EVE General Discussion

Running a game democratically by vote of the players is a sure fire recipe for disaster - fortunately CCP recognizes this.

Determining if a skill point reimbursement is mandated is actually a pretty simple boolean expression:

If the skills are being removed from the game, then you reimburse the skill points. If the skills remain in the game, regardless of their current utility, you do not.

I reiterate my point that this was disastrous for the game.

Edit: Though in retrospect, I see your point.

For playing the game ourselves, we do know how much of pain it is to have unwanted skills left in your character sheet because of a change you even remotely have nothing to do about. It seems logical that, since we required Mining Barges 5 trained as a pure time sink to reach the Orca, we should give the skill points back.

Except it's not, unfortunately. As mentioned in the blog, the only skills that we can in good conscience reimburse are the Destroyers and Battlecruisers ones.

That is because the overhaul will make the two skills mentioned above useless. Even if we were going to give the Destroyers/Battlecruisers skill points back in the allocation pool on a 1:1 ratio, we would leave players unable to fly hulls they could use before the changes (we are creating four racial variants instead of a single generic skill).

All the other skills, including Mining Barge 5 for the Orca, are not in the same category however. We are not taking your ability to fly the vessels away but changing how they are reached - players will still be able to fly them after the change. We are even modifying how skill training works to make sure you can still train the skill itself after the plan goes live.

Yes, it is annoying we leave you with a bunch of skills you have no interest into in your character sheet, and for that, you have our sincere apologies. But if we were to refund them here, other players, like capital pilots, or even people we affected during our numerous changes in the past, could rightfully claim for the same treatment. Because even if the previous concept was deemed acceptable, EVE Online is not one of these games where skill allocation can be technically wasted: with time, any player can theoretically reach and train all the skills we have to offer. There is no such thing as a Class A preventing you from seeing Class B content unless you create a new character specifically for it.

Invested skill points are still an asset - particularly Mining Barges 5, as it is very valuable for resource gathering characters. Which brings the question, why should we leave players with Mining Barge 5 trained if they are using the Orca as a hauler, or even a logistics platform for pirate related activities? That is because, initially, it was designed to be a logistic ship with a mining focus. You may not use any of its bonuses due to the sandbox nature of the game, but it didn't change the role it was initially tailored for.


So again, you do have our sympathy here - we wouldn't have spent half an hour writing this reply if we didn't care - but we cannot reimburse anything else than Destroyers and Battlecruisers in this case.

I completely agree you should not get those SP reimbursed.

Always wanted to train for an Orca, never liked the industry and Barge skill set required. That's why I didn't train for it. You decided that you accepted training those skills, now you must live with them.

Now I have to convince myself, that training the Mining Foreman and Mining Director skill is OK.

One thing I'd like to add. I would actually agree to a mechanic, that removed skills if you wanted them gone. But only if you don't get the SP back.

The idea horrifies me. *shudder*

OK, I'm going to stomp this flat right about now.

What about the magical changing of what skills are required to do something, what do you call that?
But yeah, seriously, not the kind of logic to bring into a game. If you were to list the things that don't make sense in real life that are done in a game, we'd be here all day.

Anys, to Yterrbeim I ask, there seems to be one difference to this from the norm, and that's the massive number of prereq changes. Has this happened in the past and I missed it or no? Because that sort of seems something rather unprecedented that would normally warrant other actions not taken in the past rather than some thing one "...could rightfully claim for the same treatment." Different situations call for different responses. Granted thankfully you guys saw it fit to give some leeway, likely for that kind of reason which makes it a little less concerning, but as Rebecha says, it does throw some concern about skill investment along the lines of "ok, is this a worthwhile skill investment, or are they going to eventually decide this skill is no longer required for this, making it better for me to do this instead for now" and such. Its a pretty massive time investment and one that is harsher than what you'll fine anywhere else, which has its advantages, but this kind of situation is probably the biggest downside of it.

Can see why it'd be difficult though... as there are people who would have used those "currently useless skills". Like I'm sure many capital pilots long piloted battleships, frigates, or whatever on that character. Which is actually an argument I thought about that I'm really surprised no one ever really brought up. You actively used those skills to get to your current point and they're something you know that you can fall back on. Bam, wouldn't have been able to argue that because its true. Do I think other things outweigh it? Yeah, but still its not a bad point. Better than most of the rubbish being thrown around.

EDIT: And looks like you answered part of my question while I wasn't looking, but I'll just leave it there for now.

Thank you.

Hopefully that will put an end to this ridiculous debate.

Heh. I am glad to hear that after these changes then we can have some certainty that skills will not be being fundamentally changed for hopefully a little while at least. Thanks again for you detailed response. I'll go back to evemon now hehe

So youw ant to automatically remove skills that arn't required for fits? Really? You ever think some people might not want them automatically refunded? If you give players the option in game, that means spending development time on UI to do that, which brings us back to the same situation we were in before with dev time being taken away from real game changes.



They have already drawn the line by saying they will not refund skills unless those skills are made obsolete. You want to redraw the line.. but your arguement for being able to redraw the line is that people shouldn't be able to redraw it afterwards? I hope you see the hypocrisy in that.



I think you'll find you are the one jumping to conclusions. I said that this reimbursement you are talking about would lead to people jumping on the band wagon of using ships that need nerffing. The skill tree change and tieracide (which are being made to address rebalncing has led to this discussion) is what has cause you to want your SP back in the first place. So your saying it wouldn't happen is frankly ridiculous, because it already has. Also, just a heads up "That's not a good argument." is not a counter argument. At all. Ever....

The rest of your post is already covered by what I've said about. So after all that you haven't addressed any of my previous long post.



Almost everything you said in that entire post could be used as a counter arguement against your own proposal. You say that Logistics 5 is useful to command ship pilots? I say Mining Barge 5 is more useful to Orca pilots. I think most would agree.