the SP needed for those roles.

Made about 18bil doing it and will just stick to Dreads from now on.

The carrier skills are getting refunded, so you just wasted a fair bit in still extractors unless you were planning to move it all to another pilot.

I completely agree. I plugged in all the new skills today. As someone with all four Racial Carriers to V and Fighters V, I am looking at 333 days (and 2.2B ISK) to get back to where I was before this patch. And that's with +5 implants.

The OBVIOUS SOLUTION is to get rid of the fax skill and tie it to the carrier skill and have just 2 hull types that use the same skill - fax's and carriers.