EVE General Discussion

Something needs to be done about high clone costs. But there still needs to be some serious consequences for pod loss. Perhaps something along the lines of the jump fatigue mechanic, increasing the risk of sp loss if you repeatedly die.

Eve needs to stay brutal in order to stay loved.

I don't think this has any realistic chance of entering the game. People will go with minmax (permadeath) clones, thinking they can get away with it by using that for 6 months or something to rapidly skill up, or even just thinking that if they dont play in null, they won't get podded. Something will go wrong; lag, highsec podgank, etc, and they will quit Eve since their character died. Sure, they were naive, or sloppy, or the game lagged, but the end result is the same, people quitting Eve, and that's the bottom line.

Not to mention these clones would be exploited for pve/industry activities and cripple any edge of older indy characters, by allowing new ones to become just as effective in 1/3 the time.

yeah, but only that. to set the med clone location, you have to be at the location first. traveling will have the options of jump clones, jumping (local jump drive or bridge), interceptor, wormholes... but not the easy mode vanity pod travel, which could stand to be balanced with some type of cost like installing med clones.

med clone costs will be a penalty for something that is becoming impossible (death clone travel) or unpleasant (jump fatigue).

the problem is going out in a T2 frigate for fun, using a 60 million ISK med clone (without implants). Insurance is moot.

and pretty much anything non-capital means you have no business flying it, due to ISK for just the clone.

basically makes a character unplayable for all the fun ships in the game. (capitals are okay too )

I have a suspicion that a lot of balancing decisions are made based on a zoomed-out view of gameplay through statistics and graphs, and charts. The problem with trying to use those figures to make a decision about reducing or removing med clone costs is there's no way to know how much gameplay never happened because of med clone costs.

you can't balance gameplay that never happens

Also, once the decision is made to remove med clone costs, I doubt the figures would ever suggest the best move would be to reinstate med clone fees.

tbh I was hoping for med clone costs to be dropped with jump fatigue and Phoebe. Do what they will later, but just delete the fee in the meantime, because this causes real gameplay issues.

No way. Don't make it a skill. Clone costs are a quality-of-life issue, and having to use skills to improve quality-of-life is a terrible way to implement a change.

Removed an off topic post.

You didn't give any game design reasons why the costs should remain though. "I can afford it" is just you saying you don't care about the cost. Why do you think PvP in general needs to be taxed beyond the normal equipment loss and why do the costs need to keep climbing for older characters to such an extent? Try to come up with reason other than tradition. What if the feature wasn't already in the game and was introduced as a new feature? How would you implement it and why those details?

To me it seems it wasn't given much thought when initially implemented. There were no high skill characters at the time, so they probably thought they had years to change the system, if problems popped up. They were right on that. Problem being CCP didn't properly follow up and iterate on things in general until recently and issues are ignored until sufficient number of people start to suffer from them. We started to arrive at the critical mass of complaint a year or two ago, but CCP had bigger fish to fry at that point. Now that they're properly rethinking existing mechanics and their purpose, I can't imagine the current medical clone system surviving that process without significant changes. With the changes made to medclone travel it just seems increasingly like a unnecessary deterrent to PvP in a PvP focused game.