Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I am a new player. I was absolutely excited about the game a couple of weeks ago but am already considering quitting. Why?
Because I cannot pay and play with all the shiny toys that I've read, watched, and heard so much about any time soon!

Levelling skills takes forever if I want to be serious about it.
The game encourages perfection. This character is my first one but I already have my reservations about keeping it. I would have started leveling skills very differently if I had a chance. Thanks to humblebundle.com I bought several Eve Online starter pack keys for a song and have started some alts the proper way but it takes forever to learn the skills I want those alts to have. Are the alts going to last? Hmm.
For instance, a pilot needs all the fitting skills to equip Tier 2 modules and avoid the pain and suffering caused by the lack of power grid capacity and CPU capacity. To fly a Stratios and explore sites I need 316 days of learning or 253 days of learning with +5 implants to get the skills I want a Stratios pilot to have.

In World of Warcraft a new player is supposed to catch up (join raids) with the rest of the crowd after 300 hours or so. In Eve Online I can join faction warfare or some PvP fleets right away but I will be of zero to little help for fleetmates.

Bonus attribute remaps and even Prototype Cerebral Accelerator do not help much. They are few and are easily wasted by a new player. Old-time players have a lot of skill points but new players are supposed to stay an underdog for an eternity. I know I don't have to play all the content at once and I must have alts to access it in any reasonable time but still... There are many things I’d love to do: exploring in nullsec, getting familiar with planetary interaction, manufacturing, researching and copying blueprints, making space stations and stuff like that, flying big ships, hauling cargoes!

CCP developer with 500 million SP. It is an awesome number. I know he or she is a developer and can get any SP at the flick of a finger but still. With proper remaps and +5 implants and SP per hour rate at 2700 it would take 21.3 years to get there! And definitely normal players don’t have that kind of SP accumulated.

Inflation
A year or half a year ago one PLEX cost 500 million or so. Now it costs 730-750 million and AFAIK it may rise even more. Something is not right here. Too much currency is being generated by miners or something? AFK mining in missions? Botting? Stupid exploits? Everyone is too rich in comparison with a new player?

Anyway, does CCP want live money and better new player retention? There are some options:
1. Sell bonus attribute remaps in packs of 5 or 10. They are certainly better than skins for ships IMHO.
2. Reduce the price for subscription in comparison with PLEX to USD10 or so to encourage people to subscribe directly and pay the money to CCP.
3. Somehow skill levelling for new players has to be faster. The age of old-style MMOs that took forever to progress is over. How about no cap on attribute remaps for the first two months for new characters if we cannot buy remap packs? People often make stupid mistakes with those attributes early in the game even when using EveMon.
4. Reduce the gap between new players and old timers in terms of the amount of skill points needed? Not completely reduce the gap because old-time players need to keep their sense of achievement.
Either faster learning for new characters (3-4 times as fast for some period of time like half a year) or selling ready-made characters with a certain amount of skill points (12 million or so, something that can be accumulated after a year of gameplay) as a premium starter pack for USD60 (an AAA non-MMORPG videogame title usually costs that much and no, I don’t want to sell USD200 worth of PLEXes to buy a character for 5-8 billion ISK) and allow players can redistribute skill points any way they choose.

As a new player I want to be able to play the best parts of the game without waiting too much (for months or even weeks if I am impatient) to get my skills up to standards. I don’t want to feel miserable for extended periods of time and then play the game well. And still the accumulation of skill points cannot be big enough to leave players with nothing else to try if they learn a bunch of skills fast. The skill gain has to be big enough to become an established miner, a Tengu pilot, an Orca pilot, a jump freighter pilot, an industrialist, a researcher, a Stratios pilot and so on. Definitely nothing like a Titan pilot and the likes.

TO BE CONTINUED

You are right about most of your points, i can see CCP in the future introducing x2 or x3 training speed time in the same way they introduced multiple char training on the same account as a catch up mechanism.

The mining titan stuck in a single system is not a very good idea, the investment / return ratio is quite bad, that's why i came up with the rorqual in high sec and the ore cyno field generator. That would be a ship a corp of new players would work together to build and pilot, giving them a feeling of mobile star base. The idea of gevlon goblin is aimed to a solo players, but in eve, regardless of how many real players are there, you can never be alone. Even in your corp, with just your main and your alts, you are surrounded by other corps and players, and every time you undock you see them around you.

Someone a few pages ago underlined why people decide for a worse LP/Ratio, one of the reason is in my opinion you know the system / region you are in, and the people that fly in it. It slowly turned in your home system.

Also in the light of the new Prospect ship, you can go scout a system with this ship, light up an ORE cyno, call in your mining fleet, strip mine a belt, and fall back to empire. That would put some real action into a profession that's actually very static imo and the chance for some real "content" made by players for the players, even it's simply killing an entire mining fleet in low sec, or it's that fleet fending off some local pirate / pvp pilot.

Hey, have you seen the news that 49 CCP employees got laid off?
It might surprise you but if the subscriber numbers are down, people working to provide us this game get fired.

Don't you think that some harmless silliness like highsec carebears orbiting the gate in a totally useless titan would be better than layoffs?

The only way to increase subscriber numbers is letting people play EVE who are not the "HTFU" kind. That kind is already playing. And the only way to let "WoW kiddies" play without destroying EVE is giving them features that has zero effect on the big scheme but keep them busy.

