EVE General Discussion

That chicken still has a few feathers remaining. Certainly it could stand to be violated just ONE more time.

Absolute. Total. Bull.

I see 11 year old players who I could most likely best in a fight. And I'm not even a person who plays for PvP!

Sure, I've been with EVE since 2009, and is that reflective on how well I play the game? Maybe.
But you don't need to be as old as the game to know how the game works. And that's all you need to know to master it.

And also, "Forcing them to buy implants"
For what!? Level cap? You don't really know how EVE works if you think that a friggin' Level Cap would fix it.

The graph showed me data that moved about two cm across my screen. That's not the end of the world, in fact, that's not near the end of the world. It's not even close to being a problem. We still get new players;

Stats count. Not speculation.

I think the OP has a valid point in that new players are seriously dealt a bad hand against older players in terms of SP and their actual effectiveness in the game. And they can NEVER bridge that cap (ok maybe in 10 years) That won't help bring in new players, thats for sure (and that would help the game the most, don't you think?). If you asked me, I would probably start by extending the new player skill training boost to give something around 10 million skill points for the total duration. That would be plenty enough for the newbies to get their fangs sharpened in terms of combat capabilities against even the older players. But the veterans would still have a clear upper hand in terms of skills. Everybody wins. Except maybe the bitter vets who trained those skills 10 years ago and insist everyone has to go and do the same thing. QQ. I think it just hurts EVE more to keep the newbies so underpowered. The skill system in this game in that regard is completely unfriendly to newbies, and must be a major reason not more people play this game. Because otherwise, it is an awesome sandbox mmo. One of the best, by far.

The longer I am in the game, which at this point has not been long, the more I see that winning at pvp has more to do with understanding the game, the game mechanics, planning, and just getting your hands dirty doing it, which really does not take that long.

Still, the seeming advantage a veteran player has is daunting to new players imo.

The way this is handled by CCP seems to be that in choosing your weapons, the time and place of your fights, and being game smart about it is in fact a way to gain a bigger advantage than your more veteran target has in terms of raw skill points in any given fight.

I wont deny that the mechanics can be more critical than anything but then I could just blob you so the mechanics only go so far, But the blob warfare that this game encourages is a whole other can of worms.

I think the OP has a valid point in that new players are seriously dealt a bad hand against older players in terms of SP and their actual effectiveness in the game. And they can NEVER bridge that cap (ok maybe in 10 years) That won't help bring in new players, thats for sure (and that would help the game the most, don't you think?). If you asked me, I would probably start by extending the new player skill training boost to give something around 10 million skill points for the total duration. That would be plenty enough for the newbies to get their fangs sharpened in terms of combat capabilities against even the older players. But the veterans would still have a clear upper hand in terms of skills. Everybody wins. Except maybe the bitter vets who trained those skills 10 years ago and insist everyone has to go and do the same thing. QQ. I think it just hurts EVE more to keep the newbies so underpowered. The skill system in this game in that regard is completely unfriendly to newbies, and must be a major reason not more people play this game. Because otherwise, it is an awesome sandbox mmo. One of the best, by far.

-Dir Zen












Well at least Im not the only one who feels this way.

You don't seem to understand how the skill system actually works.


Copy-Pasting my usual spiel.


How does the skillpoint system work?

- All skills cap at level 5. No matter how many years you have played the game, you cannot exceed that limit. And lower tier skills (ex. [Racial] Frigate) are very quick to train relative to more advanced skills.


- (*this is the important one*) Only a limited number of skills affect any one ship, module, weapon system, and specialty at any given time.

Ex1: You are a newbie facing someone with about 20 million SP... but how much of that overall SP is actually combat related? He/she could be a HUGE industrial player with limited combat skills.
Ex2: A veteran player has just trained up the skill Large Hybrid Turret to level 5. That skill in no way affects the skill Small Hybrid Turret and thus the veteran will be no better or worse than before at the frigate level.


