Player Features and Ideas Discussion

If he gives me the custom corp certificates, I'll rename him to CCP Awsomenium.

There'll be no shortcuts in my training plans, I can assure you.

Just a small suggestion. If certificates are to be tweaked to better broadcast to corpmates and fleetmates your skill training, then the Spaceship Command set of skills should be included. Of all the skills, the ones that provide ship bonuses are some of the biggest and most important.

For example, certificates should provide a way to see who can fly a Dominix with Gallente BS 5.

And when CCP fixes certificate visibility for alliance/corp/blue-standings players, I suggest a new fleet setting to toggle in the fleet window for auto-join fleet placement into command slots for those with correct certificates in squad/wing/fleet commander positions. If you always have to manually move out of squad 4 to fill squad cmdr slot, you know what I am talking about.

I suggest you think about the certificate visibility in terms of a poker game. You do not want to show your hand until you have to.

With this game, showing your hand to anyone too early could cause you to become easier to kill. PvP is not a poker game, but I think everyone can figure out the translation.

I suppose a method for "sneaky" players to discover non-public certificates is using a Passive Targeter I and (new module) Certificate Scanner I. Make the sneaks have to work for the information; maybe add some sort of mini-game to it, like you have to bypass security protocols, etc. Just throwing ideas in to see if anything can get a response or interest.

Then again, there would likely be an uproar against allowing full access to another player's certificates with a single scan of the Certificate Scanner I; would releasing only 20 percent of target's certificates be better? But CCP seems to jump at anything shady, so maybe this idea will fly.

Here are two more in that vein... Implant Scanner I, which tells you what the other player's implants are. Boost Scanner I, which tells you what the other player's boosts/buffs are. It seems anything slanted towards "secret", "cloak", "hacking", ghost, special ops, etc easily gets attention and can be quite popular.

I can only imagine when/if walking in stations ever materializes and the "door" finally opens, knowing what your enemy's capabilities (certificate scanner), drug habits (boost scanner), and enhancements (implant scanner) may give you the edge you need to take him out before he even reaches his ship. I am going to go ahead and create the term now: Clone Ganking.

Certificates should be publishable to your corporation and also your alliance. Additionally it might be worthwhile for there to be a way in game using something akin to locator agents to discover the certificates of others (which might lead to some interesting gameplay where people purposefully leave off one skill to hide their true abilities).

Certificates managed by corporations while good for those who like telling other people what to do isn't so good for new players who need an unbiased viewpoint and which has a minimal level of quality -- something impossible to maintain if the feature is primarily run by corporations. Also remember that a large chunk of your players are in corporations with a handful of people where there may not be a qualified individual to plan out certificates. Corporate run certificates also can't help people in NPC corps. All-in-all I don't think the corporate run certificates are worth the effort for those that need them. Big corporations have facilities and software for managing this stuff anyways. The 3rd party market will always serve those with a vested interest in that level of management. But for everyone else -- the players whom CCP can't seem to keep. A good certificate system would be a godsend that will help you keep players around.

I think for new players having the certificates to plan your training to is a really neat feature, I would say keep them. I see no value in showing other players my certificates, why give away free intel. I only claim mine to stop evemon from giving the popups.

Or think of them like an encryption algorithm. If they are good, making them public changes nothing.

- Leave their visibility as is. We can choose its publicity anyway.
- Make them much harder to achieve.
- Remove basic - std - imp - elite. Leave just names. EWAR Cert = old ewar elite for example.
- Generalize them and make their count decrease (Example: Ewar = all ewar related @ level V, Defense = all at+st @ level V)
- Since they are much harder to achieve, give bonus upon completing a certification (Example: Ewar cert = increase optimal+falloff and strength by %3 of all ewars).
- Give player a credit for its completion for a cert via in-game mail.

Just brainstorming.

I like my public certificates. :-(

But I agree that certificates needs an overhaul