Skill Discussions

I have a habit of ending disagreements with a smug or trite remark. I should be clear about my conclusion to avoid doing that in a thread I started.

I appreciate the participation in this thread. Unfortunately,"because specialization" still strikes me as a thought-terminating cliché, and a mantra. My curiosity regarding why skills are arranged a particular way remains unsatisfied, but sometimes it's just time to move on.

I am grateful for what this thread has done to help me form a new opinion of the state of things: EVE is flawed with an imbalance not so different from WoW. The ease of cross-class skilling is back-loaded (high SP), rather than front-loaded (low SP). While long requirements represent a time commitment initially, secondary skills apply to most (if not all) ships, and after obtaining them, training into a new ship is easier for high SP characters. This advantage increases with SP.

Example: for a 50 million SP character with a fully-skilled T2 cruiser, cross-training into another fully-capable T2 cruiser is a single Rank 6 skill (1.536 Million SP), compared to a rookie who wants to train into a T2 cruiser and is faced with core skills (basically the old Core Competency: Elite cert).

EVE also has invisible level caps, if a player decides to pick between subcapitals (approximately 125 Million SP) and capitals (approximately 175 Million SP). After reaching those levels, it is possible to 'hop in' any ship with full skills in every module and role.

The result is stagnation that worsens with SP. At this point I strongly agree that general/broad skills are the root of EVE's SP status quo.

If the intent of T2 skill requirements is a concentration in a specific area, T2 ship skills don't go far enough; non-racial T2 ship skills are broad. A racial T2 split is very different from the alternative I imagined when I started this discussion, but after becoming more aware of the status quo, the advantage of high SP characters, and gaining a better sense of what players (and perhaps the devs) accept as the definition of specialization... a racial T2 split is, in my opinion, needed.

The artificial level cap and stagnation experienced by high SP characters would merely be extended, rather than remedied, but racial T2 skills would be a stronger form of "because specialization" than we currently have.

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edit: this is a scary thought, considering the skill splits and the bloated SP and clone costs, but... race-specific core skills... (e.g. Amarr CPU Management, Gallente Power Grid Management, etc) would be a flat and fair implementation of "meaningful" and "consequence" that EVE players claim to like. Call it crazy, call me crazy, that's fine. It's pretty far from what EVE is like right now, and would take years to implement slow enough to avoid an uproar, but hey, 10-year outlook.

it would seem this is a stealth 'reduce medical clone costs' thread.

You seem to be one of those folks who is right regradless of any mitigating facts and opinions.

I'll ask you this. If they reduce the requirements from lvl 5 to lvl 4 what do I get? You "I shouldn't have to ean it" folks get a lot of powerful ships unlocked. Well, I did it the hard way.... what are you gonna give me for doing it the hard way? I want free stuff too.

You can't give me the extra 5% or whatever - I already have that. Free skill points? Maybe a new ship line that you need the prerequisite to lvl 5. (I hope you can see where that's going)

And finally - it was only 1 report, not multiple. I was just watching Mammy Thule trim her mustache.

CCP has to balance between making new players happy and keeping them for a long period. It's great if you can attract new players but if you can't keep them for more than a few months the game will fail.

New players often feel outclassed because they think bigger is better and try to get into ships they can't fly. Making them easier to get into by lowering the minimum requirement will only make it worse. Nothing like losing a 200 million ISK T2 ship to a veteran in a T1 frigate to make a new player feel like crap and quit.

Rain is a genius. I would advise against arguing with him, unless you're a genius, too.

No sarcasm, mate, I really like your ideas and stuff. And this is the first time I've seen the 'instant gratification is bad, mmkay?' argument turned against people making it. Good stuff!

Btw, had a look at your sig, the Maybelline image is also awesome.

How is your months and month of training so you can cross train instant gratification (it will still take you 20-30 days to get any of those toons to lv5 in the new ship line.

Instant gratification would be closer to getting into a logi/recon/HAC/HIC with cruiser 4 not well my toon already has a year of training on it so its "instant" to get into HAC's even though I didn't specifically train for them.


Why stop at ship types and not make it apply to all guns and missiles also Motion Prediction becomes lazor Motion Prediction and so forth.

every game has that stagnation its called the end game. In eve at that point you just continue on doing what you like (pvp,pve, forums) or you quit like any other game.

Other games solve this by adding totally new content with new goals to stride toward eve hasn't done that in a long time. This may not be possible in eve as in other games cause of the way a training and skilling up works.

Increasing the rate at which pilots can use mods/ships leads to stagnation and a false sense of progress. I have yet to unsub from eve because I can't do something, it's not wanting to do what there is to do.

As stated a few times it doesn't take long to start doing anything in eve, doing it well on the other hand takes time.

I never said they should lose anything. who said characters should lose anything?

I'm not tracking... what would cause some players to lose the ability to fly ships? what would the change be