Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Referred here by a GM.

Simple Suggestion:

Automated Claim system (aka repeatable "redeem items" option) for Cerebral Accelerator.

Reasoning:

1 - Boxed set advertises boost for first 30 days. New players are easily tricked into losing said implant.
2 - Cerebral Accelerators are already replaced for no isk, as the commitment is made in the sales pitch (the box).
3 - GM time is used up dealing with whiny newbies who say "OMG I lost my thing again, wtf fix it".
4 - More GM time could be used for real issues if there was an automated system to deal with these complaints.

Problems:

1 - Older Players can create Alts with the COE box set, and use them for suicide ganking with the damage bonus.
2 - This may lull new players into a false sense of security about the way Eve works, making it harder for them to learn the rules.

Mitigation Options (aka: Ways to mitigate the effect if you believe this is an overpowered option):

A - Have a limited number of accelerators available to be redeemed, each time one is claimed, the player is presented with a warning that they have X claims left, which will no longer be valid after their first 31 days.
B - Charge a small ISK fee for each accelerator redeemed, to remind players that they will have to pay for future losses.
C - Charge money for access to the item - Already done, discourages large scale creation of Alts by older players. If they do try it, cool beans, CCP gets more money for updates and the item is destroyed after 30 days.

Abstract:

Overall I believe a change like this will allow new players to try out PvP without losing what appears to be a 150 million isk implant (contracts), and will save a not insignificant amount of time and hassle for GMs.

(Disclaimer: Yes I lost my accelerator and yes I claimed a new one from a GM...but it seemed like an awful waste that they had to type out the whole spiel simply because I was mistaken about the capabilities of my Pod. To answer the trolls: No I'm not butthurt, I got my implant. It just seems like a feature that would help keep newbies in the game, reduce wasted time for GMs, and overall do little or no harm.)

So which of the mitigating actions do you think would work best, or is there another suggestion I could add to the list.
Simply removing the Accelerator Replacement is probably not an option seeing as the sales pitch is already made and agreed to in the purchase of the boxed set.

It seems like point 2 of the issue has been misread.

"Cerebral accelerators are already replaced."

The reason being that it the boxed set is sold with advertises a 30 day boost, and CCP are acting on good faith to new players, helping to bring customers to the game. Yes the new players will lose things in future, its kinda irrelevant.

It appears to be common knowledge in rookie help that the accelerator is replaced if lost, so I am surprised the forum community was not aware also.

Anyway, to the issue at hand: automated or not?
Is this worth adding in, or should GMs continue to handle this aspect of new player queries?

Ah right, if they're already reimbursed if lost then all you want is a way to quickly pick them up after loss. That seems fair enough. Not sure if there would be any way to exploit it, perhaps the devs have thought of a way and prefer to have them replaced manually.

I agree with Velicitia and Serge, they've both made good points.

I'd also like to throw out that this could be exploited by people just redeeming them all and then selling them (or transferring them to their other accounts). With proper foresight, you can have one of these each on as many accounts as you want by buying one boxed set like this and having one PLEX and then using the accounts to chain buddy invites for PLEX for the other accounts. I'd call that a bit exploitable by people training up chars to sell.

Furthermore, what's the limit of redemptions? If you say "you can have n spares that can be redeemed", what happens if the player redeems and sells/loses all n of them? Does the GM just give them another? If you've taken Discrete Math (or pretty much any proofs class) you'll see that this is the basis for an inductive proof that shows that no matter how many spares you give the newbs, they can always ask for n+1 up to the point where there's unlimited copies and they're worth less than Trit.