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Alternative to Yearly Remaps
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Obsidiana
Atrament Inc.
#1 - 2012-08-05 04:57:46 UTC
Disclaimer

Personally, I think the remap system we have in place now works well. CCP has been giving out extra ones to players and that helps a lot. That said, this idea is an alternative that acts as a nerf/buff. It provides more flexibility but at a sacrifice.

The idea

Make attribute points individually remappable, accruing once a month (30 days).


In other words, each month you can remap one point. If you don't use it, you get another. Once you get to 14, they stop collecting (you can move as many as you like). Ok, I would love it if they kept building up to a higher limit like 24 (two years), but I don't think CCP wants that.

Here are some scenarios. If you want to change from science skills to navigation skills, you just need 4 points (assuming optimal training). Changing from gunnery to T2 ships, you move 6 points. Going from corp management to leadership, you need 10 points. Something drastic like electronis to missles would take the full 14 points. The more the skill trees have in common, the less attribute points you have to move.

Ya, 14 months for a full remap, but partials take far less time. They can be as little as 4 months. You could figure out several remaps if you saved them up. Planning and timing allow for more optimal training. Younger players can tweak generic attributes to focus on areas of combat or defense more quickly. If you make a mistake, you may have left over points to use plus one this month. I actually would like to see us get one more attribute point while they are at it. That would lengthen the mini-remap times, yet make us train faster over all. (This could also restore the previous fastest possible training time.)


The idea came to me one day. No real reason why. I do see lot of requests to shorten the remap period. It is understandable. 1) A year is a long time, esp. to a new player. 2) We all want to train faster. This idea takes out the arbitrary year time span and lets a player break it up. Better that than another arbitrary half year or skill based time span.

Also if this idea has been suggested before, I would not be surprised. I keep an eye on the forums, so I think I would have seen it, but I don't read every thread. (A Google search mostly turned up SP remapping requests... meh... I looked.)
Kusum Fawn
Perkone
Caldari State
#2 - 2012-08-05 07:17:21 UTC
personally i kind of liked the pre remap era of the game, it ment that you had to do some research into what it is you were doing. and live with the consequences.

then came the remaps, and i was fine with them up to a point. where they actually helped people and made them learn about skill bias and training time modifiers. a little bit of math and planning. it was ok that nobs could remap because they didnt always know what they were getting into. i have a main with high charisma (relatively) because i thought it would help somehow. I havent made that mistake again. in fact this alt was made pre-starting skills change and had a 3 charisma, simply because achuras could do that,

your suggestion while nice and all, means that there is so little in the way of character planning needed that you might as well get rid of skill bias entirely. something which i do not view as a good idea for any game based on time. everything should be a trade off. it makes choices as a character more dynamic and less predictable. while its not a grand sweeping change, its still a dumbing down of a much more complicated and integral part of the game.
this is one area that i still fully support being complicated. forcing a player to learn about the game and various aspects of it is a boon.
just like the ideas to unlearn skills and reallocate the sp, this idea is not supported

Its not possible to please all the people all the time, but it sure as hell is possible to Displease all the people, most of the time.
Obsidiana
Atrament Inc.
#3 - 2012-08-05 08:01:28 UTC
As said, I'm fine with the current system. I'm not looking for support or to change anything. I just think this is better than other alternatives I've read about. If CCP does decide to change it at some point, I like this one better than the 6 month or skill based ideas. Call it the lesser of several evils. >:}

The old system was stupid though. Various types of characters were uselessly gimped and pointless. Early EVE/CCP had a "We're going to do that later" attitude that got us crazy CPU haulers and salvage drone skills before salvaging existed. Adding charisma skills was on the phantom todo list. They corrected the shortsightedness with new characters but alienated the veteran player base. The new characters would surpass the old in time, violating a core rule of EVE. (Heck, people were mad that several looked better, not that I cared. Then they were mad that they had to redo their characters later too. Heh.)

The solution was attribute remaps which lets you train most things well or specific things excellently. Max speed means not training things for years (which is cool by me btw, and I don't always go for max speed). Recent changes to it made it even better as you can accrue bonus remaps and split up a year.

In any case, this system can lead to a lot of optimized time, but at a sacrifice of not gaining vastly different skill sets. You can also remap yourself into a corner if you aren't careful. >:} The time and research to avoid that and optimize or partially optimize training would require quite a bit of effort.
Kusum Fawn
Perkone
Caldari State
#4 - 2012-08-05 21:26:12 UTC
while yes there are quite a few things on CCP's "we will fix this later" list (pos's im looking at you) your second post doesnt make any sense asa to what it is that you are even proposing in your first post.

I'm breaking this by paragraph.
1you aren't proposing a change, this proposal is just a different change then the other changes that are also proposed on this forum. (what?)

2 old system was stupid as people who made decisions before learning anything about the game felt gimped.
List of not finished things CCP has thought about. (crazy cpu haulers was left over from them thinking about letting haulers use strip miners, and then deciding not to but never fixing haulers back, the salvage drones was some inability to get the containers fo the drones to play well with the amount of salvage they picked up, this is an issue they just recently addressed, it used to be that you had to have 80-100 m/3 cargo free for whatever reason to be able to salvage something. despite salvage taking up 0.01 m/3 apiece. and there being a drop from each wreck of 0.00 - 0.10 m/3 ( i think 10 pieces was the upper limit of savage from a wreck, but i never salvaged a capital ship before the salvage changes a year or two ago)

3 essentially wrong. max speed often means training thing for a year. thing that aren't immediately useful but will be 3months into the next remap when you train your ships instead of your cores or whatever. recent changes are also awful. with your proposed change - with remaps, means that switching between two skill sets (mem/per - per/mem) will be a lot faster as the optimals for them are usually only one or two points difference. swapping them every 3 months means faster training and less total investment and planning. because its easier and you are never locked into any particular skill plan.
-without remaps, means often slower training times if you are min/maxing as you cant do big shifts in attribute point allocations.

