Skill Discussions

Short Story: there are too many "necessary" skills a player needs to be effective in EVE, and it takes too long to train them up. Furthermore, there is nothing a pro-active player can do to hurry up the process. Why should I do more than log-in for 15 minutes a day to update my training queue, given that I won't be able to do anything well for another couple of months, if not years?



Long Story: I had previously played EVE, several years ago, and only for about six weeks. I hit the same wall then that I'm running into now, that basically it takes too long to train up the skills needed to do what I want to do.

At first I thought that if I only trained the bare minimum to get into the game - then I can at least participate. I won't be the most effective combatant in my corps's roaming PvP fleet, but at least I'm there.

But I found that after sprinting to Battlecruisers, everything I could do, I was doing at only a third of the efficiency of my corps-mates. The problem is exacerbated in that I can't even talk to them about my frustrations because my 2 million SP is constantly being compared against their 50m SP.

I was reading on a forum that a Harbinger Battlecruiser can be "easily" fitted to do 500+ dps. EFT says that my Harbinger, with Medium Scout Drones, will at best do 140 dps. And there's nothing I can do about this except to train more, which has been my problem all along. I don't want to shelve my character for six months and only come back to the game when I can fit Tier 2 Turrets. The game has to be changed to accommodate new players who will be eager to bump elbows with their veteran corps-mates.


I don't want to post this whine and contribute nothing, so in addition to replying to commentators, allow me to post ideas or suggestions for improving the new player experience:

Information distribution and presentation:

• Skill Certifications are a good idea, but the presentation for them is poor. I don't see the connection between getting Certifications and increased ability or utility for my Ship. There is no fast-browsing way to look at the "bigger picture."
• The game does not make critical knowledge readily available. I had to discover for myself, to no small amount of surprise and disappointment, the huge number of skills needed to Armor Tank to any degree of success. As an Amarr pilot, who will be Armor Tanking every ship, these skills seem like the sort of information that needs to be front-and-center.

The game should provide a tiered listing of skills, wherein a new player can see for themselves the introductory skills to a subject, like Armor Tanking. There would be the first set of skills the player should purchase and train, to establish at least a minimum foundation. And then there would be a Tier Two of supplementary skills to build upon the first Tier. And then a Third Tier, and a Fourth. Each Tier should satisfy the prerequisites for the following tier.

By the end, at the maximum Tier of any given activity, in this case Armor Tanking, the player will be exposed to every Armor Tanking skill, and will have trained them in the order befitting the timing and needs of the player. For example, the Tiers would direct the player to train for Armor Repairer 2 before training Armor resistances. Both are vital, but the former is better for a beginning player than the latter.

In addition, having these tiers allows the player to say,
"Cruiser Pilot, T2 Offense T3 Defense" instead of
"16mil SP pilot!"
Of these two statements, which is more useful?

• The skills themselves have ambiguous and misleading descriptions about what they actually do. For example, you have the skill that increases Capacitor Regeneration, which is good. Less good is the skill that increases the size of the Capacitor - the skill does not tell you that Capacitor Regeneration is based on a percentage of the total Capacitor size, so actually both skills result in faster Capacitor Regeneration. Worse is the skill that increases ship Agility. How much is a Harbinger's agility normally? How much will this skill help me? What is ship agility used for?
• No skill, or any in-game resource, tells you that the Capacitor recharges on a wacky curve, that the Recharge rate at 30% is greater than it is at 95%. I was initially panicked that my Capacitor regularly hovered at the 30% area, only later discovering that no, this is normal if not ideal.

Each "chapter" of skills, for this example we'll use Engineering, shouldn't be a simple drop-down list of the skills you happen to have. There needs to be graphic of some kind that lists every skill for that chapter, with an intuitive manner of describing what each individual skill does and how the layers of prerequisites build upon one another.

As a new player to the game, I just don't know if I'm missing a vital skill, and there's no resource for finding an answer, except to blindly search through Evelopedia or google and hope I get lucky with search results.

Training Queue:
Stacking skills for up to a day is a brilliant update to the game. I have an idea that expands upon that concept as it relates to new players.

Training Curriculum: In the same way that a college student will take 3-5 classes over a quarter/semester, learning different topics simultaneously, the new player should be able to queue up clusters of skills to help them establish that necessary "base" of skills faster.

I've read on these forums that veteran players know and acknowledge this problem, and avoid making an alt character because they know it'll take 6 months to a year just to get the character in a position to be useful.

Imagine being able to select the Tier 1 Armor Tank and Small Laser Turret curriculum, where at the end of the week, you are rewarded with skills commiserate with three weeks of training. Or something. POST LIMIT!

