Skill Discussions

If you took the time to read the rest of the thread you would see that yes, I strongly disagree and for good reason. What CCP seems to believe is besides the point when new players are quitting because the environment in inhospitable and they don't feel welcome.

I'm struggling to see anything other than vanity as a reason for not giving new players a break or allowing people to catch up slightly...

Would anyone at CCP care to shed any light on the situation for new players? This is something I see has been raised time and time again, with little to no input from the Devs. Come on you can't stay silent forever, you know the current business model is unsustainable for new players. Your input on this oh so sensitive subject would be greatly appreciated

"Vanity"? Really? How would you respond if I said "I'm struggling to see any reason other than self-centred entitlement for you to demand special treatment"?

Have you considered that maybe it's not "Vanity", but simply the perspective and experience gained from years of playing the game and interacting with other players that leads us to say that actually the skill system is pretty good as it is?

From the olympian perspective of playing for almost 7 years, and regularly associating with players who have plyed both much more and much less than me, I'd say that you're significantly constrained by your skills until maybe around the 7-8M SP mark. After that, assuming that you have spent your training time wisely, you're in a position to be pretty much on a level (a few percent less raw DPS, perhaps, a few hundred EHP behind, but not really much of a perceptible difference) while flying the T1 frigates and cruisers; after that, what you're mostly doing is expanding the range of ships you can fly well.

Your complaint is based on the idea of "catching up". You might also wish to consider if that truly applies to EVE in the same way that it does in "normal" MMOs: What EVE's skill system does is encourage the normal progession model of content "throttling", but unlike most games, it doesn't enforce it - there's no "You must be level 85 to board this ship" barrier. If you've got the ship skill to one, that's all the game cares about. And that's the wall that you're running into, because you're used to games that don't let you even try to do stuff you're not ready for. It's a fundamental principle of EVE that it allows you to make bad decisions if you want to, and it won't protect you from the conseqences.

If you try and "rush" to battleships, all you'll be doing is doubling that constrained time, and massively increasing the cost of your losses. You can do that if you want to, but don't expect a lot of sympathy if you ignore the advice of all those veterans "protecting their vanity" and find out that you're just spending longer in the skill deficit hole as a result.

The way I see it, it is vanity through and through. It's the same old argument time and time again in every MMO when a new content patch is released. "Why should X players get the ‘now obsolete’ gear for cheap/free - I worked hard for that!” See, it is a non-issue because that gear is now obsolete to them, it doesn't matter how much time they put in because it is obsolete.

Vast amounts of skills Veteran players hold are now obsolete to them. Yes they put the time in at some point, but now they have the skills it is a non-issue because well, they have them! By default every single new player is penalised because they have not been playing as long as said Veteran in the current system. Could you imagine if other MMOs kept all gear prices the same content patch after content patch and just kept on raising the price of new gear? The gear creep for new players would be so incredibly huge no-one would even bother trying and the game would pretty much be confined to its existing player base.

The only reason EVE has gotten away with this system for so long, is because they allow you to train your skills whilst offline. But like all bubbles, it is going to pop eventually. The game has been out for 10 years now and that bubble has grown pretty damn huge. New players see this bubble and think, "You know what - this isn't a game for me". Not because they don't like the game or want to give it a chance, but because the "gear" creep is so damn huge it puts them off from the get go.

The real point is that the current system is unsustainable for new players. Fast forward to 5 years time - the game has been out for 15 years and another couple of Tech levels have been added. How do you think a new player is going to feel then? Knowing it has taken another player 10 years to be able to fit their ships out with a T4-T5 builds for said race that will absolutely stomp a T1 build. The game would have absolutely no chance at retaining new players then.

Yes Veteran players are going to feel cheated... Players always feel cheated when they have worked hard for something and it then gets given away for next to nothing - even if it is now obsolete. But it is vanity plain and simple. Those skills now mean nothing to them as they finished skilling them years ago and have since been working on bigger and better things. It really makes no real difference to them at all whether new players are given a slight head start or not, it is not going to affect their character in the slightest as those skills are obsolete to them. So why are they bothered? Vanity.

This is still an MMO remember, and like all MMOs, if you are going to continue to release new levels of “gear” every year, sooner or later you have to put measures in place to help bridge the gap between new and old players – or fat chance trying to retain those new players when they see how big the “gear” creep has become.

The false implication that is made by everyone who brings this topic up is that veteran players don't remember what it's like to be a new player, or that their new player experience is somehow invalid because it was in the past. The fact that veteran players rarely support these ideas is not an indication that they're jaded or trying to "keep noobs down", but that they have both the new player and veteran player perspective to work with, and realize that the skill system is more or less where it needs to be.


They simply need to be shown what they can do with low SP. That's the problem you should be trying to solve. (Not implying that it's your fault... CCP could do more in that respect.)


Ironically, that's what the system is intended to do. Let new players experiment without being greatly financially penalized. If you succeed at getting new players into Battleships quicker, you're just trading an SP wall for an ISK wall (which is incidentally what frustrated me most as a noob).

I am not trying to implicate that Veteran players do not remember, but as the old adage goes – out of sight, out of mind. The issue just isn’t real for them anymore and whether new players get a boost or not should have no bearing on them whatsoever.



Maybe so, but the SP wall is very real and grows larger as every day goes by. Which doesn’t stop new players from thinking “how am I supposed to catch up on 5 years+ of SP?”


This issue would solve itself. If players could get into Battleships quicker, more players would fly Battleships and the price would go down. The ISK wall exists now because they are niche items for new players, take that niche away and the wall comes away with it.

