Player Features and Ideas Discussion

(1) It's risk averse, not adverse. Adverse is a different word, it means something different. Averse has the same root as avoid. If you are averse to something, you avoid it. Adverse means disadvantageous.

For example: Ab'del was a risk averse pilot: when he undocked and saw 27 pirates in Tornados camping the station, he realised that conditions were adverse for flying a low EHP mission Tengu, so he redocked.

(2) The boosters part of the proposal is specifically there so that players can choose to manage their level of risk. They can either use cheap boosters that will only last 72h anyway, so they're risking very little, or they can use expensive implants. Neither choice offers faster training speeds than the other. Each is useful for different conditions.

New players have less of a chance now of having the same rate of SP growth as old players as it stands now. Make a mistake, and the differential is even larger. A system that punishes new players for up to a year after making a mistake isn't a good system. Ship and isk losses are appropriate consequences for mistakes.

Resources are available to help new players, and they can learn, but in the end attributes still don't constitute any meaningful game play and should be removed

Yes the sky will fall if the learning system makes a bit more sense.

People said the same thing when they removed learning skills. The current attribute system is a relic of the old learning skills and normalization of the SP/hour is the final step of removing the old system, not the first step in some slippery slope to the demise of EVE. Players will still be required to specialize to catch up, and they'll still have to start small.

About podloss: OP, your timing could not have been worse for a suggestion like that. In a recent patch the insurance payout for T2 ships was buffed by a tremendous ammount. With Rhea the medical clone system was dumped to prevent SP loss. After weighing the arguments for and against it, i think most players agreed on it being a good change. This does not mean that many would not have had to stomach further reduction of the meaning of death. And now you posted a suggestion to prevent potential SP loss.
I would like to point out as well that dying in pvp combat does not equal getting podded. As long as there are no smartbombs, interdiction bubbles or instalock setups involved, the chance to escape with your pod is quite real. And if i manage to i feel i should be somehow rewarded for it instead of sitting there like a rabbit caught in the headlights.
And while it is true that whether or not to upgrade your clone was not a choice, this does not apply to plugging in training implants. There is also another choice which to the best of my knowledge wasn't mentioned at all: To pod or not to pod.
Since the direct financial gain by podding somebody is negligible, whether to do it or not is very much a personal choice for each capsuleer and each potential podding situation.

About training boosters: This concept is well known in the mmo industry, it's commonly implemented by f2p games as a cash shop item. If implemented the way you suggested it would merely be a tax for high podloss risk activities(hpras) as opposed to the one time payment done by players who don't engage in those. Switching from one method of fast training to the other would still require the clone jump of the current system, so nothing is gained there. Also biology would be lifted to the status of a re-added "training skill" to reduce your hpra tax.

I don't really see how this would encourage PvP.

And otherwise, all it would do is chop away a large part of an existing and legitimate market. I was all for removing learning skills, but this is a different matter. This is a deliberate choice, risk vs reward, and that's what the game is all about.

Don't fly what you can't afford to lose applies to what's in your head, not just what you're sitting in.

Because regressive systems historically have discouraged participation. And progressive systems tend to encourage participation. Power Grid, a German board game, has some great mechanics for catch up that make it also competitive. To maintain your advantage you need to stay vigilant the entire time. Regressive systems tend to encourage people to make a lot and then sit on their early advantage. Note that I am not making an argument for life, but for games. The perception that a system is regressive is all that it takes to make people not want to participate. I've played numerous games where the winner of a game could be determined at the mid-way point or earlier and the rest of the game was the slog to get to the final score-keeping.

Games should be enjoyable above all else. That enjoyment can come from the joy of learning a new skill or strategy. That enjoyment can come from small or large victories. That enjoyment can come from overcoming situations where you previously lost. But enjoyment is critical. The more regressive a skill system is the more likely players will quit believing that they're just slogging out the rest of the game, having already lost long ago.

I can certainly get behind the normalization of stats and a removal of stat implants opening up those slots for other bonuses.
OP suggestion has a problem, though, in that it adds the same thing back in, just in a different form. Whether it is 5 implants bonusing SP gain for different skills, or a flat bonus to ALL training, it is still a training time bonus, and, in fact, the current system is the better system since it at least lets you choose to just buff certain categories.

I'd be OK with removing stats as something that effects training time since it's really false choice Right now it's get the best you can reasonably afford otherwise you are falling behind which is fairly one dimensional, and doesn't really add THAT much to the game.

I could get behind the idea of keeping stats but have them provide some tangible, in-space bonus.


I actually used to like the concept of the learning skills, but I have begun to think that, while training skills in the background in real time is great, the way it is handled is suboptimal. I don't see min-maxing your SP gains to add something to the game. Sure having to make tough decisions is very important, and that aspect of eve is very important to maintain, but I'd rather it be choices that have more real depth to them.

Right now, I don't think SP gains have that much real depth. Ship fitting is a good counterpoint, you have the choice of many ships with many fittings, sure plenty are suboptimal for a situation, but there's still a decent number left over that are varied, yet viable, and you can choose how much risk to accept by choosing larger vs smaller ships and meta vs faction modules. Sure it is massively complex, but it provides similarly massive depth. Meanwhile SP gains are complex through having a multitude of stats with multiple ways to get each and you have to combine them in the best way and min/max your training, but the only depth that comes from it is option a better than option B better than option c. There is no room for sidegrades to your original intended plan, so it has a fair bit of complexity, but little depth.

The best games are the ones that provide the maximum depth for the complexity (easy to learn, hard to master, if you will), and in the framework of eve SP/hr doesn't add sufficient depth to the game to warrant the complexity.


Is it really a choice, though? Sucre you COULD choose to not upgrade your clone, but it is such a non-viable option there is really no reason to actually choose it. It's like suggesting you could choose not to pay your utility bill and have them turn your power and water off. Sure it IS a choice you can make, but there is no good reason to make that choice.

It's an illusion of choice, because while there may be multiple choices, they aren't actually worth considering. The only time SP is lost for not upgrading a clone is through neglect or accident, or ignorance of the mechanics, and that is bad gameplay. Also bear in mind complexity is not depth. the clone mechanics added complexity but no depth which is the worst combination of factors (since, ideally, you want to add maximum additional depth with minimal added complexity).

It further punished older players after a fashion. It's a veteran tax, sure older players can afford to pay more for their clones, but that doesn't make it a good idea. Again, there isn't much choice in the matter either. NOT upgrading your clone isn't an option worth considering, and there is no way to choose to leave station with only SOME of your SP on the line (If clone grades instead let you have as many SP as you wanted but only actively use a subset with any overages being risked, then it WOULD be a choice. Do I leave station in a 2mil SP clone that lets me fly this one thing cheaply and risk not being able to use something until my next clone jump, or do I get the more expensive clone that lets me fly all of the ships I qualify on should I need to swap to something else.)

It sounds like you're making a mistake a lot of people make - speaking from someone with a decent chunk of SP and not remembering the newbies days. Once you hit a certain point it really is a choice, but in the earlier days it is not.

One of our young tackle pilots pointed this out, he kept getting podded (enemy bubbles, tackle...whatcha gonna do) and lamented constantly buying new implants. So naturally we said just use an empty clone, but as he (rightly imo) pointed out when you're still chasing 'core' skills followed by doctrines, taking chunks of time off there matters. It directly impeded his gameplay.

Now take an older player who can fly everything they really care to and damned sure everything they NEED to, why should they care about an extra day or two on a skill? They've got nothing but time.

Just what skills DOES a new character start with these days?

When I was a fresh noob, the skills were fairly spit-balled across the board, but at least I didn't have to train core fitting skills from 0SP.