You just described the certificate system, the teirs being basic, standard, improved and elite

all the T1 and T2 ship in the game have a list of recommended certificates which you can use as guide to training for that ship

The biggest one being Core Competency as it has you training things that benefit all ships like capacitor skills and navigational skills

The players can also wave around the certificates around in the same manner as you described. A player can already advertise themselves as for instance having Logistics Chief Elite instead of just having 40mill SP but not many people do.

The next part is the argument that skill training rates need to stay the same...

We have players that have been here since 2003 and some of them have actually come forward about the fact they felt there were too few skill in the game and they they felt there wasn't much left to train for any more. In fact i have a friend that is training all the racial carriers, dreds, and titans to 5 just cause he can and cause he doesn't have much else better to train.

The thing is that you rushed into a harbinger. You had the right mind set of trying to get in and help and participate but you took too high of a role right off the bat. You should have probably been in a alpha or DPS destroyer or gotten into a AF, inty, or EAS as you can be MUCH more effective in them since you won't have to train as much to even use the stuff on them cause it all small modules.

You can't argue that you'd be worthless in such a small ship either, they can put out surprisingly good amounts of DPS (AF) get great speed and quick lock times (Inty) or totally cripple another much larger ship (EAS)

In addition the skill training time forces the player to take their time in the learning process. There is a boat load of things that can't just be trained with SP to make yourself a better player and that sorta of stuff you just need to take the time to research or you have to experience it on your own. You aren't going to nail the bulls-eye with a gun you never held before no matter how good the parts are. Taking your time to move up the ship size tree can allow you to learn these types of strategies and tactics to then use then better when u get up to those ships.

You also can't argue that you can never catch up with older players. Yes you'll probably never catch up SP wise but you can catch up skill wise. Cause as soon as you've train ed a skill to 5 you are now on equal grounds in terms of the bonuses that skill provides as everyone else that has ever trained it to 5.

In the mean time you can spend the time waiting by using the skill you DO have to make ISK and to make some social connections to your corpmates and other people around them. You never know who might supply you with a cache of ammo or free ships later cause you're a friend. or ally. Enjoy what few skills you do have now, don't dread the wait to get the ones you want.

You mentioned there is nothing "proactive" a player can do to speed up training time - but implants will do that for you. Which, of course, requires a skill Get Cybernetics to level 3, then put in some implants to boost your training time. Since you are on an int/mem remap, put in some +3 implants to three points to your int/mem attributes. (Train cybernetics to 4 and you can use +4's, btw)

Memory Augmentation - Basic is the implant for +3 to memory.
Cybernetic Subprocessor - Basic is the implant for +3 to intelligence.

The +3 implants aren't all that expensive on the market, they can also be purchased in LP stores and are often rewards in some storyline missions. The +4 implants are quite a bit more expensive, of course.

There's already been given some great advice about low-skilled pvp ships - the electronic attack ships help low-skilled players be particularly effective, imho Even more fun - and dirt cheap - is just fitting up a frigate for tackling. Can never have to many tacklers :)

OK I've looked at your losses. You don't know how to fit any of those ships. Your Arbitrator losses are lolfit to say the least.

So to be fairly brutal about this :

1) You have no ship knowledge - doesn't come from thin air, or BC, or any other site. Read up where you can, talk to people and most importantly fly them;

2) You can't fly them well - that only comes with experience;

3) You have low SP - well so did we all. For PvP you do what you can and for now that's tackling/solo frigate work. If nobody points the target then nobody gets a kill.

4) I suspect you know virtually nothing about game mechanics - especially PvP mechanics.


You could have 100mill SPs and you'd still be losing ships left right and centre. The reason is that you don't have a clue what you're doing with them

If you want to continue in PvP then I'd recommend you take a couple of Agony Classes.

They won't teach you how to be a great solo pilot but you will come out of the classes knowing whether you want to do PvP and also you'll feel more confident in gangs as you'll understand more of what is happening. The Agony classes sort of jumpstart you into gang warfare and for solo players like me its sometimes quite nice to come back and try some fits which don't work solo.

EVE is complex and as open-ended as possible for a reason, and being a new player myself, I love it. Honestly I feel this game could be more open-ended, not less (like adding even more options and less direction). What you recommend is a step backwards. Figuring it out is half the fun, IMO. It's space exploration and conquest, and that to me means long drawn-out journeys and a hard struggle to earn your place at the top. Not tutorials and hand-holding.

Hello,

I am a year old character. I can solo level 4s, and I have no problem doing havens in null sec. I don't yet have my core fitting improved certificate. I don't even have my passive shield tanking standard certificate either. And don't get me started on weapon systems; I can barely shoot the assault missiles on my Gila!

You should eventually get them up there, but the way I've done it is that I usually put off fitting skills until I can't fit stuff anymore. I put off shield skills until I needed to use T2 stuff. Etc.

