Skill Discussions

EVE is not WOW, yet many new players expect it to be.

Can you grind your way thru to lvl 90 in WOW in a week? Yes you can. Can you grind in EVE? No you can not. But the differences go far beyond that.

EVE is not just another MMO game. It is a virtual world where you can go where you want, when you want, and do what ever you want. EVE has removed the skill/exp grind. This is a good thing.

Yet buying a high skilled character off the bazaar will not unlock much more of the game for you that you can not do with a new character. Sure you can not jump into EVE and be flying a Titan a few weeks later. But that is not just a skill point issue. EVE is far deeper than that. To enjoy EVE you must learn to look beyond the skill points. Some of the best PVP in this game is at the frigate/cruiser level. Sure the giant capital fleet battles of null sec look fun, but I have been there. Blob warfare is not that fun. In large fleets you get lag, you get Fleet Commanders screaming at you to do what they say, you can not do your own thing but have to follow fleet doctrine or you will die very fast.

Even if you had the skill points what would you do? In EVE unlike most main stream MMO's when your ship gets destroyed it is gone, no respawn with all your gear intact. When you get podded you respawn in a clone with nothing but your skill points intact. If you started EVE and got a Boost to 10 million skill points the first day what would you be able to do you can not do with a 100,000 skill point character? Fly a battleship? Not without isk.

A battleship costs upwards of 300 million isk to buy and fit properly, and it can get destroyed 5 seconds after undocking it. then you need to buy another. A new player will lose many many ships in their first few weeks Playing EVE, regardless of how many skill points they have. Skill point progression is slow because it has to be. You are just expecting to go raiding a few weeks after starting, and that mentality dos not work in EVE. Are you going to spend a couple thousand dollars in real money buying PLEX to buy the ships and gear to learn the game at the battleship level with your purchased high Skill Point character?? Not unless you are an idiot.

The average veteran can make easily 60 million isk per hour. In NULL sec you can make far more. A new player will make if they are lucky 1 million isk/hr. But starting, playing, and learning, this will go up quickly.

EVE is a virtual world. You are new to that world. By the time you learn how that world works you will have the skill points to fly the ships you can afford to use. The first rule of EVE is "do not fly what you can not afford to lose." You can spend your first couple months getting into a battleship as quickly as possible, but when you finally can afford to buy and fit it, Can you afford to lose it? Chancse are the first time you undock in a battleship you will lose it in your first fight. I ask again, can you afford to lose it? Because you will lose it.

There are many veteran players in EVE that enjoy PVP in frigates. Their advantage over a new player flying the same ship is minimal. All those skill points they have allowing them to fly a Titan means nothing when they are sitting in a frigate. Their experience is what gives them the advantage. Changing how quickly you get skill points will not change how quickly you gain knowledge of the game, and how to not die. If you do manage to kill that veteran in his frigate he loses much more than you do. His high skill points mean his clone costs many times more than yours. if you die you lose a few hundred thousand isk worth of equipment. If he dies he loses the same equipment but also a 20-30 million isk clone if he was a titan pilot.

If you are new to EVE stick to the small ships until you know what you are doing. You can be flying T2 frigates in only a few weeks. these ships are considered elite to many veteran PVPers. You will be able to fly the ships before you can afford to lose them. EVE can be just as much fun as a new player as it can for a veteran. In fact I miss the days when I was new and every time I jumped through a gate I saw something new. Every mission was a new experience.

Do not set you goals for something that is over 1 year away in skill training time. set your goals for what you can do. Make your first million isk, then your first 10 million. get up to running level 3 missions, learn to scan and start running exploration sites. These are not wasted goals, infact you will need this experience and skills to move on to the greater goals you set down the road. You need to learn to walk before you can learn to run. Character progression in EVE is based on isk and how much you can make, not how many skill points you have. More skill points may open up opportunities to make more isk/hr but also make you lose much more when you die. and you will die, a lot. EVE is a world with a living economy. You can chose to live in that world as a warrior, as a resource collector, as a trader, as a builder,as a pirate, as an explorer, or any combination of these. Yet the knowledge and isk you need to do these things without going broke takes longer than getting the skill points trained.

