Player Features and Ideas Discussion

There has been quite a lot of discussion about removing the cost and penalties associated with your medical clone, but few ideas that I have heard of what to replace them with have been compelling. With that in mind, I offer up to you to critique my idea.

Medical clones would give a small reduction in training time to skills but only within certain set SP limits. This would provide a compelling reason to purchase a medical clone on an alt that is actively training, and continue to purchase more clones if you die or gain more SP. This would give a very similar feel to how the clones are set up now, as well as provide a death with consequences that isn't overly harsh. Under a system like this, I would imagine similar numbers to today's Eve, only more specific:

Alpha Clone: 0 to 900,000 (Free)
Beta Clone: 900,001 to 1,380,000 (28,000 ISK)
Delta Clone 1,380,001 to 2,050,000 (45,500 ISK)
etc,
etc.

On a separate, but related note, this system would allow for clones to have different amounts of skill training bonuses, if CCP saw fit. For example, the Alpha Clone could give a 20% reduction to skill training time, the Beta 10%, and so on until a character reached a point that it was near, say, 1%. This would benefit newer players and players training alts that could be combined with other benefits.

Understandably, there will be many questions about how this can or should be implemented. I have had several players ask me some these questions before, so I'll put them in a quick FAQ:

Q: How is this different from an attribute implant?
A: This gives a flat reduction to training time after your attributes are considered, unlike implants that are for one thing only. Moreover, implants will give a flat boost regardless of your current skill point level and only need to be replaced when you die. This would be only within a very explicit skill point window.

Q: How does this not benefit people who don't take risks more?
A: It still retains some of the low-risk attributes of the old system, certainly, but that is required for death to have consequences. Unlike the old system, if you get podded and reship, there is no need for you to upgrade your clone until you feel you're safe enough to benefit from it. This gives players more meaningful choices which is ultimately a better thing.

Q: Why wouldn't I just stay in an Alpha clone?
A: You certainly could! The only disadvantage you would suffer under this system is an increased training time for skills if you're outside of the Alpha clone's skill point range.

Q: 1%? 10%? These numbers are too [big, small, made up]!
A: Absolutely. This is just a base point to get the discussion rolling.

Q: Why aren't you writing this on some other website?
A: This idea isn't enough for a full blown article, but I really want CCP and the community to see it. I promise I have another idea I will write an article for.

The increased cost is something I'm not necessarily married to. I'm not opposed to there being a cap on the cost above a certain level as long as there are still levels to be upgraded to, mainly to not give an undue advantage to low risk occupations. However I disagree that it is a mandate to have it. There should be times that you consider low risk for long enough to purchase, while there are other times it isn't worth the investment. For example: If I were given the option to save some ISK through clone costs while knee deep in a war at the cost of having a marginally lower SP gain, I would certainly be in favor if the ISK savings were compelling enough. Are there players who are too rich to care? Absolutely. But there are also a large number of players who don't have that much ISK to not care.

Game needs higher clone costs and lower skill point coverage, so you always loose skill points.

Or, apply the T3 cruiser principle to every ship and get rid of the "Immortal Highlander" clone as pods are escape ships (not interchanged USB drives that can slotted in easily), its a back up that's missing some of the most recent information (think of the autosave feature when typing up a document and your computer crashes, but it saved 5 minutes before....you didn't lose the entire lengthy document and just the last couple of paragraphs). Further more, the longer your clone is alive from creation date the greater the skill point loss you can incur for flying smaller ships, just because you are risk adverse to isk loss . Either way, you fly a bigger hull and loose isk or fly a smaller hull while loosing more skill points....so you can stop spouting about flying what you can afford since now its subscription time you are losing out on

tl;dr - to many HTFU guys don't lose enough, with this feature the HTFU crowd can punish the guys they shoot at while at the same time stop the kill for thrills easy targets....go for strategic or tactical or profitable targets, not just kill anything in high sec (where they are surrounded by CONCORD's protection and the victim pretty much cannot touch/fight back, CONCORD needs to start podding all involved parties in a gank including the victim while destroying all the wreckage for greater isk sinks in game) because you have a cheap fit catalyst that's way easy to replace. Hell, now you can burn SP, burn your victim's SP, destroy you ship, destroy their ship, and everybody suffers at the same time while no one wins just for the laughs

My view: if you are an older player with enough sp to cost 10's of mil isk and you can't afford it you must be doing something very wrong with the skills you have!

I don't think the issue is that they can't afford it. It's more that the cost of updating the clone is so high that it basically locks out certain kinds of ships from the user. Why bother flying a 10mil frigate, 25mil cruiser or 30mil assault frigate (including fits), when it'll cost 45mil if you get podded? Same reason most players wouldn't put things like dead space energized membranes on a frigate.

Why is it that everyone wants to destroy the remaining parts of EVE that kept it from being too casual? EVE used to be a mean ***** who kicked you in the nuts everytime you let your guard down. It was dark and nowhere was safe. Now it's all lovey dovey candy casual and ****.

Cry me a river about the SP loss, just learn to update your clone... People who play more than 1 month should be pretty clear on remembering this.

Besides, redundant post is incredibly redunant.

And the fact that it's inefficient for high SP characters to fly low cost ships is the biggest reason for the change away from medical clones as they stand right now. They are required in order not to lose SP, and SP being the most valuable resource in the game means you'd be special not to update your clone.

Back on topic, are there any complaints to the system I have proposed instead of the old system?

I'm not so sure on this one, I live hisec/losec right now and find that 45 mil per clone wouldn't be so bad depending on how often I lost them. In null the SRP system replace T3/caps/supercaps so if clone costs are a problem to retain high SP pilots then there should be clone SRP too considering that the cost compared to fully fit high end ships is peanuts. Also there are many ways to make large sums of isk in null and when we higher security folks see those who routinely fly several bil+ ships into combat only to have them replaced for free it rings a bit hollow.

Perhaps this is a perception issue which I truly believe leads to most of the nullsec/hisec has too many isk faucet type arguments. However I would recommend lobbying your corp leaders who will be raking in tons of isk from their rented/sov systems to provide clone replacement plans for corp activities at least.