I see you deleted your post Malcanis? But I wanted to respond with this:

Half a million people? You mean half a million accounts, not all of which are active. The most players I have ever seen on Tranquillity is just above 50k. However it normally averages around the 35k+ mark.

The game has grown and may even continue to do so as people get fed up with the influx of other MMO's out there, but even you must be able to see new player retention it pretty poor. I've seen and experienced it first-hand 10 years into the games life cycle, so I'd like to think I have some experience in what I'm talking about. This isn't merely a case of being uneducated. You've been playing for 7 years and only have the word of new players who decide to grit their teeth and stick with it, which only gives you one side of the argument to go on.

Just look at whenever a big battle is publicised in the various media outlets like Reddit. The games sees an influx of new players, followed by an influx of players leaving as they realise just what it is going to take to get involved in the very battles they joined for. Why do you think I re-joined a few months ago? I wanted a slice of that pie, yet I couldn’t even reach nullsec without getting destroyed time and time again... So I joined a corp and got shown the ropes yet I still feel completely overwhelmed by the sheer volume of skills I have ahead of me.

The very nature of the game means that the SP wall will continue to grow ad infinitum for existing players, ever increasing the gap between them and the new players. That is not a sustainable business model. Sooner or later a mechanism will have to be put into place to help bridge that gap, surely even you can see that? Maybe my solution is not even close to being the right solution, but that doesn’t mean a solution is not needed. If my experience and the experience of others in my corp are anything to go by, it sorely is.

New players seem to believe that the raw number of SP a player have all come into play at once, and is their 10 mil. against their opponents' 150 mil, so he has 15x the chance of getting victorious. But besides the basic fitting skills, that are useful on every ship and not long to train, only a small portion of a player total SP are used when flying a certain ship.

What use do I have for my 8 mil. sp in drones when I fly a tengu? or how advanced spaceship command 5 + Jump drive skills are factored in when I fly an inty? Eve is not about getting a big leap forward like let's say, levelling from level 84 to 85, and getting those new skills and equipment restricted to that level, but rather small steps taken one at a time, here I get to fly this T2 frig, here I get to use those T2 medium autocannons, oh, only 2 weeks now to T2 large ones, and before you know it you'll be having a lot of fun and getting to use a lof of equipment.

Ofcourse, I believed like the OP at first, I felt overwhelmed by the system - and keep in mind, in 2007 you had to train 6 mil. SP worth of learning skills so you don't fall behind older players even more. My first experience in 0.0 was with some dudes in ishtars killing us daily, so ofcourse, I said it must be the SP difference, so let's skill for ishtars. And, 2 months later I was sitting in one and getting owned by a guy in a drake.

tl;dr, eve is not about instant bonuses, but rather small steps, in which the first of them are recommended to be done in a team environment. If you believe that 30 mil SP from now you'll be awesomely proficient at pvp only because of the SP accumulated and not because of your own human qualities, you will have many surprises, most of them rather costly :)

The OP is profoundly misguided in his assumption that the goal for a new player should be to get his ass into a T2 Large ship fitted with T2 modules. That's a fundamental misunderstanding of EVE.

But it wouldn't hurt, and would actually help retain players by giving them choices they wouldn't otherwise have. Not a bad thing if you ask me. If a player has more choice and can try their hand at flying a greater amount of ships, they can not only get to grips with the various play styles of different ships quicker, but can make more informed choices on the actual ship they would like to specialise in. It is a win/win. Even if it doesn't fully resolve the issue, it would go a long way to softening the blow on new players skill progression.



True, but then not everyone wants to or can afford to level up alts to be competent in other areas.

I haven't deleted anything. Maybe you're thinking of someone else.



This confirms my suspeicious that you fundamentally understand the nature of skilltraining in EVE. Whether or not you realise it, you're thinking in the "skillpoints = levels" mode, as if 1 million SP = Level 1, 2 million SP = Level 2... 85 million SP = Level 85, and so on. And if skillpoints did work like this, you'd be correct: passive skillpoint gain would be a bad model.

But.

Skillpoints aren't analagous to character class levels. You get absolutely nothing, not a single extra hitpoint, not so much as a 0.01% increase on your chance to crit from having 10M or 100M or even a billion SP. You only get to fly more ships, and no matter how many SP you have you can only fly one ship at a time.

After 10 years, it takes exactly as many SP to take Gallente Cruiser 5 now as it did in 2003. And more importantly, Gallente Cruisers are still viable, useful ships just as they were in 2003. Indeed, perhaps now more than ever: the CFC are joyously deploying low skillpoint (or low ISK) pilots in Celestis fleets to support their battleships with devastating effect.

There's no "unclimbable wall" now; there won't be next year; there won't be in 10 years when there are characters with 300M SP.

The analogy I like to draw is with WoW; a 6 month player might have just got his Paladin to level cap (what is it, 90 now?) And assuming he's chosen the right talents and whatever, his Level 90 Paladin is as good as anyone else's. But a 6 year player might have a stable of a dozen or fifteen different characters in different classes and specialisations. If the raid needs a pally, then the 6 month guy is operating on the same level. But if the raid needs a healer or a hunter, then the 6 year guy is going to have an advantage, because he can chose a character that's perfectly optimised, while the 6 month guy will have to try and force his paladin into a role for which it is less optimised. That's how EVE skills work; you hit a "level cap" when your skills for a given ship are perfect, and after that all you can do is level cap in more types of ships. But no matter how many new ships you train for, it won't make you even 0.1% better in the ships you've already trained. All you're doing is widening the number of roles you can bring an optimised "Level 90" ship for.