The single greatest thing about EVE, at least for me is the skill point training system. There is no experience grind. The advantage a veteran hardcore player has over a new casual player is the experience and knowledge of how the game works, and the piles of isk they made, not the skill-points they have. This is not WOW, and if you try to play it like you played WOW you will only get frustrated and quit. WOW is made for kids, EVE is not. Perhaps this type of game is not for you. There is a reason most EVE players are in the 20-30 years old bracket with many even older. There is also a reason why EVE has continued to grow for 10 years while many others faded and died.There is no end game in EVE, it is a ever changing, growing, world.

A bit of a correction here since the extra skill points can unlock extra capabilities in the ship you fly......Let's say you like to fly minmatar ships, which are the most diversified race in eve, and some of their ships do require high skills in projectiles and missiles and drones( i'm looking at you typhoon...).


Like it or hate it, that's a lot of training to get the best out of the ship, and i'm ignoring that some minmatar ships are shield tankers and some are armor tankers to add even more variability to the mix....They're a pain in the butt to train up, but awesome when they are.


So the race you choose also makes a lot of difference in the difficulty training up, as if you take an Amarr ship, it'll be a laser boat with an armor tank so it's easier to skill up, or a caldari ship and it's shields and missiles all the way barring a few cases, or a gallente ship which is a rail or drone boat and an armor tank.

i've got 17mil sp after 10 months, if you're only getting 800k per month you're doing something wrong.

I have +4s and i remapped twice and trained int/mem for about 5months and now currently in perception/will for the last 4 months

Lets see... How long until you can be in a competent PvP Frigate:

[Atron, CheapMetaRanis]
Small 'Accommodation' Vestment Reconstructer I
F85 Peripheral Damage System I
Gauss Field Balancer I

Experimental 1MN Afterburner I
J5b Phased Prototype Warp Scrambler I
X5 Prototype Engine Enervator

Small 'Knave' Energy Drain
Anode Light Electron Particle Cannon I, Caldari Navy Antimatter Charge S
Anode Light Electron Particle Cannon I, Caldari Navy Antimatter Charge S
Anode Light Electron Particle Cannon I, Caldari Navy Antimatter Charge S

Small Auxiliary Nano Pump I
Small Hybrid Burst Aerator I
Small Hybrid Metastasis Adjuster I

1-2 Weeks and you'll have average skills to fly this, and you'll be deadly with it.

Add 2 more weeks, and you'll have the average skills to fly this:

[Thorax, Noob Thrax]
Damage Control II
1600mm Reinforced Rolled Tungsten Plates I
Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane II
Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane II
Magnetic Field Stabilizer II

Experimental 10MN Microwarpdrive I
X5 Prototype Engine Enervator
J5b Phased Prototype Warp Scrambler I
X5 Prototype Engine Enervator

Anode Electron Particle Cannon I, Caldari Navy Antimatter Charge M
Anode Electron Particle Cannon I, Caldari Navy Antimatter Charge M
Anode Electron Particle Cannon I, Caldari Navy Antimatter Charge M
Anode Electron Particle Cannon I, Caldari Navy Antimatter Charge M
Anode Electron Particle Cannon I, Caldari Navy Antimatter Charge M

Medium Ancillary Current Router I
Medium Trimark Armor Pump I
Medium Trimark Armor Pump I

Hammerhead I x5

If you just aim for the basic certificates... it takes 5 days to get into the atron, and 8 days to get into the thorax. Sure, PvP'ing with low skills, in cheap-fit ships means you aren't using them to their fullest potential, but so what. You don't need to train 5 months to become viable at PvP.... you need to quit bitching and accept that perfection is NOT quickly achieved. And unlike other MMO's, you don't NEED perfect skills to wtfbbqpwn your opponent... instead you need general game knowledge on how to engage, or you need friends.

LOL, EVE is made for intelligent players.

The mentality of powering through to end game as fast as possible is not what intelligent players do.

That is a complete lack of patience, and a sign of immaturity, not intelligence.

Having the skill points to fly a battleship does you no good if you do not know how to make enough isk to replace it every time you undock. A new player does not have the experience to survive in a battleship, or the experience to make enough isk that they can afford to lose a battleship. The skillpoint system is an effective method of holding you back from jumping into something you are not ready for. I know players that have played for over two years and have still not flown a battleship. Not because they could not train into it in that time, but because they enjoy the fast paced action of cruisers and frigates. Battleships are big, slow, and made for fleet battles.

