Skill Discussions

I'm with Malcanis on this one. There are issues around the skill system for new players, but PLEXing ones account shouldn't be listed as one of them.

Firstly, I don't care about your feelings. Welcome to EVE.

Secondly there is a catch up mechanism already. Rank IV skills are only just less effective than rank Vs, yet take only 20% of the training time. Stop looking at rank Vs as the only things worth having. A character with IVs can quite easily kill a character with all Vs if they fly right and/or have the right ship/fitting. Also, there are only so many skills that apply to any one ship. great, you have 16million skill points in leadership. But you're solo so none of them do anything. Oh, you have 23.5million SP in drones? but you're flying a Merlin, so they don't do anything.

The newbie problems are these:

1. EVE has a learning CLIFF, not a learning curve. There is no way around this other than for people to join a newbie friendly corp and get some advice.
2. They see bigger ships as better ships. Someone needs to tell them that frigates can kill battleships, bigger is not better, it is just bigger.
3. IVs are good enough at the start. Vs are what you do when everything for the ship you're flying is at IV.
4. Friends is the best skill you can train. A couple of week-1 guys in frigates will kill a 7-year veteran in a pimped out pwnmobile if they know what they are doing.

These demands for 'catch up' are based on ignorance and a prevailing instant-gratification culture. you can't have that in EVE. We don't want that in EVE. EVE is for patient people. If that isn't you, then please make sure the door hits you on the way out.

Stop trying to break my game because you don't have any patience.

Now that's complete BS.

Even on frigate level, rank V is the difference between flying a punisher or a retribution/vengeance. Or the difference between being locked out by a falcon or laughing about a blackbird (or even alpha-ing it).

Try beating that scorch pulse setup with your regular pulse lasers.

Even for non PvP skills: I trained salvager to V just the other day and my Noctis almost feels like a different ship.



Why do people always assume that their target does NOT fly right?

I'm sure for every anecdotal evidence of a new pilot shooting down an older pilot there's 20 times as much to the contrary.
And I'm probably being conservative there.



And yes, at the point the ship you're flying is completely skilled AND there is no potential upgrade for that ship to fill that particular role ANd you can use all the drugs and implants your opponent brings, you're on even ground. How often does that happen?



1. is really exaggerated (IMO, anyway). Of course some people have trouble learning, but the people I want playing the game should not have a problem with a tiny bit of maths - the peculiarity of some intuitive mechanics comes with time.

People that have problems with even the simplest fittings are NOT our target audience here. For one thing, they are largely unaware of the SP wall and even IF they are - they are quite obviously tolerant to suffering, so they are a lot less likely to leave the game.

It's the min/maxxers - i.e. those people the game is quite obviously tailored towards and that make up the bulk of the veteran players in relevant positions - that are driven away by the SP-wall-of-Quit.

2. is the communication problem I mentioned earlier.

It is still correct after a fashion, as the Battleship you're able to fly (and the income it generates) allows you to fly that frigate with abandon, or allows you to fly a T2 ship instead, or a slave set. All of that DOEs make a difference.



3. The pro PvP corps won't even talk to you unless you have the relevant Vs or really good connections. At least according to their looking for member ads.

3. Works both ways. Why again the assumption that the 7-year old veteran - with 7 years worth of making contacts - has no friends?




It's not a demand, it's a recommendation. And you can call me a lot of things, but ignorant about the mechanisms of EVE is certainly not one of those.

Please define 'instant'. A catch up mechanism that doubled SP generation for a certain time would hardly qualify as instant.


And who sounds like a petulant child here? 'We don't want' 'my game' etc.

P.S. stupid limit of 5 quotes :(

You're right, I mixed up some names above. Corrected the mistake. I'm not good with names, I usually prefer to work with categories instead.

I should not have given the example on frig level I guess.

Where the hell is that advertisement??????? So now the game is F2P??? I wish you would find someone who know what they are talking about to make your point.


Look you keep kicking this dead horse. You wonder why CCP is not responding. You cite bad info like bombers. This topic has been beaten flogged and stomped many times over the years.

You can not have home runs in football!

You can have 3 characters per account. Only one can be logged in at a time, only one can be training skills at a time, but you can have 3.

You can pause training on your main and train up a alt for a couple of days for PI, trading, market checking, etc. You can transfer a character from another account once trained to your satisfaction, etc.

You said advertisements. Why do you keep saying incorrect things then get snippy when corrected? Your veracity is near nil. And please reference a "main stream media" article where it says the goal is to play for free.

A new player, like myself, who can barely tell what skills he might need to pick his nose isn't really well served with any of that. Pausing training on your main as a new character isn't anywhere near desirable. In another MMO, I might try a warrior, a thief, a mage, a belly dancer, whatever, and get a feel for what options are there. In EvE, there's no template, which is fine, but there's also no clue as to what you might need to progress towards whatever yardline you've determined your goal to be.

For example, I want to stick some T2 blasters on my Catalyst. Currently, my gank alt cannot do this at all. I trained to the requirements, Small Blaster Specialization, but whoops, I can't fit them. Not enough smurf berries. No clue in the game as to what I need to have enough smurf berries. Most of the pilots I ask forget what skills they learned that gave them enough smurf berries.

Thankfully, EveMon and EFT let me mess around long enough to realize that I'm going to need a skill I've never heard of called Advanced Weapon Upgrades to 3, along with the prereqs and one or two other skills, in order to have enough smurf berries. With my implants and what have you, that'll take 15 days, the majority of which is tied up in Weapon Upgrades V. I want some T2 blasters on my Cat so I can kerplowie more stuff, so I have no problem with this plan.

My problem is how hard it can be to figure out these plans in the first place. As a new player, tying up two weeks of training is about a third of my total account age to date. If I had only one character, that's a long time of not being able to progress. For me, a minimum of two accounts is almost needed simply to get a feel for what I might want to do when I grow up, because the game is very poor at helping you figure out what it might take to do things.

Dunno, been subbed for 7 years.

I don't see where this F2P entitlement is coming from, EVE has never been F2P. The only reason we have PLEX at all was a workaround to fight ISK sellers. That it as a side effect let people doing nothing but playing EVE play for free is good. It was however never intended for everyone to use as a means to play the game and will never be.

I'm not convinced 'entitlement' is the right word here.

Companies are competing for the attention of potential players and F2P is a flourishing concept right now.

You can't seriously be surprised that in the light of said competition there is a _perception_ among newer players that there's supposed to be a choice between F2P via plex and the - more leisurely - subscription model.

(I'm subscribed btw.)