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Player Features and Ideas Discussion

 
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NPE feedback Q and A

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Author
Aryth
University of Caille
Gallente Federation
#61 - 2015-07-02 14:21:46 UTC
2M starting SP is great. However, it should also come with redemptions. The worst thing is for a newbie to spend his fresh SP and then realize he made a mistake. Maybe allow reallocations for up to 30 days. Or just give them a reallocation token of some sort. Limit it to 2M.

Or just give us all reallocation tokens for some hilarious ISK value for 100m SP worth.

On the implants. Removal really only has 2 main issues.
One, reimbursement.
Two, replacement of the usage in the economy.

Reimbursement seems fairly straightforward. Return the EST ISK value into the wallet of the char with them. Trillions of ISK into the economy at once isn't going to be that large an impact. On the grand scheme of things there is little impact from point in time injections of ISK. Assets is another story, see PI, but ISK is safe.

The replacement of the usage is a far thornier problem. Since implants represent the LP floor of EVE they are going to have a dramatic effect on the economy with their removal. The easy solution is to implement several more implant sets that everyone is going to want to have as a bare minimum in their clones. Not 1B sets, something where the entire set is 500m or less.

The other tack is to simultaneously introduce something hilariously expensive that people save LP for and cash out. Aka, the aforementioned reallocation token. I could see CCP wanting to make this a NEX item though.

Last easy option. Finally nuke R&D agents and move that portion of the datacore generation into regular LP. R&D agents just need to die a final death.

Leader of the Goonswarm Economic Warfare Cabal.

Creator of Burn Jita

Vile Rat: You're the greatest sociopath that has ever played eve.

elitatwo
Zansha Expansion
#62 - 2015-07-02 14:24:38 UTC
CCP Rise wrote:
Q: 'Starting skills are a huge barrier, can we give a lot more to new players'
A: Yes. But this is not a simple change. You guys seem fairly agreed that the small amount of starting skills, combined with a high amount of 'must have' support and requirement skills, leads to some really icky barriers to participation for new players. We are inclined to agree and we are in the process of laying out a plan to address the problem. Nothing is set in stone yet but it seems likely that we will try and move new players towards starting with significantly more SP. Maybe between 1 and 2 million. It also seems likely that we will probably avoid any major skill reworks or skill removals. As this plan solidifies you will hear more from us....


I don't think that even giving a nooby 470 million skillpoints will help them after the first tutorials. They might be ready to fit everything right away and fly all ships but they will die horribly in anything they sit it.

Sitting in a boat is not flying and as long as you don't explain the skill system in much more depth and with examples, new players are going to leave.

Waiting for a skill barrier to have fun?

I had a blast figuring out what kind of ships can do what or the x module had y prequesites and it'll take z minutes to train or buy the book first (because Aura forgot to tell me that completing a mission for the agent is mandatory, not optional..).

And my line of thinking was that everyone else had to do it too, so I am no different than anyone else nor do I deseve any kind of special treament.

The tutorial should do a much better and coicidentely a longer job of explaining the skill system and that it is the most important thing from now on until the end of time.
Make a few examples and give out civilian modules that have for the sake of the tutorial the same prequesties as a tech 1 modules of the same kind but you can fit on your Rookie boat.
Then open the modules prequesites tab and make a gigantic neon sign on the prequesites tab -> dat here is important, do not forget to look here, regardless of modules, ship, drone, or exotic dancer.

Let the first example be a civilian afterburner with the requirement navigation I, engineering I and afternurner I and then let Aura open your character tab and place the skillpoints to there, hell remove all skills from the sheet until Aura explains the skill system based on your bloodline.
By clicking some choices and the examples, Aura put the base skills in your sheet while you are forced to look at those. When you see your first book in your empty bookshelf it is as if you just leveld up.

Repeat with frigate I, turret I, drone I (depending on your starting character).

Make the noob read all the information on the skillbook so that he can only continue after that and tell him right away that you do not need to train all to V right away since that would take ~17 years.

Make them accept the missions of the agents and award them a core skillbook everytime they dock in the right place.

Amarr may need to know that laser turrets will hurt their capacitor but only in the higher ship classes.

