EVE General Discussion

I disagree, you can look at utility objectively.

We're arguing semantics now, which isn't the point of this discussion.

Objectively there is nothing in this that is a diminishing return (or utility if you accept that utility can be view objectively)

Subjectively it might seem like you're getting less of an effect if you're only looking at whether or not you're immediately completing a skill or knocking out several low ranks of skills. However, even subjectively, it can feel like the same amount of time shaved off your training queue, whether you get an immediate rankup of a skill or not (which is in line with the objective observations).

You and all the others who think the Daily skill point rewards has diminishing returns couldn't be more wrong even if you tried. Doesn't matter if a player has 5 mill sp's or 50 mill sp's. Training time is the same for both. The only aspects to affect that time is Attribute Implants and Neural Remaps.

Also thinking that experienced players only have level 4-5 skills to train is completely wrong as well. I have over 150 mill sp's and there's still a lot of skills I haven't started training.

These new recent additions to the game - Daily Objective and Skillpoint Injectors - bypasses the Training time which is what this game was founded on. Now it's all about instant gratification. Might as well just remove all skills and training queue and just have all characters able to do everything right from the start.

Then it won't matter if players are new or old, all characters can immediately jump into a Battleship, Dread or Carrier, do some PvP / PvE in Nullsec space and basically feel like they've won the game, all within the first month. Course then they'll get bored and go to another game due to accomplishing everything worth doing in this game.

Oh wait, players are already doing that.


DMC

As a veteran player this is disturbing to me. I do not think that the SP distance between older and newer players should be kept - and I don't believe, most other veterans do. I would easily agree that new players should get a free 20% bonus (no matter if they are online or not) on skill training (maybe a decreasing bonus over time) to close the gap between new and old players a bit and allow new players to catch up in skill faster.

But the daily opportunities neither solve this problem (because they are accessible to everyone, new and old players, just keeping the distance in SP the same) nor is it their purpose to help new players more than old players. Their purpose is to encourage or force players to login daily. But what kind of encouragement is that? Logging in, hop into a ship, fly to a belt, shoot a 3k ISK frig and logoff? The game is supposed to provide content so that players login because they want to play and have fun. And also to not login because they have a bad day or just no time. Now they are punished if they don't or feel forced to do so although they don't want to play today. This can be more annoying to new players because they really want to get the basic skills up and feel particularly bad when they can't login a day or two.

I doubt that the current system of accumulating skill is friendlier to new players: Advanced players know better how to make ISK and have more resources to earn ISK to possibly buy skill injectors and get even more ahead in skill or get ahead in trained alts. They have the ISK to buy +5 implants, they are more often training long running skills to level 5, allowing them to stay longer in the optimal attribute pair before they can remap their attributes and they might even have old bonus remaps.

I would have prefered if skill training had been made even more passive as it was before skill injectors: Remove attribute implants, remove neural attributes on skills and character entirely, remove neural remaps, raise skill training speed generally (to, for example, the level of having optimal attributes and +4 implants) and give new players a general passive - not a "you must shoot a frig" - skill training speed bonus that decreases over time.

With skill injectors and dailies, imo, they have touched the holy grail, that skill was the only thing that ISK - and therefore skill itself which favors actually advanced players over newbies - cannot buy. It allowed players to login to actually play the game and not to login to do something they possibly don't want to do (running utterly mechanical dailies or make ISK for skill injectors) just to be able to play the game at some point later. It's like the return of the hated learning skills in new clothes, something you just have to do to be competitive but with no value on its own. Being able to simply ignore skill training (aside from choosing which skill you want to train), because it always runs automatically and there is no way to make it faster or slower, had the big benefit that you could care about the game content you like or be absent a few days without feeling forced, cheated or punished.

Looking into various ingame channels I have subscribed to I see a whole lot of discussion about skill injectors, things like "I have to run 50 missions this week...", "I have to run 30 hours incursions this week...", "I must make 3 bil this week...", etc., etc. "...to bring my alt number 7 to logi 5", etc., etc. It just feeds the alteritis and advantage of old players more than it helps new players.

Of course, there is still a conflict between new and old players that doesn't go away. For new players skills matter a lot and they welcome everything that speeds skill training up because skills open access to the various contents and features of the game they don't know or haven't explored yet. Over time the value of skills decreases, you know most features and what is most interesting and exciting is the addition of new content - things like a new Apocrypha expansion or whatever adds real content to the game, not development time wasted into weird shoot-a-frig-for-skillpoints-"opportunities".

I know, that's all no big problem for the very regular players who are online every day and focus on PVE anyway. They earn the 10000 SP basically for free. For occasional and less addicted players who are nonetheless paying the same money or PLEXes it is just annoying to fall behind in skill points compared to others and especially to those who do the craziness of login-shoot-logoff. That's very different to the advance a regular player has because he gains more experience by daily play and which can easily be accepted by an occasional player.