- Getting a skill from level 4 to level 5 only adds on an extra 2% here, 5% there (exceptions apply). If you simply train up all the skills within a specialty to level 4 (which takes ~20% of the amount of time it takes to get those skills to level 5), you will find yourself flying at about **80 to 90%** of the effectiveness of a multi-year veteran with those same skills in that specific specialty at level 5.


- Getting a skill to level 5 is supposed to be a painful train. Many players (yes, even veteran ones) opt to avoid doing it and instead train up other skills to level 4 (again, because it's faster).

Example: I personally have the T2 weapon specializations at level 4. That puts me at a 2% disadvantage in damage against someone who has the same skill(s) at level 5 (assuming we are both using the same ship with the same fit)


- Ships and weapons have been balanced against one another.

Example: A battleship can potentially instapop a frigate... but the frigate can fly very fast, making it difficult for the battleship's weapons to track, especially at very close range... then again, the battleship can deploy drones to deal with the frigate... and the frigate can shoot the drones down... however the battleship might have a Large Energy Neutralizer fitted to nuke the frigate's capacitor power every 24 seconds... in which case the frigate could use a Small Nosferatu that sucks out capacitor from the battleship every 3 seconds... etc. etc.


- High tech equipment (ex. T2, Faction, Officer, etc) will not give a player "I WIN" abilities. It simply gives a player a linear edge at an exponentially higher cost.

Ex1: A basic T1 Armor Adaptive Plating gives ~10% omni-resistance to damage for only 100 thousand ISK... a T2 Armor Adaptive Plating gives ~15% omni resistance to damage for 1 million ISK... a "deadpsace" Armor Adaptive Plating gives ~19% omni resistance to damage for 15 to 20 million ISK.

Ex2: A group of three or four T1-fit frigates that cost about 500 thousand to 1 million ISK CAN kill a faction frigate worth about 50 to 100 million ISK... provided they are using the right mods in the right configuration and know what they are doing.
https://zkillboard.com/kill/39793460/ (Condors caught me and ground me down... I only had time to kill one of them)
https://zkillboard.com/kill/38239838/ (all the Breechers in this KM were T1 fit... I could only kill two of them before being nuked)


What does this all mean?

- Having more skillpoints is not the "end all, be all" point of the game and there is more to most activities than "get enough skillpoints, open window, click, press F1- F9."
There are a plethora of factors that can decide success or failure and many of them are purely abstract in nature (see: planning, meta-gaming, friends, short-term allies, making deals, psychological warfare, etc).

- Part of the idea behind the current SP system is that you can't "powergrind" to success. You MUST learn how to utilize what you have first... which requires you to use your head and be creative. This helps you later on when you can finally use "better" ships/equipment... because you have hopefully familiarized yourself with the underlying mechanics that most Tech 1 ships/equipment share with Tech 2/3 and Faction ships/equipment.
Example: you may not be able to pilot that sexy Interceptor right away... but that doesn't mean you can't slap together a super fast frigate that does something similar.

- Once you have your "universal" core and support skills near or at maximum (which takes about 2 or 3 months of mostly focused training) the gap between you and an older player begins to narrow quite significantly. You can find these skills in the "Engineering" section of your character skillsheet.

- Just because you are limited in what you can do (as a newbie) it does not mean that your contribution to a team is meaningless and/or without weight.
Being a "tackler" or cheapo Ewar-support in PvP might indeed be suicide if you have limited skills and knowledge... but even half-success can mean the difference between catching or losing a target... everyone escaping a bad situation or dying in a fire.

You just lost all the new players they dont care about charts and numbers and statistics And graduate Eve with a doctoral . most players wanna drop and play blow up ships(maybe Valkyrie will fix this) and go to bed after a long day at work or College if this continues this game will die because there will be no new players to replace the old.

Even if that happens (no more new players), the graph clearly shows that old players aren't really leaving. Thus, have no need to be replaced.

If you want EVE to be like any other MMO, well, this ain't the one for you then.

We continue to get new players, and you nor me can speak on their behalf.

This is not an FPS, it's an MMO. Things take time.