Noobs always want to fly bigger ships, as in bigger = better(erer). Let Aura tell them a frigate is very important shipclass and there are always needs for good frigate pilots.

People that do not want to learn are not a good fit for EVE anyways.

Eve Minions is recruiting.

This is the law of ship progression!

Aura sound-clips: Aura forever

Jori McKie
Hedion University
Amarr Empire
#63 - 2015-07-02 14:40:49 UTC  |  Edited by: Jori McKie
About the attribute Implants:
Get rid of them at all and offer instead different levels of booster drugs which enhance the training speed percentage wise and are time limited. Use the same supply source for them as with learning implants. Percentage and duration can be fine tuned numbers here are just as example. Offer them with different durations up to 300 days (10x times the standard one)
LvL 1 Implants > Booster drug with 0.1% more training speed with 30 days duration
.
.
.
LvL 5 Implants > Booster drug with 0.5% more training speed with 30 days duration



As second step offer new sets of Implants with unique features, start with different Genolution sets.
Low-Grade Genolution
Medium-Grade Genolution
High-Grade Genolution
The Genolution set is a very big help for new players to compensate for lower CPU/Grid skills. And for older players to squeeze out extra performance from ships.

Then think about introducing something like:
- Different sets to improve E-war, like range, strength, duration
- A set or sets to improve strength against E-war
- A set or sets to improving remote armor repping
- A set or sets to improving remote shield repping
- A set or sets to improving remote cap transfer

Lots of other opportunities to fine tune risk/reward on implants but i'm out of ideas now. Of course you need to fine tune and nerf the current capabilities of any sort of remote rep/transfer and especially E-war. If balanced those new sets can play a vital role in fleet combat. Think about the new sets as a kind of personal links and in conjunction with the hopefully soon coming on grid links they could work as complement or fail safe in case your on grid links get killed. Maybe think about getting rid of the link implants and transform them into full sets.

"It's easy to speak for the silent majority. They rarely object to what you put into their mouths." - Abrazzar

Grm Makentor
Deep Core Mining Inc.
Caldari State
#64 - 2015-07-02 14:47:03 UTC
Hello
If you intend on removing learning implants can you please reimburse my past 2 years of my min/maxing attributes, denying myself the instant gratification skills in favour of adhering to the long term skill plan and risk management of +4/5 pods in wormhole/nullsec along with all the missed opportunities when the risk is literally too great for my +4/5 pods.
Thanks in advance.
Phoenix Jones
Small-Arms Fire
#65 - 2015-07-02 14:47:56 UTC
The other thing about the NPE is that the opportunities need a viable reward for doing them. This doesn't need to be ships, but it should be something that makes a player (even a veteran), want to do.

Honestly, for completing a series of opportunities, the player should be rewarded a skin, isk, a medal, something.

It'll make people want to do it.

With other games, the usual reward for completing a series of achievements is usually some mount of some kind. Now mounts don't exist in eve, but Skins do.

I would make these no trade/barter/contract items (make them account bound).

A incentive isn't a bad thing here.

Yaay!!!!

naed21
Iron Knights
#66 - 2015-07-02 14:48:15 UTC
Seeing how most attribute implants come from mission LP stores, I'd suggest replacing them with generic faction implants. Think like the CA implant set. Or maybe even just use the CA set. Purhaps split it into teirs, low - medium - high grade. With the current set being the high grade.

Conversion could go like this:
+5s = high grade
+4s and +3s = med grade,
+2s and +1s = low grade

From there I'd change the pirate implants to be blueprints to build from PI because they wont have any base stats with these implants (attributes).

Or you could just remove the implant requirement from the LP store as I don't think the pirate implant market puts that much pressure on the demand of the attribute implants.
Rivr Luzade
Coreli Corporation
Pandemic Legion
#67 - 2015-07-02 14:53:27 UTC  |  Edited by: Rivr Luzade
I just leave this here. Not only does this video counter most of the points in the Q&A in the first post as well as opinions in other posts, it is also one of the videos (among other T1 frigate videos from suitonia and similar other video creators) that should be a must watch for new players and that more experienced players ought to link to new players as a must watch to bridge, for instance, skill waiting time. After this and maybe a second video, you already have trained a lot of required skills for fitting a ship and you know what you do or at least have an orientation what to do.

