Skill Discussions

I petitioned this a few days ago, but am still waiting for a reply. Wanted to make a post still so people could share possible solutions / ways to avoid my problem in the future since it might affect me again before I get a GM response to my ticket.

I had Shield Management V in training for a few days. It was about halfway done.
A few nights ago, I loaded Energy Weapon Rigging I and II in front of Shield Management V, and applied the change with apparently no issue as Energy Weapon Rigging I finished training during the same session (so I knew the queue was running). I logged off later that night while Energy Weapon Rigging II was still training (I think I had maybe an hour left on it, it's a 1h 38m train with my neural configuration and implants).
When I logged in roughly 18 hours later (after work), I came back to Energy Weapon Rigging II completed, but the queue paused on Shield Management V. This means I lost around 17 hours of skill training (18, less roughly 1 hour to complete Energy Weapon Rigging II I believe) .

I can't confirm the precise times, but I do recall seeing the original completion date for Shield Management V as this Saturday. Now, it's this Sunday.

Has anyone else experienced this "random pause" problem before? I saw one post with a similar issue though not exactly the same. The "fix" there was to clear the queue until skill training resumed. As you can see from my description above, this wouldn't help me: my queue was active when I logged out, and for some reason decided to pause itself with a skill later in the queue while I was not in-game.

Unfortunately, I can't keep overwatch on my skill queue while I'm at work, which means that I would lose 18 hours of skill training every time this happens during a weekday. I believe skill queue issues are fairly low on the support priority list, but 18 hours of training lost each time would completely ruin my game experience pretty quickly.

If anyone has experienced this issue before, are there any solutions?

That's all that's reimbursed? Even when the loss was completely out of my control? My training queue was active as evidenced by Energy Weapon Rigging I and II completing. And as far as I know, there's no way to tell the game to train some skills then pause unless you simply don't queue anything.

Aside from that joke of a reimbursement rate, is there any way to avoid running into this issue in the future?

Well I guess it's better than nothing. Still, I don't understand why such a policy is in place. Especially when it sounds like they would have the logs to see when I logged on and off, what I had in my queue, what my implants were at the time, what my attributes were. Especially because I was logged off! They can't make the argument that I might have jumpcloned out to a naked clone or something like that. Weird policy. Anyway, I'm still waiting for a response. I'm wondering if I ping the ticket with a reply to keep it active or something.

Edit:
Went and did some more research on this. Found a few posts back from 2009, around when the skill queue was first introduced it looks like. The pause bug was reported along with other bugs (skills disappearing completely, negative training, the queue training skills it wasn't instructed to). Didn't glean much more information by way of causes or solutions though. It's a little disconcerting. Now I feel I can't trust my skill queue and ill have to go the one-skill route like pre-Apocrypha?

I never have had this problem.

Unlike Tau, I click "Apply" at least half a dozen times, and still check afterwards.

That's correct. I had shield mgt 5 training, queued two ranks of energy weapon rigging, then applied. I was logged in when energy weapon rigging 1 finished, but logged off about 30 minutes into level 2. So I know I applied the queue fine because the skills were training. Logged in 18 hours later to energy weapon rigging 2 completed but shield mgt 5 paused.

I found posts with similar issues but those were back from 2009 when the queue was first made available, and some around 2010. I guess it's really rotten luck that I got hit with it 4 years after the fact. Found a few "horror stories" too where people got hit with the bug, but they weren't actively playing, just logging in every few days to train skills. I think one guy came back after 25 days or so and found he hadn't trained anything due to this bug (or a similar one).

Lol yeah, I lost three days of training last weekend due to this bug..

Same situation.. Had Amarr BS 5 half-way trained, injected something quick to level 2. Level 1 completed of the injected skill, logged off, went away from the weekend and when I came back my injected skill hit level 2 but Amarr BS 5 never started..

Oh well.. I would probably not like to know how much time I've lost BEFORE the skill queue, lol

I received a reply to my ticket and got some skillpoints back. Wanted to share what I learned from the GM to help along other people who stumble upon this:


Unfortunately, there's no determinate cause for the glitch. However, the GM indicated that clearing the cache seems to resolve the issue in a lot of cases. I don't recall seeing this specific recommendation in other threads, so I wanted to share it here.

I also learned that the standard reimbursement rate for training issues like this is 1,800 points per hour as well. Hope this helps someone in the future.

Interesting... when did you hear this 1,500 rate? I had the GM break it down for me just the other night and he said 17 hours lost, 1,800 SP per hour, 30,600 SP. So the math all checks out.

"Clearing your cache" is a standard response the GMs give for pretty much any problem from your ship magically going missing to billing issues. To see whether it actually works in any particular case, you'd have to try it. And since the evidence of it working is "everything is going on as usual", I doubt it can be conclusively proven.

As for the reimbursement rate, the SP you get back are given in the form of raw SP, which you can assign to any skill - not necessarily the one you were training. The rate is so low because you could apply the SP to a skill with attributes which you are not remapped for, and in theory gain an advantage this way. So the reimbursement has to be based on your lowest possible rate of skill training for any combination of attributes.

Is this actually a true thing? I had this happen on 2 different characters. Once I lost 8-9 hours, the 2nd one paused before I left on vacation, making me skip almost a week of training.

I figured maybe I didn't add the skills correctly and derped it, clicked pause instead of apply. I was sure I hadn't clicked pause though, but my queue was paused so alas the evidence spoke against my memory.

Never bothered making a ticket though. Losing 8-9 hours isn't that much of a deal, but 5-7 days is a bit of an annoyance. :P