Player Features and Ideas Discussion

If skills aren't important and eve is about the journey

WHY DO SKILLS EXIST?!?

Skills obviously have some relevance. All I want is to not be at a disadvantage because I oh so unfortuitously chose to join EVE later rather than sooner.

And if buying skills will kill EVE, eve is already dead because of the Character Bazaar.

After umpteen iterations through this argument, I still haven't heard anybody against it give a clear argument as to what it actually breaks.

OK One EVE is about the journey and skills are part of the journey in fact it's a large part of the journey.

two, you won't necessarily be at a disadvantage to older players, 3 month players can and do compete with 5 year players and they do succeed I have seen it myself.

buying a character on the character bazaar is not unfair because somebody somewhere still has to put the time in to train that character, it's not just created out of nowhere and given to you. Plex for sp creates sp out of nowhere, with no disadvantage to you other than you just lost a plex. And if the character you want is not on the character bazaar you're out of luck.

You can create a character out of nowhere anyways. Create a character, poof there's a character. Does it matter whether someone had him sitting in a hangar for a year or not?

Why am I out of luck? Why does it have to be this way? What if I don't WANT another character because I have this one and I put so much effort into it already.

P.S. Losing PLEX is a disadvantage. You get the same skills you would have gotten by waiting, but you don't get the game time.

One: I did say that plex is a disadvantage

two: people would buy plex solely for the sp not for the game time just as players do so now for isk,

And yes I did catch your edit.

I still like Frigs over Capitals

This is patently false. The current skill system makes it so that you CAN "catch up" to an older player, one specialty at a time.

Here's how it works:

- All skills cap at level 5. No matter how many years you have played the game, you cannot exceed that limit.

- Only a limited number of skills affect any one ship, module, weapon system, and specialty at any given time.
Ex1: Someone you are facing has about 20 million SP, but how much of that overall SP is actually combat related. He/she could be a HUGE industrial player that just wants to blow off some steam.
Ex2: You have suberb gunnery support skills and have a fair bit trained into projectile weapons. However, today you want to use lasers. You fit some to your ships and go out to shoot some stuff... however you notice that despite placing excellent hits on the target(s), you are not dealing much damage. This is because your gunnery support skills, which allow you hit stuff better, are being applied... but without training up the skill specific to lasers your damage will be anemic.

- Getting a skill to level 5 from level 4 only adds on an extra 2% here, 5% there. If you simply train up all the skills within a specialty and defer getting them to level 5 until you have/want to, you will still find yourself flying at about 80 to 90% of the effectiveness of a multi-year veteran in that specific specialty.

- Getting a skill to level 5 is supposed to be a painful train. Many players (yes, even veteran ones) opt to avoid doing it and instead train up other skills to level 4.

- Ships and weapons have been balanced against one another.
Ex: A battleship can potentially instapop a frigate... but the frigate can fly very fast, making it difficult for the battleship's weapons to track, especially at very close range... then again, the battleship can deploy drones to deal with the frigate... and the frigate can shoot the drones down... however the battleship might have a Large Energy Neutralizer fitted to nuke the frigate's capacitor every 24 second... in which case the frigate could use a Small Nosferatu that sucks out capacitor every 3 seconds... etc. etc.


Tell your friends to strap themselves in a frigate, go out, and DO something. You don't need "the best" skills to compete. Tech 1 ships are not "horribly underpowered" compared to Tech 2 ships. And it IS possible for a pack of week old characters in frigates to tear apart a multi-year pilot in a battleship.


The character and its value are not created out of "thin air" as your proposal does. In the current system, another player had spend a great deal of time setting the skills and speccing the character until it is "just right." After that, the ISK you spend for it is shifted.

Please rephrase this as I am having trouble understanding.

What I can gather is that you're seeing things from a "directly confrontational" viewpoint. In any PvP engagement, you'll be lucky if this is the case. Often, people will employ Ewar and/or tactics to compensate for any weaknesses in skills they may or may not have. Having "friends" also helps in this regard to.

edit: oh... now I get it. Yeah... there is no "race" here. There is no "endgame" per se in EVE at all. Someone did some math and calculated that it would take 27 years to get all the skills in EVE to level 5.
I will also repeat the point I made in my last post: all skills cap at 5. You cannot go any higher. No matter how old you are. This limits the power of older players and allows younger ones to "catch up"... again... one specialty at a time.


(I get the feeling that you didn't read my post in its entirety)

Up to a point. Again, only so many skills affect so many things. You can have the skill Large Energy Turret at level 5 and it won't make your frigate's laser turrets operate any better.


See above. You can only apply so many skillpoints in any one activity you are engaging in.

Beyond that, you are at the mercy of "Industry pilots" when buying a new ship and its mods. Likewise, out in space you at the mercy of PvP/combat pilots.


They were created and effort (however little) was spent on them. Nothing about them or their stats were created out of "thin air."

The biggest flaw in your plan is that the vets you are trying to catch up to will simply buy plex and add sp as well. So you will be stuck where you were before you started dumping money into your head to fix your problems.

While I personally would like such a mechanic it'll never happen because it'll cause players to get bored quickly and CCP would lose subscriptions instead of keeping us reaching out for that carrot just in front of us.