Unrelated sidenote since CCP reads: This video (minute 11+) shows how horrible transparent UI is in my opinion. So much overlapping, interference, ambiguity with the texts and windows. No need to comment on that as it's a matter of choice and this is a mere observation.

UI Improvement Collective

My ridicule, heavy criticism and general pale outlook about your or CCP's ideas is nothing but an encouragement to prove me wrong. Give it a try.

Phoenix Jones
Small-Arms Fire
#68 - 2015-07-02 14:55:48 UTC
Aryth wrote:


Or just give us all reallocation tokens for some hilarious ISK value for 100m SP worth.





You would wind up destroying the game by doing that. Character builds wouldn't matter. Character history wouldn't matter, character trade wouldn't matter. The reputation of a character wouldn't matter.

You'd see Industry alts turn instantly into titan pilots, you'd see miners turn into pew machines. You'd have people complaining how they screwed up their skill remap and beg for another.

That would be the biggest can of worms CCP could ever do. They'd wreck every doctrine, every character and player would be crying how they screwed up their skills, how their training and time investment is now worthless, how their characters definition and life meant nothing.

Swarms of people would max train into the current flavor of the month, and when it gets changed, huge outcry's from people about how CCP nerfed their skill retrain, how CCP trolled them, and that they deserve another or they'll quit.

It basically turns eve into what EQ2 and WOW did. Buy a instant level 90. The entry into eve for all newbies will be "Buy a character off bazaar if you want to play". New Players will feel even more disenfranchised that in order for them to compete on any level, they have to buy a character with a remap.

You want to see Eve die in a ball of fire. Do that.

Yaay!!!!

afkalt
Republic Military School
Minmatar Republic
#69 - 2015-07-02 14:57:18 UTC
You mean a veteran player can do awesome things with their vast library of in game knowledge to draw upon?

I'm shocked.

Wait. No I'm not. At all.


You consistently trip over yourself by not placing yourself in the newbies shoes with the newbies knowledge.
Corraidhin Farsaidh
Federal Navy Academy
Gallente Federation
#70 - 2015-07-02 14:57:50 UTC
Phoenix Jones wrote:
Aryth wrote:


Or just give us all reallocation tokens for some hilarious ISK value for 100m SP worth.





You would wind up destroying the game by doing that. Character builds wouldn't matter. Character history wouldn't matter, character trade wouldn't matter. The reputation of a character wouldn't matter.

You'd see Industry alts turn instantly into titan pilots, you'd see miners turn into pew machines. You'd have people complaining how they screwed up their skill remap and beg for another.

That would be the biggest can of worms CCP could ever do. They'd wreck every doctrine, every character and player would be crying how they screwed up their skills, how their training and time investment is now worthless, how their characters definition and life meant nothing.

Swarms of people would max train into the current flavor of the month, and when it gets changed, huge outcry's from people about how CCP nerfed their skill retrain, how CCP trolled them, and that they deserve another or they'll quit.

It basically turns eve into what EQ2 and WOW did. Buy a instant level 90. The entry into eve for all newbies will be "Buy a character off bazaar if you want to play". New Players will feel even more disenfranchised that in order for them to compete on any level, they have to buy a character with a remap.

You want to see Eve die in a ball of fire. Do that.


But apart from that, what could be the harm?
Bienator II
madmen of the skies
#71 - 2015-07-02 14:58:48 UTC  |  Edited by: Bienator II
CCP Rise wrote:

Q: 'Attributes aren't very interesting, you should remove them'
A: Again, we agree. Team Size Matters discussed removing them on the o7 show (or some other public venue) awhile back and it's still something we are very interested in. We need to figure out a good way to handle all the learning implants in the game though, which is actually a difficult problem. If any of you have awesome ideas for how to handle it don't hesitate to make suggestions.


i mean I am not sure if we can help you with this because only CCP knows how fast players should progress in the game. We also don't know your goals. If you want to get rid of attributes but are OK with learning implants its not that difficult to do just that.

unify attribute implants to one implant type, remove attributes and adjust min training time and maxed out training time accordingly. This would initially create an overflow of implants since you map all attribute implants to one implant type.

alternatively you can do that without unifying implants with the option to do the unification in the future. Remove attributes and give attribute implants (and pirate sets) a skill training set bonus. Adjust min and max training time so that you are happy.

-> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuHfVn_cfHU

how to fix eve: 1) remove ECM 2) rename dampeners to ECM 3) add new anti-drone ewar for caldari 4) give offgrid boosters ongrid combat value

Carbon Alabel
Gemini Talon
The Curatores Veritatis Auxiliary
#72 - 2015-07-02 15:10:04 UTC
Here's an idea for repurposing attribute implants: make them work as hardwiring implant amplifiers.
There are 5 attribute implant slots and 5 hardwiring implant slots, so a +1 perception implant (slot 1) would give a 10% bonus to the effects of slot 6 hardwirings, while a +5 Willpower implant (slot 3) would give a 50% bonus to the effects of slot 8 hardwirings.
Alternatively, you could have the +5 implants give a 10% bonus to their respective hardwiring slots and a 5% bonus to all other hardwiring slots (+1 implants would have 2% and 1% bonuses). Compared to the first one, this idea would provide incentive to buy multiple attribute enhancing/amplifying implants and would result in a lower total increase in implant bonuses.

This idea seems like a good one to me, as it wouldn't affect the bonuses of existing pirate implants (which are already considered overpowered by many people) and would provide a decent cost to benefit ratio for using those implants which would ensure that players which produce and trade in them are not damaged in any way.
I'd appreciate any thoughts on this idea.
Somos
Caldari Provisions
Caldari State
#73 - 2015-07-02 15:10:53 UTC
Is there a reason we can't just get rid of learning implants all together?

Get rid of the +1-+5 attributes, give everyone base stats to support 2500 sp/hr, and move along.

I think we can all agree that a lot of implants support choice in gameplay. Want to scan, get Virtues. Want to buffer tank, get slaves. Need extra PG, get a implant. It's a robust system that's fine and supports a lot of choice. Attributes don't do that.

Attributes only support one thing, getting more SP. If you want more SP/Hr you need to get learning implants or remap, there's no middle ground. It offers no choice and in the case of remaps it locks you into a skill plan for a year. A year. That gives players very few choices of what to train and is extremely unfun to be locked into a plan for a year.

Getting rid of remaps and learning implants fixes this. As stated, the current implants out there are great, lets keep them. Lets just get rid of attributes and attribute boosting as a whole and standardize the way all capsuleers earn SP. It removes a learning curve for new players, keeps players having a choice in what they inject, and at 2500 SP per hour gives SP at a really decent clip.
Jackie Fisher
Syrkos Technologies
#74 - 2015-07-02 15:13:34 UTC
Link some of the extra SPs to the Opportunities system and weight the rewards to encourage the more important activities. eg few points for using autopilot or speaking in local but good rewards for joining a player corp or shooting another player.

Fear God and Thread Nought

Ohh Yeah
Jerkasaurus Wrecks Inc.
Sedition.
#75 - 2015-07-02 15:13:54 UTC
Somos wrote:
Is there a reason we can't just get rid of learning implants all together?


A dev said on Reddit that they wouldn't have any issue doing this, except that learning implants are the source of income for a ton of people in EVE, so they'd have to replace them with something equally desirable. For a bunch of LP stores if you remove learning implants, people have to try to sell random faction mods with low moving volumes and stuff.
Dersen Lowery
The Scope
#76 - 2015-07-02 15:18:58 UTC
afkalt wrote:
Newbie then either a) flies a half fit shitfit (what a great experience) or b) does "something else" whilst it trains.

That something else is not eve, because although the sandbox is huge, they're newbies and they CANT DO MUCH by very definition.

Too many vets forget the new days. Too many people train the likes of JDC V and advise folks "do something else whilst you wait" forgetting that the newbies don't have the skills to "kill time" whilst they wait.


^^^ This, all day.

