Skill Discussions

Freighters' "primary" skill prerequisites are completely contained in the "secondary" prerequisites, and the image used in the Odyssey dev blog shows this was already the case before the last expansion:

http://cdn1.eveonline.com/www/newssystem/media/64158/1/SkillFreighter.jpg

Is this a left-over from some older patch (that never got cleaned up properly), or is there some situation where this is relevant?

Long before the skill changes I picked up Caldari Battleship 1

Later on they added BattleCruiser and Destroyer as prerequisites in the nest but since I have Battleship 1 (Which is the only "required" skill) I can still fly a battleship even though I don't have the pre-reqs.

The nested skills look a bit funny, but the way it works can protect against these kinds of changes.

Which is not really related to the issue mentioned in my post. If you removed the primary skill requirement (leaving only the "secondary" tree), the effect would be exactly the same in the situation you're describing (i.e., you'd also still be able to fly it).

In any case, the prerequisites only apply to injection, nowadays. As long as you have the "Freighter" skill itself (plus ASC 1), you could (in theory) lose every single prerequisite skill (i.e., all the skills down the chain), and you'd still be able to pilot your freighter.

Edit: In theory, leaving the "primary" there means that if a player who had Advanced Spaceship Command 5 (which was required to inject the freighter skill) somehow lost all 5 levels of it, then he would lose the ability to fly his freighter until he got it back up to 1 at least. In practical terms, that's not really something that would ever happen (or that the developers would care about), though; the overlap is clearly just a left-over from some older expansion.

BTW, I've meanwhile checked with a GM and he confirmed that the "primary" skill tree is indeed completely redundant. It just never got removed, probably because there's no benefit in removing it (other than cleaning up the interface a bit).

"Primary" and "secondary" (and tertiary, and so on) is just a way CCP uses to distinguish between the various different skills required, when they have different "skill trees" under them.

The skills required to fly the ship are listed in the ship's info, while the skills required to inject each skillbook are listed in the skillbooks' info. Once you have a skill injected, though, you can lose the prerequisites for that skill, and the skill is still valid (even if you had only injected it, and left it at zero, you will be able to train it later, regardless of still having the prerequisites). This ensures that "if you could fly it before, you can fly it now", even if CCP decides to change the prerequisites for the top-level skills.

So you're saying ship bonuses can only be based on skills that appear as top-level prerequisites, due to some technical issue?

That would explain why they didn't clean up the repetition, but it seems that it would be trivial to automatically hide repeated skills in the info panel.

In other words, it hasn't always been like that. Which was exactly my point.

And training ASC from 0 to 1 takes only a few minutes, so that's obviously not the reason for having the same skills repeated in primary and secondary. Ryelek above has probably pointed out the real reason (a technical detail of the way ship bonuses work).