Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Finally we have reached the point, why the hell should i train all that ****** warefare skills including specialization upfront an Absolution itself???

No logic at all, firstly i want to fly an Abso and later on let me decide what warefare skills to train.

Very simple.

with this logic no ship should have pre-requs

I don't have a problem with prereqs directly, because I think they can serve a useful function as a guide to players who don't have access to good advice for skills to train. What I wish for, that would be contrary to current prereqs, is the possibility of having an expensive yet fail-skilled T2 ship. I would like for it to be possible for a player to undock in an expensive hull and get invariably owned as a result of having basic skills for the ship. Right now that's not possible because ships are too strong by base attributes and role bonuses.

I guess what would be required is a base hull that is half as tanky, and skills that provide twice the current amount of benefit per level. So truly, you could see paper-thin command ships, even with a proper set of meta modules.

Even T1 versions, though, could use a 50% reduction in stats, complemented by skills that are twice as effective. I dislike the idea of things being too tanky from the first moments a character is able to undock them.

I'm thinking: same amount of training time, same maximum potential, lower starting stats... is how it would end up if base stats were 50% lower, and skills were twice as effective per level. Shorter training time barrier to entry, paper bag tank, more potential for failure.

Which just translates into easier targets for a more and more convenience driven, risk-averse and sluggish PVP crowd. I can't support that. They are already easy targets if not trained properly, more is not necessary.

Moreover, I do not think that everything in EVE should have a low barrier of entry. There are things in the game that young players can fly early on, T1 sub caps, even carriers these days compared to years ago, and also many T2 ships have very short training times. However, I think that neither T2 Battleships, T2 Battlecruisers or even HAC should be available to young players. These are advanced game assets that require a lot of training besides the ship prerequisites to be useful. As an example:

If you have a John Doe of 3 months and a Jack of all trades of 3 years and put them together in a CS fleet, let's say an Absolution fleet, John Doe is no asset to the fleet: he can neither work as meatshield because not tanky enough nor as damage as his DPS and projection falls way behind that of the rest of the fleet nor can he keep up with the fleet in terms of speed and agility and also falls short in many other departments. He is not an asset, he is a burden and such a burden that he puts the entire fleet at risk. So, most of the times he will be told that his CS is crap and that he should fly something else. He is also a nuisance since he constantly needs to ask for specific modules to even be able to fit the ship, which makes it more expensive for him and tiresome for the rest of the community. However, after 3 months and a training towards CS (regardless if it's the current iteration of skill prerequs or a new one), s/he cannot fly something else as most of his training went into the CS. So, what is this lower barrier of entry going to achieve? It brings forth a useless pilot for fleets, it increases frustration in this pilot and his corp/alliance members because s/he is useless, s/he cannot fly other things to be more useful. And if we look at solo play, there'll be even more frustration as he spent a lot of ISK for a useless ship, which is outperformed by a regular T1 BC. Not to mention in this case, the average player of only 3 months ingame has no clue how to pilot these ships.

I don't see a meaningful choice here. However, it is not to say that even with the current higher barrier of entry there are no players too dense to find their own hand in front of the eyes; those who just think "Shiny, must have now!" without putting a first, let alone a second thought into what these hulls really require in terms of SP to be useful and PS (player skills) to know what you can and cannot and should not do with them. As there won't be -- in my eyes -- any change in added frustration with a lower barrier of entry, the only thing lowering the barrier would achieve is to provide lazy PVPers with more food for their victimization complex and in the process makes them less and less good at real PVP. And that is a thing we do not need in the game; we do not need more bad PVPers and we also do not need more Angry Bird and Farmville players in this game. We need more capable pilots who know what they are doing.

I could hardly imagine a situation when a green horn john doe allowed by a fc to join fleet in abso knowing that john just finished kindergarden. What fleets you are talking about then? If that's a personal desire and choice of john doe then it's ok to let him die but even in this case noone will stick to another unneeded red @ corp's kb.
If u r talking about younger corps which are not part of any blocs then it is more expectable to see a greater number of loses over wons. Most of experienced players did cross that times.
And having cs for beginers that should be the right step.