As i said before this is not WOW. You can not power your way up to max level and then take the time to learn.

How well would you do in WOW if you lost all your gear every time you died in a raid?

Power leveling your way to max level would not work well then would it. you would not be able to afford new gear every time you die. You would need to take it slow, and learn the game, before you get to the point where you need that expensive gear.

so 5+4=9 so I had 1 month where I was in my standard remap training for random things because I had no idea what I was doing :D

I was in a myrmidon by the end of that month with tech 1 armour modules but at least I had tech 2 drones by then.

I got a co worker into the game about 4 months ago, he now flies a maelstrom t2 tank and hes on lvl 4 guns training up to t2 with lvl 5 bs in only 4 months, making a couple hundred million isk with me in just a few days, if you want to mine, another friend of mine was maxed on mining in just 6 months. so look at skills before yet another person decides will i have to stay docked for 1.5 to 2 years before im of use. while you stay docked the rest of them will be getting flying experience because you cant just sit there and push a bunch of buttons all the time like wow

Yes, but most new players are not making enough isk after only 3-4 months to afford to lose a 400-500M isk ship. And a decent battleship is 400-500M isk fully fitted with T2 mods. Hell I have T1 battleships worth well over 1 Billion.

EVE has no skill point or experience grind. The grind is isk. when you die you lose everything you had with you. You need the isk to replace your equipment every time you die. No other MMO does this. If you could get into a fully fit battleship within two weeks of starting the game player retention would me much lower, as most new players would lose there ships long before they could afford to replace them. A new player would work very hard to get that first battleship, as many do.

However, without the knowledge of how the game works they would lose it very soon after undocking it. Grinding 500 Million isk running level 2 missions, or mining with a venture would drive many players away, as they could not compete with the veteran player with loads of isk. New players would be in an even worse position then they are now.

Many complain that EVE does it wrong, that EVE needs to get with the times. Yet EVE is one if not the only MMO game that has not only lasted 10 years without dieing, but seen an increase in their player base with each passing year. Sure there are other games that have been around for 10 years or more. Games like EverQuest, but even EverQuest is only a shadow of what it once was. EVE has grown with each year.

Even WOW while still having far more subscriptions than EVE has diminished rapidly in the last two years, it is dieing. They are not near the 6 million subscribers they had 5 years ago. But are on the downward spiral ever other MMO has seen when players just get bored of leveling up new characters and being stuck at that max level with the best gear,with no where to go. New expansions ad a few weeks of content but take many months to arrive.

With EVE there is no end game. there is always something else to reach for, some thing new to try, some thing you have not done or trained yet. The available skills currently in EVE would take over 20 years to train every skill to level 5. Not every skill is of interest to every player. But there is not end game where you have nowhere else to go. Even getting into a Titan is not the end. You can lose it, and even if you have the isk and/or resources to replace it they take months to build. Not only has EVE survived for 10 years, but there are players who were here for the beta that are still playing. EVE is a sand box, a virtual world where you can do what ever you want. It is what you make of it, not some liner story you play to the end, then role a new character of another class to play through again

I have a question....

Why do so many who hates the basic mechanics of EVE... Skill Points and the fact that you lose your stuff when you die keep an active account to post in the forms?

This leads me to wonder is it just trolls?


Yes I can gripe about many things CCP is doing... I don't like some of the ship changes... I hate the upcoming tracking enhancer nerf etc but these are just factors in a big picture... If I disliked the basic concept of skill points and how the game is played I would have quit a long time ago!

Yes I will admit there was a short period of time when I was a newer player I thought about how this game was so unfair but that was only a breif moment when I was being raped in PVP..

I quickly realized I was playing the game completely wrong because I was in the WoW mindset of solo questing. I joined a corporation and saw the big picture of the game. Years later I'm so happy I didn't let my first impression cause me to quit. Would I start over from day one with a new player today? Absolutely!


TLDR

If so many people dislike the basic concept of Eve why are they still paying for an account to post here? Are they just trolling or maybe they just haven't figured out the big picture of Eve yet?