Case in point, certificates are good guidelines, but they are hardly needed to function. With a little ingenuity and foresight, you can still fit and fly your ships just fine without having elite fitting skills, elite tanking skills, and elite shooting skills. Anyone saying otherwise has forgot what it was like to be new.

Yes the certificates system could use a little work still but is the best thing you have and it's exactly the system you're asking for.

Throwing it out for your system would just be a remake of the same sorta thing and has just as much potential for ambiguity as to which skills belong win which category.

Just read up on the certificate descriptions and then the descriptions of the skill within them.

And don't forget about the recommend ones on the ships.

You've been given some good replies already. Also the veteran you mention in your reply, I don't think the post of one guy complaining about alts is really proof.. I still make new alts and have actually joined RvB with an alt with less than 500k sp. This is actually a bit on the low side but it's still very doable to fly a pvp frigate. Within a few million SP you can definitely be useful. But you can't expect to be doing everything at the same efficiency as very old players.

You're right about the game not educating you very greatly, but I think it would possibly become a bit too much if it did. The tutorial is already quite long. Part of the fun (for me at least) was figuring things out. The 30% capacitor thing you mention for example, isn't it great if you find that out and it opens a lot of new opportunities for you? Or hell, hearing about a great community application such as EFT which allows you to do easy research yourself. I think it only adds to the experience.

I'd also like to mention that there is a lot of early game content that is pretty much only fun at low SP. Eventually, level 4's become so easy it's a pure grind. Even though there is quite a lot of PVE content, it all becomes routine when you can do everything easily. So try to enjoy the days where non-pvp activities still give you a challenge :)

Othran, to which I retort that World of Warcraft, for all its faults, keeps players on the rails. Whether you waste your time or focus, you're always progressing in your class.

In EVE, you can be sprinting through skills training, never having a moment where your queue isn't full, and be going nowhere fast. I had people tell me to up my trade skills, that throughout EVE you'll be selling loot and salvage, and the sooner you cut down on brokering fees, the more isk you'll have in your pocket. So I trained those.

I had another player tell me that salvaging, period, at any price, is a sure-fire isk-maker. So I trained that and Tractor Beams.

But the best Salvagers are Destroyers, so I trained that.

Then a player said the game doesn't really start in EVE until you get into Cruisers, because Frigates really don't compare. So I trained that.

I had another player tell me that Drones were the most broken part of EVE and the sooner I could get them working for me, the better. So I trained those.

I saw for myself that Mining was a fine, quiet activity when I just wanted to hang out online, something I could passively do on the side in between more active parts of the game, so I trained that.

Then I found that none of my ships could haul 27,500m3 of ore, so I trained up a Bestower and Expanded Cargohold 2's.

Someone told me that having my ship be Cap Stable was a necessity, so I had to research what that term meant and then I had to get the skills to make it a reality. So I trained that.

Edit: It was during this little research project that I finally learned for myself what Riggings are. Seeing their importance and virtual necessity to a low SP character, I trained Riggings to shore up my weaknesses (two of my three Harbinger rigs are to boost Cap recharge).

But during PvP roams, my shields and armor would buckle like paper and my guns were less than useless when beating against an enemy tank. So I had to re-focus my attention and train those.

Edit: The focus of this thread was to express my exasperation at the amount of time I'll spend to get my Armor tank into any kind of respectable shape. I'm still on this portion of the game. I haven't focused on my offense yet - just earned Heat Sinks II and will have to depend on those to boost my dps without breaking my Cap until I can put more time into them.

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My point is Othran, that the game is constantly pulling at you to train all of the skills, all of them, at once. All the EVE wikis and resources have their own short list of "must-have" skills to be trained.

My skills are my responsibility? Sure, no doubt. But throwing my skills back in my face when I say that growth in EVE is too slow, and you won't make a friend out of me.

So much of this game is about rock/paper/scissors, and you can only learn that by experience, by actually getting out there and flying whatever you can fly, trying and failing, picking yourself up and trying again.

I think it's a serious mistake to think that you've got to just sit and wait till you have the right skills/the right ship.

I don't PvP much, but I know enough about the game to know that half the battle in PvP is picking your fights - and, again, that really only comes with experience, with gradually learning to fly lots of ships, and knowing from the "inside" what they are capable of.

The game does take a fair amount of time to master, but that's what makes it a deep game that sticks; and at any moment - right now - you can be having fun learning it.

Just as a general point, I think what most people do is learn to do a whole bunch of things - whatever takes their fancy really - to a reasonably good level (IV is a good skill level to aim at for most things), and then they find one thing they really, really enjoy, and specialize in that. So you can be a jack of all trade, and a master of one (or two, or three, if you're with the game long enough).