@Rain "Everyone else" is the last part of the example from "And if we look at solo play,..." on. I fail to see how a CS could benefit these people. I even fail to see how a Nighthawk could have benefited you, when you were barely able to fly a Drake? You would pay more for the same performance, or even worse, if your idea of lower entry barrier was implemented. Yes, it will teach them a painful lesson that money does not buy victory in EVE, but the modern gamer generation has been drilled to expect instant gratification when they use shinies instead of regular gear. This is obviously not going to be the case and people will start forming the "rage mob" (something that Sion Kumi and other CSM people complained about that's forcing CCP to act), demanding that they get their instant gratification. Considering that more and more players turn into or are "born" this way (millennials children mostly) and that CCP is actively trying to bring these people into the game, I see high risk of exactly that happening. I might see matters very pessimistic but experience has been teaching me, that my expectations are rarely far from what is actually happening.

@Tiddle Jr
All kinds of fleets. Snuff's Absolution fleet, for instance. Or from my previous alliance, where one guy had a nice idea about a very small Nighthawk band, which required very good SP and PS. Not many people had these skills in the alliance, so he also had to accept less well trained chars into that fleet (like me, who has some deficiencies in Navigation still), which made people not being able to keep up with his perfectly trained Nighthawk and this put the entire fleet at risk as we couldn't stay in RR range or took too long to get into RR range. And this was only the SP related deficiencies. It worked out in the end, but this kind of applications for these ships are impossible to be met by young John Does, which brings me back to the above mentioned frustration that you can board something but not fly it.
Another example from a different ship class would be a pilot named Sarge Shatta (I am not allowed to link killboards here, so you have to look it up on your own. Tipp: go to his losses and look for the July 20, 2014). In 2 days, he lost 4 Proteus; 2 to NPC and 2 to PVP. We told him not to attempt a 8/10 (I believe it was) solo, we told him not to attempt it again after the first failure. We also told him not to go into FD- (Syndi) to run a DED there, we also told him not to try his unrigged Proteus solo against Balkan Express. We explained it to him what would happen or what he needed to do differently, we kind of adjured to do not do it; in the end it became a farce even too sad for me to resort to sarcasm any longer. After the 4 losses he left us on the ground that we would not have welcomed him and supported him, that we had ridiculed him. He left to FCON and soon after to TNT, probably to find more "welcoming" people. Someone tell me, if a person is so resistant to learning and reason: what good comes form reduced entry barriers to equally complex ships? And what good does it to the rest of the community around this pilot if s/he causes nothing but lost temper, nerfes, time and frustration? I do not want to have such a pilot in my corp ever again. Granted, we have another special snowflake who also loved to fly Solo Proteus for a while; however, he has seen reason after a couple of losses and does not do it any more. He has recognized that this particular type of activity is not what he can successfully do at the moment, he has listened and learned from our advice. Is he the standard? No, I don't believe so; in contrast, I firmly believe that this kind of player is the exception from the irritating rule.

All in all, I do not see benefits for the pilots in lowering the barrier of entry for these advanced game assets.

The reality is in small scale fleets you need max boost to make a commandship worth taking with you.
Armor commandships can do some ewar, otherwise they can not do anything but they are better then shield commandships.
In large fleets you need max skills to survive(300-500k ehp recommended) and because otherwise no FC will take you (there are more then enough boosters by now).
If you are not willing to commit 20mil SP to this which you can not use for anything else then do not even think about it.

Boosting is most of the time a very boring job and it gets worse if you have to do it offgrid.

Only consider skilling this if you have 50mil SP and a few billion isk.

You need
-all specialist V
-fleet command IV
-all tanking skills V (you are a target even with 500k ehp faction tanked Damnation)
-all battlecruiser skills V (trust me youwnat them all)
-implant skills V for the mindlinks (needed makes you 50%better)
-all navigation skills V (the damnation is a flying brick)
-probing skills V
and a lot of basic skills to V

And a few spare commandships and mindlinks throughout new eden, because they are never on the market when you need them.

How do I know that ?
I have max skills and I have 20 Commandships.

If you are still interested in commandships and boosting.
At the moment most FCs like T3s more for the job of boosting a fleet.
All shield commandships are made from glas(less the 200k ehp) they can not survive any large scale engagement and have no ewar or damage or anything useful. (PLS CCP fix them)

In conclusion skill requirements are were they should be and they prevent a lot of new players from wasting SP.