Player Features and Ideas Discussion

No no no no no.

eve is not a grind fest on skill points.

this can also result in buying sp with isk.

Yes

This sounds angry, even when reading it in the overly cheerful voice that narrates everything in my head.

I wrote a big reply and realized on second thought this a really bad idea sorry. It pretty much breaks Eve as a game. My friend left WoW and started playing this specifically because he didn't have to grind exp. He pulled me into this I rather like that aspect of the game.

Items and Isk should be the incentive.

For the record, I do not like the item based implementation much either, just wanted to throw it out there. I think it's a bit too much and simply buying SP is not a good direction.


I fully support minor to moderate skill queue boosts being applied to meaningful and challenging content as a further reward for engaging in those all too underused outlets and in turn keeping pilots who would be otherwise content to just leave their pilot in a station for 25 days to rot a reason to login a play.

It's not game breaking, it's perpetuating. Every MMO relies on giving you multiple rabbits to chase that you can never catch. The skill queue is one of the least rewarding and most frustrating un-catchable rabbits ever. I am at least offering a way to selectively, deliberately intervene and fight the horrible skill queue monster and give pilots a maintainable way to stay involved in the only meaningful metric in this game, their SP.

Those who play through meaningful content often and daily getting a modest boost to training over the risk-free, effort-free training we currently enjoy is hardly a game breaker.

It doesn't. As illustrated by other games where daily quests have been implemented.

This, in fact, is the one and only activity other than epic arcs/cosmos that cannot be usefully botted, no matter the sophistication of bots, due to repeat limit.

Epic arcs/Cosmos have the same repeat limit, with different timespan.

Bots exist to handle almost every aspect of every mmo, that is not a viable argument against an idea. Bots currently farm missions, mining, low level exploration and quite possibly other things I am unaware of.

Limitations based off of exploitations would be the death of new development if we linger on it.

Why not replace the, currently, almost useless story line items that COSMOS agents give out with these Quafe boosters? *Or* A BPC for a "volatile Limited Ocular Filter" or the like. It plugs in like any other implant but after a set amount of time it degenerates and fails. Make it viable for them to be manufactured and sold for modest profit but still cheaper than regular implants. For those who do PVP they would be very popular and for people starting out they would be a viable option for getting over that hump. I'd put out there that making the volatile versions worth about 25-50% of the regular implants worth it. Personally I don't run implants because they are so bloody expensive and I'm a pretty casual player; I can afford t wait.

For the record, the skill queue was part of why I started playing and is one of the great selling points to my friends since we all have these irritating day jobs that take up most of our time add on a wife or girlfriend and a going out with friends (who don't play) plus a hobby and game time gets dropped ff to nothing. WoW and other grind based levelers have little to no interest for me since I would never get anywhere. I'll go monts without doing more than updating my skill queue thn I'll have some free time and an itch and I've got a new ship type I can fly or suddenly, t2 guns or something like that.

I don't see why this cannot support pvp as well, I have clearly stated that I would like to see the more challenging side of EVE carry forward these great rewards. The only limitation is how do we implement it? I was thinking on killmail generation, but I would be glad to hear your ideas on it too.

None of those are problems. The first point is entirely intentional: it is meant to be a chore to get lvl V because the whole game is built around diminishing returns, and deciding between more immediate (and often larger) returns or some kind of (much less rewarding) specialisation. If you feel they're “daunting and frustrating”, then it means it works — it's giving you a reason to not train those levels.

The second point has nothing to do with the skill system and everything to do with players not liking EVE. They have this idea that once they train X, everything will change and it will be fun fun fun! …only, when they get there, they will realise that it's the exact same thing as before. If they can't enjoy the journey there, they won't enjoy the destination because it does not differ from the journey in the slightest. This is just them fooling themselves.

The third point is a rather hefty non-sequitur. No, it does not affect immersion, and the incentive is unaffected. The decreased interest in EVE is due to running out of things to train and new things to look forward to, not because things take time to train. Decreasing the training time to get new toys only means that the people who get bored with them now will get bored of them even sooner.
Horrible, horrible, bad, awful idea. This introduces a completely pointless grind to EVE that will bore people to tears far quicker than any amount of training time might. It also reinforces bad behaviour and tries to steer the gameplay in specific, pre-determined direction. These are very bad things to do in a sandbox.

Your supposed problem is entirely built out of misconceptions, and your solution directly contradicts the core design philosophy. End result: ugh!