In a way, you are both right. There's obviously a sub problem going on and recent change of directions with related layoff are a sign. It is also true that in general the mmo genre is suffering a collapse mainly due the high number of titles on the market today.

Eve indeed need to change, into a more freeform sandbox, where there's a substantial change of game play between hi sec, low sec and null, and not simply a bolean concord intervention difference, but by making every kind of space unique, like w-space is in regards of normal space. Where being hi sec, low sec or nullsec is a gameplay specialization, like being a w-corp is now.

You also think of giving new players catch up mechanism, like double or triple training, instead of training two or three toons at once. Saying that a multiplicative of skill time is wrong over multiple char training is actually a logcal fallancy, as the total sp gained by the account per day wont change, but that would reduce the time a new player can get into the activities of eve

Even if the idea can sound wrong, keep them coming, if a logical argument can be found against them, lets modify them together

I agree eve should focus on retaining those customers, that leave early (= more money). I don't agree on the OP idea - this thread shows how absurdly bad it is. Ccp already acknowledged the problem and started working on it. We should see enhanced NPE; that's a good start. What else to do? There are ideas popping up all over the place. We need to focus on the good ones and refine them into something worth having.

People already pay for multiple char training, I myself am one of those.

I started because to make an industry/research toon, maybe double subbing for a month or two. After just 3 weeks I came to the conclusion multiple char training is even more imbalanced than a skill training speed boost, as you'll end with 2 characters able to do twice the industry jobs ( or thrice) while in the long run you can just retain your single account sub.

A skill speed bonus will probably ease the wait for those skillsets that require 3 months to train, waiting 3 months to pilot a marauder is not creating content, piloting one can create content, as the eve mantra is that players should generate their own content. Now i said marauder, but you can put in its place any ship you desire.

I've seen in my 10 years of EVE too many people logging just for the skill, ending up manly in quitting or selling their toons.

Whoa, which character market are you looking at?

edit: or which plex prices

The approach you are implying will lead EVE even closer to session type MMO (WoT, Warthunder, Start Conflict etc), where all other aspects aside from what you are calling "content generating" (PEW-PEW) reduced to nothing and which I personnaly dislike pretty much. And this won't actually solve anything, but will potentially ruin what EVE actually is. That huge maradeur training time was placed here not just to bore you to the death, it simply does mean nothing.

You know, I have around 2 years of active sub on my main, and I haven't still trained it - currently I'm training for a BO and need another half of a year to get there - and I don't really care. I have some other ships I can fly, and fun you can get out of the game don't come out of your ability to fly all the possible ones, you don't need this much, you will be pretty fine with just a few, if you actually play the game, and not just run some boring missions in highs all the time your are online.

If I got maraduer right now, what would it change? I will be able to beat those missions faster? Aaaaand? What is in it for you? Just to stare at hefty numbers in EFT? You don't possibly intend to go PvP with it, do you? Just to spin it around while in dock? May be it's just me, but I can't understand why many people attach such importance to the hulls the can and can't fly. There are mulituted of other hulls in game, and most of them are pretty good. Good fraction BS would be more than enough for all needs of highsec carebear. You won't even able to see that hull too often in EVE, while you are out of dock, I mean, so thats numbers what is so important that you absolutely need a maradeur, and not a BS?

I don't think it's a wise decision to give a hand to people who don't actually want to spend more than 6 month in the game. They of no use to the other world, as EVE is build upon stable communities, and those who leave after 3-6 months of playing hardly able to contribute to something meaningfull. At best they will be just easy targets for vets - if they leave higs at all. But they could easly start to request futher shift of game mechanics to serve their thirst to "beat the game faster and move on to another", which will transform game into some casual WoT-like cesspool.

I see the point in proposals to sell some pre-trained characters in some premium starter packs (like, 6 month old or so), so one could get that bumpy maradeur of his and achieve his carebear happines already - but, actually, it isn't needed as you can find some half of a year old charater on market too, buy it almost for the price of 6 month sub. Generating some ingame objects to sell it for real money is what CCP tries to avoid in first place; and devoid those who already do the job of raising this charaters to sell them of their income is a bad thing too, "not too sandboxy".

I can see some reason in what OP propose (so there should be some better and more meaningfull ways, than tens of titans orbiting gates in highsecs)

But by reducing time needed to train all skills you won't possibly help someone, and will push the game one step closer to its doom.

i don,t know what has happened to the community of eve over the last few years, the veterans have gone sour and the newer players have a 4chan cod mentality. but its not the game i've grown to love over the last six years

Yeah, I did.

My idea was to be able to pick between from either multi training or double / triple SP generation at the actual cost of the multi training. If you train one more toon on the same account, you pay 19 euro, if you train two more, 38 euros.

To not make it escalate to crazy level i was thinking of capping to "3" services max per account, at example one multi training, one active sub and one double SP on your main.

CCP is not losing money, or at least, i don't see the difference between having just multitraining, which I deem to be more damaging for them.

That we like it or not, we need to give the chance to new players to catch up SP wise with the 5-6 years old toons, or I fear soon we'll end up having to buy an use toon a must to be competitive in a certain field, not to mention, we end up being alone.