Sure, I can do something else while I train Jovian Titan to X. I have 70M skillpoints and billions of ISK in ship hulls and fittings. When I was brand new, you know what I did? I inched through the tutorial because I was reading the EVE University wiki and training toward real fits, because I wanted to fly real ships. So I would run a couple of tutorial missions in my crap-fit free ship, cram as many skills onto the queue as I could and go to bed. If I hadn't had friends encouraging me to get through it, I would never have put up with it.

That may sound organized, but what I was actually doing was trying to train for as many real ships as I possibly could, at once. I had no sense of how huge the game is. I spent my first 10M skill points badly. I don't know what 2M free skill points would do for an abject newbie except induce a terminal case of choice paralysis. I know you guys are pushing ~sandbox~ really hard, but even some sort of optional structuring of skill points into starter packages would be a huge help. Maybe the college you start from could have some kind of significance?

There are skills whose only real purpose, as far as I'm concerned, is allowing you to fit every slot on a T1 ship. I have never understood that. I have never understood why Propulsion Jamming I isn't something that every new character starts with. I have never understood why skillbooks are variously given away in Aura sidebars and unrelated missions as rewards, making them easy to miss and hard to understand. I mean, if you want an Opportunity to direct people to the career agents, at least fix the career agents first. The Military and Advanced Military tutorials were designed by drunk sadists.

And I want to echo Ralph King-Griffin's concern about capacitor. I brought that up when I reviewed the NPE a couple of years ago, and it's still a concern. Outside of China, green means good and red means bad. Cap stability is rarely good. Cap instability is rarely bad. On top of that, the fitting window makes MWDs look horrible, because it applies the cap penalty and then silently assumes that the module is always running. There's no way to tell it not to.

Proud founder and member of the Belligerent Desirables.

I voted in CSM X!

Rivr Luzade
Coreli Corporation
Pandemic Legion
#77 - 2015-07-02 15:19:29 UTC
Somos wrote:
Attributes only support one thing, getting more SP. If you want more SP/Hr you need to get learning implants or remap, there's no middle ground. It offers no choice and in the case of remaps it locks you into a skill plan for a year. A year. That gives players very few choices of what to train and is extremely unfun to be locked into a plan for a year.

Your choice is to find a suitable attribute point distribution, remap for them and then use the implants to compensate for either skills falling out of the plan's most used attributes or further improve the training time of those which fall into the most used attributes.
Furthermore, I cannot confirm that my 4 years in EVE with Perc/Mem attribute mapping have been unfun at any stage. Why? Because I made an informed decision and use implants to further improve my training. Sure, Trade, Leadership, Social takes a bit longer to train, but so what? The couple of minutes do not matter. Moreover, these skill categories are of no importance to a combat focused character and thus the training time increase can be ignored.

UI Improvement Collective

My ridicule, heavy criticism and general pale outlook about your or CCP's ideas is nothing but an encouragement to prove me wrong. Give it a try.

Aerasia
Republic University
Minmatar Republic
#78 - 2015-07-02 15:30:18 UTC
Ohh Yeah wrote:
A dev said on Reddit that they wouldn't have any issue doing this, except that learning implants are the source of income for a ton of people in EVE, so they'd have to replace them with something equally desirable.
So let me understand... they won't change the system because it would remove one of the symptoms showing why the system is so bad in the first place.
Sir Constantin
#79 - 2015-07-02 15:30:58 UTC
Please do not get rid of attribute implants as they are just a bonus to training, getting rid of them is like saying to get rid of boosters and give everyone the +boost stats by default.

For new players a small SP boost for core skills should be good but what they really need is a a bunch of good tutorials and some optimized skill plans.
If you give them full frigate skills day one, they still gonna quit because their next target (BC, BS) is even longer to train into.
Arrendis
TK Corp
#80 - 2015-07-02 15:33:12 UTC
Rivr Luzade wrote:
No, it does not lead to any barriers. How is 1D 10H an entry barrier to anything?


Of course it does. If I buy a game to play with my friends, I don't want to have to wait 2 days (1d 10 - most people have about 4-6 hrs an evening when they can play, so even if they queue up everything right away, that's still 2d before their open time meets up with the skills they need for the most basic ships) to play it. I want to play it once it's done downloading. If I get a 21-day free trial, I want to be able to try the game for 21 days, not 19.