Player Features and Ideas Discussion

This suggestion comes out of answering a lot of questions in the New CItizens Q&A section, and is aimed at solving one of the most common forms of confusion newbies suffer.

In EVE, when a module's effectiveness is improved by a skill, you find that out by looking at the skill's description.

As an example, the skills Rapid Firing, Trajectory Analysis and Small Blaster Specialisation all improve the performance of Light Neutron Blaster II. These effects are all mentioned in the descriptions of the skills themselves, and their benefits are not mentioned anywhere on the description of the Light Neutron Blaster II.


The opposite is true for spaceship command skills (such as Gallente Cruiser). The Gallente Cruiser skill simply states "Skill at operating Gallente cruisers", and you need to check the actual cruiser hulls to find out what this means in practice.

My suggestion is to expand the description of these skills to read something like the following:


Gallente Cruiser

Skill at operating Gallente cruisers.
Each level of this skill improves the pilot's ability with each of the following ships, check that ship's description for details on the bonus:
(list all ships that receive a bonus from this skill in hyperlink format)


This may seem obvious to veteran players, but a lot of newbies believe that all training this skill above 1 achieves is meeting prerequisites, because they never think to look for a skill's bonus anywhere other than the skill.

Unlike weapon supports skills, that effect all weapons or a single type of weapon the same, the ship skills effect each different hull, well, differently. In this instance, it is simply far easier to list the effects on the ship info page than it is to list every single type of hull the ship skill effects on the skill info page.

... you mean like the "required for" page?

There was a time when I thought that ship skills did nothing but finish prerequisites, and what finally convinced me otherwise was when I realized that my Catalyst was actually mining slower than my Navitas. It wasn't that I didn't think to look on the page that listed ship skill bonuses, but that I had never found it and didn't know it existed.

There are still skills that today appear to me to have no function other than meet prerequisites.

I strongly support this!

If you want a list of ships that a command ship skill directly affects then yes the required for tab shows this


as for the person who never thought to show info on the ship you were flying I don't think this would help you much since you would still need to show info



at best this idea is a tiny improvement hardly worth the effort at worst it turns the skill books into an impenetrable wall of text

+1

I don't think it's a big ask of dev time to add one or two sentences that a ship skill is more than a mere requisite.

The thing is, players learn from other skills that this is not needed.

Look up Gunnery the skill. It tells you it gives 2% ROF increase on the description. It then has a Required For tab, which tells you different information. Gunnery is required to operate Modal Light Neutron Blaster I, but the bonus Gunnery gives you is listed on the Gunnery skill, not on the meta blaster description. This is the same for *every other skill in the game*.

Why would any newbie think that Caldari Destroyer skill behaves differently unless they happen across it by accident?