Player Features and Ideas Discussion

First off, let me say WOW to the length of some of the posts in this thread. It had me floored.

Now onto the topic.
I agree with the general sentiment expressed by previous posters before me, certificates are ok for new players, but should remain private or on blue lvl. corp certs would be awesome.

1. Now, i think it should be emphasised that in order to be genuinly usefull to new players, the certificates need to be viewed in the same window as the skillque, perhaps with such a 'sliding' subwindow such as the new inventory filters; or it should be possible to drag / drop certs into the sqillque.

2. next, the names of Certificates need to be absolutly clear. no more "high-velocity Helsman". it needs to be something like "Staship Maneuverability"

3. The Tooltip of the Certificate is as important as the certificate itself. For example, the current tooltip for Fittingskills, basic.



This is what the tooltip should have Looked like:
Holders of this certificate have a basic proficiency at fitting Starships.
The Engineering Skill provides +5% Powergrid for all ships, permanently.
The Electronics Skill provides +5% CPU for all ships, permanently.
The Electronics Upgrades Skill enables the fitting of Co-processor I (LINK), which provides CPU. Higher Lvl of the skill provide more CPU by these modules.
The Energy Grid Upgrades Ski9ll enables the fitting of Reactor Control Unit I (link) Which provides more Powergrid.


All tooltips should at first glance allow a new player to see WHY they should train for this certificate, and what benefits they get by it. The whole point of Certificates is to prevent new players from having to click "show info" on all skills in the game. therefore the tooltips need to provide the most basic information on what benefits the player will get from that skill.

4. All Certificates need to be reworked. I think it might be a good idea to create one set of Certificates for Professions:
a) Exploration
b) Mining
c) Trading
d) Production
d.1) Reasearch
d.2)Planetary Interaction
e) Missioning [Social skills, Salvaging]

Furthermore :
f) Core Competency
g) Core Fitting
h) Core Tanking (shield / armor)
i) Core Capacitor
j) Core Navigation
k) Core Electronics (Targeting, Signalstr. ect.)

l) Gunnery
m) Missiles
n) Drones
o) Leadership
p) Piracy [EWAR, Points, Overheat, Nano paste, Boosters] i think i played the game for 7 month before i found out about boosters.

I know those are 18 Certs, but any less would really not help. for professions, you are only going to do one, really

Some more GENERAL guidelines concerning Certificates.
BASIC should take no more than one day to achieve
IMPROVED should be 2-4 skills to lvl 4
STANDARD should be ESSENTIAL skills lvl 5 , rest 4 (for fitting: Electronics, Engineering, Wepeon Upgrades 5, advanced 4, for example)
ELITE all V

Thats all i could think of for now.
EDIT : Looks like my post wasn't any shorter, lol. and they say people can't provide constructive critisism.

Seems like a bit of a waste of time to me personally, they don't really hold any value and seem fine the way they are

As many people already said, the problem with certificates is deeper than just a visualization issue. They need a complete overhaul.

In my opinion, the ideal solution would have the following points:

1) EVERYTHING is private by default

You can let the player link a specific certificate into a chat window, for example, but let every information about skills and
certificates be private by default. If the player wants to show something to someone, let him/her decide in that specific case, otherwise hide everything else.

2) Custom certificates

Different people value different skills in different situations. Define some default certificates that actually make sense
(e.g. capacitor-related skills, shield tanking, stealth bombers), but let people add, edit and remove certificates as they see fit.
Which skills are important heavily depend on the player, what he/she likes to do in the game, what are his/her goals. As someone else pointed out, turn the certificates into "custom bundles of skills" and let people decide if the default ones are sufficient or if they need something else.

3) Give a nice visual tool to navigate through certificates

You guys showed some amazing prototypes at Fanfest related to Ship Progression. Do it with certificates. Make it that when you open a certificate, you can see the tree of skills you should train, how long it will take, which ones do you already have (injected, trained, available and unavailable), which skills are pre-requisites to other skills, etc.

Hooray for wasted dev resources and useless bloated code ! \o/


* (unrelated) Now, can we get rid of the stoopid system sweep already. If I didn't care enough to act on it the first thousand times I saw it, why would I want to see it another thousand times.

I like certificates. I keep all of my elites on public display. It makes for something character related to link in the profile. I've collected quite a few.

Giving free intel means squat to me. If you want to know how I trained ill send you a list before I kill you.

I do not however want to see my profile cluttered with basic comp certificates.

I won't bother arguing with people about the importance of them. I personally find them a good guideline for how to focus training.

The certificates are really good for knowing how skilled and in what direction your possible target is, hence it is not information I want known to those seeking to gank me. Although it is funny to see an elite hull tanker.

This is one of the few things in Eve that I think could disappear and cause little or no heart burn.

Without a major overhaul of what the certificates are, they are basically no useful.

Don't remove something just because it's rarely used, especially if it's already in the game and working w/o issues. As per other options, those are cool, especially the comparison option, should be great tool to people who specialize in training new pod pilots or corporation recruiters to quickly assess pilot's capability. As for the last question, i'd be worried if any of the information on certificates would be by available publicly w/o the option to hide it.

Maybe if you added a new gameplay element to them through some sort of 'training' arcs through the npc schools might provide some interest

That sounds awesome! I have a potentially controversial suggestion to make certificates generally more popular:

Basic Certificate: +0.25% bonus to all skills under this certificate
Standard Certificate: +0.5% bonus to all skills under this certificate
Improved Certificate: +0.75% bonus to all skills under this certificate
Elite Certificate: +1.0% bonus to all skills under this certificate

Failing that, some small yet tangible benefit to getting a certificate. Bragging rights are great, but they don't win fights :'(