4 the gaining of vastly different skill sets is not a drawback to anything. in fact you are encouraging the use of alts with this as it will be easier to max specific skills to the exclusion of all others in an alt. the faster it is to train one specific path the more alts will be used to cover the rest of the paths. or the other paths will simply be excluded and many people will never see the full possibilities of the game. while it is not necessary for any one person to see the full extent of in game actions, the game design should not be geared towards alt farming and exclusion.

The first set of changes to the attributes, included a change to learning skills, their complete removal and a leveling of attribute base points. For the min/max group this was a nerf as the changes made training most things longer. 3 charisma was not a terrible thing, only that it was only available using achuras. thus everyone had a caldari alt. making the attribute points more flexible reduces the consequences of picking paths.

why are we dumbing everything down to the lowest common denominator?

Its not possible to please all the people all the time, but it sure as hell is possible to Displease all the people, most of the time.
Obsidiana
Atrament Inc.
#5 - 2012-08-06 02:42:36 UTC
On point 1: Look, it's simple. This is just another way to do things. More ideas are a good thing. Some people aren't happy with the way things are, and I sympathize. I'm the type of person who comes up with a lot of ideas. What one person thinks is a bad idea may actually be a solution, so I share.

On point 2: We already explained our views about the old system. I respect your opinion. There is no chance of either of us changing each others' minds. Any malice in my tone was toward the system, not you.

On point 3: I'm not following your math. Three months are one too short for the shortest optimal change. It would take a half year to make the swap you suggested. That's roughly what CCP does now with the bonus remaps. All this gets longer if they add one attribute point too.

On point 4: Esp. new players need vastly different skills (P/W vs. I/M). Also, older players who finish skill branches need them too. Not too many older players will be training that new navigation skill optimally, and that's ok. Younger players might, and that's ok too. Most of the people who I know that train alts either make throw-away characters or are industrialists older than me who needed the manufacturing slots. (That said, EVE-U has some interesting alt guides.)

On point 5: The amount of planning and game knowledge it would take to never train less then optimally would be crazy. It might even be impossible, depending on how skills are added. Furthermore, optimal training is not really the best route. The better the balance, the faster you reach your goals.


Btw, thx for posting. It's nice to debate with someone who understands the game. 8)
Paikis
Vapour Holdings
#6 - 2012-08-06 11:06:26 UTC
I disagree. If anything I'd like to go back to no remaps. Pick your starting stats and live with the consequences.

EVE is supposed to be about consequences.
Obsidiana
Atrament Inc.
#7 - 2012-08-06 14:06:30 UTC
With EVE being as complicated as it is, I can't agree. I had help making my character, so it turned out well. Many others were not so lucky. To a person playing a game and learning as they go, they just want to have fun. It doesn't make sense to have such dire consequences before you even step into a ship. That's when the consequences begin. To make things worse, there was a lot of misinformation, misconceptions, and incomplete data. We also did not have tools like EVEMon.
Takeshi Yamato
Ministry of War
Amarr Empire
#8 - 2012-08-06 14:50:18 UTC
There's a reason why remaps were added and attribute points standardized. Before that, choosing the starting attributes was the single biggest choice a player had to make in the game, and it was also the first choice a new player had to do (besides picking a name and a faction which are largely irrelevant).
Shayla Sh'inlux
Aliastra
Gallente Federation
#9 - 2012-08-17 08:02:02 UTC
Quote:

personally i kind of liked the pre remap era of the game, it ment that you had to do some research into what it is you were doing. and live with the consequences.


Wait, what?

You *liked* it that the early players who were new to the game (like, 2004/2005) before much information was available picked a character because of the backstory and/or looks got completely screwed because their chosen bloodline rolled with a useless set of stats? I rolled an Intake because I liked the story behind the bloodline and I liked the background of Gallente. I got boned for doing so as I ended up with a perception of 4.

You really think it's fine for a game to require extensive planning and research BEFORE YOU START PLAYING just to not screw yourself six times over because you didn't max out perception? (**)

(**) Mind you, this is when literally ~85% of the trainable skills had perception as primary stat. They have since then added TONS of (useful) skills that have other attributes linked, but there's a reason the optimal generic remap is still per/int

Quote:

then came the remaps, and i was fine with them up to a point. where they actually helped people and made them learn about skill bias and training time modifiers. a little bit of math and planning. it was ok that nobs could remap because they didnt always know what they were getting into. i have a main with high charisma (relatively) because i thought it would help somehow. I havent made that mistake again. in fact this alt was made pre-starting skills change and had a 3 charisma, simply because achuras could do that,


Yes, and when the third bloodline was added (Achura for Caldari) the question regarding "what race to pick" would have only 1 correct answer: "pick an Achura, and sink the 5 freebie points into Perception and Intelligence".

That's called a broken mechanic and it took them, what, 7? years to fix it.