EVE General Discussion

Why would CCP cripple one of many cash cows? It forces older players to buy PLEX to offset the clone costs. Ships...pfft. Only T1 ships are worthly of insurance.

I support reducing the cost of clones(I think 66% reduction is fair), but not the removal. I also support increasing T2 insurance(to around 70% of ship valve), however, not T3.

Take what everyone says with a grain of salt...It will never change because of greed, and CCP will only make the cost go up as time elapses.

All this dicussion is just that, a discussion with no change or different outcome.

Obviously not someone as new as you. Veterans however do have a cost, and its not cheap. Stick around another 8 or 9 years, then maybe you'll start complaining about costs.

Just because veterans have all those skills, doesn't mean your income increases to supplement all the costs associated with losing ships, clones.(implants dont count). When a clone costs almost as much as a battlecruiser, there is a problem.

If one who has the SP to require the more expensive clones has not discovered how to finance such purchases by such time then perhaps one should pod themselves a few times without a clone to lower the costs.

One can always sell such toons and purchase something with lower maintenance costs.

So your solution is to turn off one of the hooks for the game? Stop training?

That is simply asinine.

Doesn't encourage stronger risk aversion the longer you play the way clone costs do.

A ship costs the same to lose if you have 1m SP or 100m.
A pod does not. Clone costs simply punish older players for being old. That's a **** mechanic.

I made an argument on that page linked in the OP about the whole clone thing intended it to be more sarcastic than serious, but now I feel that it can as well pass as somewhat that makes a bit of sense...

See, higher SP provides an advantage if those SP are relevant to the task, so it makes sense if you have to risk (and occasionally pay) more to have this advantage. But most SP on old toons are irrelevant to particular task, so why do people have to pay for something that provides them nothing?

What if we could introduce an option to "freeze" certain skills of a toon? "Frozen" skills have no effect and don't count towards SP amount in terms of clone capacity required in order not to lose any SP you trained.

Limitations should be added, like:
- managing skill "hibernation" should have large CD (let's say 48 hours, maybe 24 if you think that 48 will be too limiting);
- it should be impossible to "freeze" any skills that are prerequisites to any skills that are kept unfrozen so that amount of "active" SP never fall below the amount of SP normally (currently) required to fly your fit with stated effectiveness;
- you can still train frozen skills, but they have no effect until you "unfreeze" them;
- if your active SP exceed capability of your current medical clone at time of podding, you are still taking SP hit based on your total SP; hey, at least that's still better than not having an option to "downclone", you just have to be double careful;
- speaking of that, add a warning popup if player tries to undock with a clone insufficient for his current active SP; add an option to disable that warning because UI customization is cool;
- skills that can be used in passive or semi-passive activities like anchoring, corp managenet, PI or trade shouldn't be allowed to be frozen.

The last bullet is up to discussion because it means that such change can't be fully used by industrialists and the like, but however it is accomplished, the point stays: you should not be able to keep your jobs running, your orders working and your POS operating while you happily keep related skills frozen.

Also it's possible that clone costs should be tweaked a bit while keeping this function in mind, but I think noone short of CCP staff with access to statistics can do that properly.

Example:

You've docked your capital and you feel sluggish after flying that 80 m/s speedster. You would like to take your cruiser on a suicidal roam, but you think it'd be nice to be able to visit null in the process. So you proceed to do two things:
- you clone jump into another clone as flying slaved and hardwired clone in a shield tanked roaming T1 cruiser isn't exactly bright idea; this action initiates JC cooldown;
- you freeze your capital skills and the like in order to allow cheaper clones save your SP in case of podding; you can't freze your frigate-related skills though because cruiser-related skills have them as prerequisites; also you still already have expencive clone bought before, and you will lose it first time you die, but at least your subsequent clones can be cheap; this action initiates Neural Hibernation Management Procedure cooldown.

You can ofc suggest an option to actually downgrade your clone to recieve a portion of your money back, but I think that is uneeded. Gameplay-wise, no need to make changes bigger than it's sufficient, just to remain careful. Lore-wise, that's your clone that medical staff created and noone else needs it. That means they aren't (effectively) buying your clone just because you don't think you need it anymore.

Comment on the idea. If it will have any sorts of positive feedback and I will be made obvious to its downsides and abuse potential (and then get the latters brainstormed out), I'll be posting this in the suggestions subforum.

Disincentive to fight and do all sorts of stupid things is what makes games into "kitty online".
I personally disagree with insurance part for that exact reason.

Age != Wealth

That advice applies only to ships, since You do not have the option to simply swap to an earlier and therefore cheaper version of Your current clone on the fly.

You're basically telling us that there comes a point at which You can no longer afford to play the game with the character You've invested years of time to develop it because... duh, it's balancing (it's not, really. it's just an outdated and old mechanic and nobody ever even looked at it after it's implementation).

What ould be he alternative?

Create yet another alt because Your obviously ancient character is too valuable to do anything else than scanning and science?

Quit because some masochistic minority believes it is cool to loose 20% of Your current isk for getting podded because interceptors do not have marauder class tank?

Just tell me one viable alternative that does not start with that "don't fly what..." garbage.

Gotta admit the 20 mil stupid tax I pay every time I welp a pod doesn't feel nice.