TLDR: I'm not against skill point boni for new players. But either give them out for free or not at all. Skills are a means of playing and I don't like much that they partially have been turned into a purpose.

Agree 100%.

Don't know what CCP has been smoking lately but I want some.



DMC

No.

People gave up on the notion that there is anything objective to utility around the time they started giving up on classical utilitarianism.

Now, utility, or more accurately a utility function, is a mathematical representation of preference orderings. Further, there is no unique utility function. In fact, utility functions are defined only up to a monotonic transformation--i.e. that they preserve the preference ordering.

If I say I get 1 "util" from dailies and another player says he gets 100....who gets more utility? Me or the other guy. What if all other things I derive utility form provide at most 1/100 utils, and the other player gets 99 utils from all other goods/services? In other words, inter-personal comparisons of utility are not possible. It is not possible because nobody can tell you what their utility function looks like beyond some very vague notions. For example, preferences are generally assumed to be transitive. That is if I prefer apples to pears and pears to grapes, I prefer apples to grapes. And if you prefer grapes to apples and apples to pears you are not some how wrong.

So, as a new player yes, I might have logged in more frequently to take advantage of dailies. Now...now I'm more likely to go fire up the iPad and re-watch Firefly or Walking Dead. Now I mainly log in to do stuff to other players--i.e. shoot them. Sometimes I log in to make ISK, but even that has become less common as I've acquired more ISK.

So yes, diminishing marginal utility. Think of it like eating a pizza. When you first get it, that first slice is awesome. However, once you've downed half the pie....that next piece doesn't look nearly so good.

Diminishing marginal utility.

Alt accounts training and extracting on a regular basis can be done profitably, this profit can be funneled into operating more accounts to do this, depending on how one wants to use their profit margins, if it was not profitable to have alts train and extract SP to sell, there would be no real injector market. At some point a player would likely reach a threshold of how many alts they could tolerate running vs how much isk it was bringing in, but given that it is a profitable market a player could keep expanding the pool of alts. Yes eventually you would have market saturation and prices would drop, and perhaps the injector market is already close to saturation and the margins are minimal, I don't know, I have never used an extractor or injector nor do I ever intend to. Perhaps I unintentionally implied an infinite expansion, this of course would not be the case. Real cash could conceivably allow for a player to go beyond whatever purely isk balance point, and there might even be some who've done that.

My previous post was based on hearing from some other players who were doing alt farms at some level.

i havent bought or sold any skill injectors/ extractors- 650m for 300000 skill points doesnt seem worthwhile

i have been doing the dailies often- before i never looked at dens, hideaways etc but in the last 2 days, ive had 2 escalatons from those crappy sites earning me a gila bpc, pith c type invuln + 50m loot. (approx 500m loot total) without dailies i wouldnt have them so theyre working for me.

by next week ill have my 300000 skillpoints for free too

No, this is incorrect…again.

Suppose you have a box. You are given a 1x1x1 inch cube. Your box is 1x1x1 foot box. To fill it you need 1,728 cubes. Now, after you fill it I give you a box that needs 3,456 cubes to fill it. The daily allotment of 1 cube now will less efficacious at filling your new box. Yes, the daily amount is the same, but its effect is not.

This goes back, once again, to diminishing marginal utility. It isn’t the absolute value that matters, but the subjective value people place on it.

Just one more step in making EVE like WoW (or whatever generic MMO).

I understand a lot of the frustration and dislike of the dailies and I'm sure that if I was an older player who had spent years on the training of skills, I'd probably feel different.

However I'm only a 6 month old character, and I have used skill injectors. I don't think that it provided INSTANT GRATIFICATION nor do I think that it's going to reduce or diminish my enthusiasm of EvE one little bit.

I DO think though, that it has allowed me to go outside and play a bit more with my Corp mates rather than sitting in High Sec playpens trying to learn how to mine. I haven't got a huge amount of level 5 skills but by getting some of the ones that interested me up to level 4/5, I have been able to find things in New Eden that entertain and excite me.
One example is reprocessing. I would never have bothered reprocessing ores without having the required skills so I would never have found how much I like the Industry side of things (ok, that's kind of a lie, I was pretty sure that I would enjoy that regardless).

From everything that I've seen and read it looks like the majority of the SP extractor/injector additions mainly just redistribute the skill points already in the game. Yes, I'm sure that there are people that have alts gaining skill points with the express purpose of selling them, but for the most part it is a re-distribution. And not an equal one either with the diminishing benefits that people get from using the injectors after a certain level.

I used the injectors to get myself up to speed with a few different skills associated with resources and industry and now that I don't get the full benefit of the injectors I am less interested.

So maybe consider some of these dailies/skill injector/extractors as a way of leveling the playing field so that there isn't such a gap between the rich and the poor (old and new, in terms of SP). There are still HUGE differences between people that have played the game for a long time and the newbies, these just seem to be a small stick-carrot to keep us more interested so that we continue playing and helping the game grow/develop for everyone.