Jita Park Speakers Corner

There's a lot of rhetoric in CSM proposals about the 'new player experience'. How exactly does outright gimping new players, not just in their amount of options but in their ability to fight back against older players, contribute to this?

The powergrid/cpu cores take ten days, half of a newbie's trial. The entire Core Ship Operation cert takes up to 60 days. The armor/shield compensation skills take ten days apiece. The whole armour tanking tree takes 90 days in all. These are not reasonable amounts of time to anyone that hasn't already invested a great deal of time and interest into the game.

A lot of people (the usual apologists) are obviously going to respond to this with 'you don't need to have all core skills to V', but where's the question of need? People are meant to play a game for fun, and barriers to entry like this do nothing but make new players, opening whatever guides they find for the first time, decide 'oh well, I'm not playing this game for that long anyway'.

The majority of new players are therefore consigned to being either warm bodies in nullblocs or running level 3 missions until they quit.

I have spoken to a great deal of people who have quit EVE not because it 'wasn't the game for them' (this is also a common apologist argument), but because they simply realised one day that it just wasn't fun waiting for skills to train. Telling people who haven't played EVE about the train times makes them insist that they'd never play a game so mind-numbing. This is part of the reason I'm somewhat ashamed to try and get my friends into EVE at all.

Proposed solutions:
- Remove all core skills and reimburse them with skillpoints. Benefits remain the same.
- Give all new players enough skillpoints to either buy all core skills or specialise in one type of tank and weapons system.
- Remove skills entirely and replace them with implants or something, because paying money to look at a bar go up might as well be the definition of a farce.

'Core skills' worth removal, by level of annoyance:
- Anything related to fitting
- All capacitor skills
- All skills under the Navigation certificate
- All compensation skills (or merge them into a single skill)

As a side-effect, this will greatly increase accessibility to T2s and would make the game much more dynamic for newbies looking to get into things like covops, balanced by the cost of the hulls themselves.

Under your logic OP... all skills should be gotten rid of. Turret/Missile support skills... ship skills... astrometric skills... industry skills... they all prevent a newbie from performing well.

The problem with your reasoning OP is that it doesn't stop until everyone can do everything equally with any ship, mod, or equipment in any activity from the very first second they start playing.


Stop looking at skills as something you NEED and something to work around. Find solutions to compensate for your lacking skills... be creative in the ways you fit and use your ships... because that is pretty much the point behind the skill system as is; you are supposed to learn how to use your head in order to play rather than rely on the "need more skills for max effectiveness!" mentality.

@ShahFluffers
Yes, all skills should be gotten rid of. It's a stupid, outdated system only held up as a good thing by 'vets' whose only reason for supporting it is their own example of the gambler's fallacy, and the only people who would be willing to say something about it have quit the game a long time ago - probably because of people like you.

Since we can't do that, however, it would be much more helpful to new players to not make them spend more than what they need to get experience from the game. Almost all skills but those few core skills (I see a lot of people saying they take 'only' three months to train, but only idiots, people who played the game long ago and a few very determined people would be willing to sink $45 into a game just to have their 'core skills' train up, taking more than their trial period to get into ships that their nullblocs tell them to or else being consigned to mediocre support roles) would remain unchanged.

Literally the only thing keeping this game afloat at this point are alts.

@Nariya Kentaya
Cute anecdote.

Most new players would prefer to be able to learn what they're doing and get better on their own merit rather than have themselves artificially restricted in what is meant to be a 'sandbox'. It's just that simple.

I'm not even going to point out the contradiction of you supporting a system that you yourself admit doesn't work.

A lot of people do.



I am not suggesting a grind. You might as well say that ISK is a grind, because you are attacking the most hilariously misplaced stramwan in the world. I dare you right now to go through any one of my posts and point out the point where I suggested turning the SP system into a normal XP grind system.

Go on. I'll wait.



If you want to be 'conventional', I suggest playing World of Warcraft. Most people are much more willing to spend their time than their money on something, and that reflects itself in the player market.

You're also missing the point: I suggested removing core skills in order to allow new players to get into ships and quicker, not to remove train time entirely.



You are literally, unironically supporting a Farmville game model on a game where it makes no sense. You are supporting what is essentially a mini-Farmville on the game. You are a Farmville gamer revelling in his elitism. You are the exact kind of person who plays Farmville: someone who can't afford to spend that much time on the game. You are the kind of person who would love Farmville if you could grind mini-games to make your rutabegas grow faster.

(I don't actually know how Farmville works, so this might be true.)

Elitism is not going to help your case here, because we are all playing what is basically and essentially a sandbox RTS (the only one that exists) with Farmville tacked awkwardly on top. Removing Farmville from this game would be nice, but I know that people like you and me have grown so many rutabagas that it's hard for us to throw the whole thing out.

My thesis remains the same:

New players do not want to wait months and pay money in the meanwhile to play Space Farmville to progress. If they're like you, and want to play Space Farmville, they can go back to Facebook to do it.

You can't read and you like playing Farmville with a skin, so I guess it wasn't worth arguing with you in the first place.

I really need to stop talking with Farmville fans. It's going to hurt my brain one of these days.

It would then probably make more sense to just start new players with ~500,000-1,000,000 SP allocated to fitting and capacitor skills. at least. The current 90k start is far too limiting.

I still think the compensation skills are an overbearing SP sink, though.

The waiting time until you can fly anything that would be a threat solo is huge.

Six individual one week old newbies in thrashers make a mess out of most mission running BS, all with minimal training.

If they would train Social Interaction to at least III right off the bat, they would be much better off.

this thread is going nowhere.

bullshit. You can have the core skills trained to 4 in less than a month. Stop treating Eve like some other ****** MMO that focuses on racing to max level. Stop putting so much weight on the value of SP.

Skill training time is all about level 5s. Training level 5 takes almost 6x the time it takes to train levels 1 to 4.

But with some exceptions, level 5's bonus to whatever the skill does is nice, but not game-changing.

As an example, few people train Advanced Weapon Upgrades straight to level 5. They'll go to 3 or 4 and switch to another skill, leaving 5 for later. There aren't that many fits that work with AWU 5 but not with AWU 4.

Unless they want to fly Marauders or Dreads.

So it's really all about level 5 prerequisites, that are clearly intended time sinks before players (new and old alike) gain access to new gear.

CCP already waived level 5 prereqs on some skills, for example racial battleship 5 for carriers or PG management 5 for thermodynamics (overheating). They might decide to lower some other level 5 prereqs in the future (T2 ships and modules come to mind).


TL;DR: the training time of core skills isn't really 'gimping' anyone. Training to level 4 is fast and almost always enough to be 'competitive': player skill is much more important (and yes, it does take months and even years to train that).

Rather, it's level 5 prereqs that actually set the 'pace' at which players (new and old) gain access to new toys. It's CCP's call to balance short-term satisfaction vs. long-term commitment, it's a tricky job but their track record shows that they're not afraid to make changes.