EVE General Discussion

Drones V might be one of the worst "V" requirements in the game right now. Combine that boost with the Interfacing III that invariably comes right after getting Drones V, and you end up with a 1.625x difference. And that's ignoring the T2 access that comes along with Drones V.

I'm actually not really looking forward to the weapon Tiericide for that reason. At least right now you can get spendy and go Meta 4 to keep on par with a module's stats, but drones don't catch up on DPS until Meta 8 and those costs get out of hand really quickly. Whether it's by giving the skill by default, or just reworking the 'unlock' - having a level V that is a 25% performance boost itself, unlocks a further 50% boost skill, and grants access to a 20% boost module/equip ... that's a bit nuts.

I'd disagree with this, at least for combat. Drones aren't the only system to have that kind of snowballing bonus, and having the ability to T2-fit a combat frigate is pretty much cost of entry for PvP (the advice of 'go suicide tackle' aside).

Haven't read the entire thread, but maybe return to the pre-Apoc new character theme? Specs based on racial bloodline and school choices... Just really try to avoid the Achura bias. ;-)

Extreme comparison. You'll be hard pressed to win fights using a drone boat with Drones III and Light Drone III. On the other hand something like a Rifter with Gunnery III and Small Projectile III can scram kite other brawlers into an inevitable loss.

Depends on a lot of variables, but the basic idea of cheesing through it involves training drones to III up front and, preferably, picking gallente as your race to save a few hours of cross-training. You should be able to plug all the career missions down in a few hours and SOE is only marginally more time consuming per mission with the major time sink being travel between the agents which you can do afk. I've never lost one of my noobtristans to ganks, but YMMV. It's very easily doable in a 2-3 hour a night stint over a weekend and the knowledge required to make that kind of time isn't that hard to find.

The exploration missions are the most trivial given they can be done with no skill training at all, just knowledge of how to move scan probes. SOE should be equally trivial as gallente since you've got a free tristan that can do everything up to dagan without breaking a sweat.

But yes, I certainly agree he's over-estimating the time one would get content out of these missions, if you read how to deal with them efficiently, which is something most EVE players would suggest newbies do. At the point of completion here you've got a lot of options, but they are not as widely published, hence my earlier post about how the post-career-and-SOE low sp activity list ought to be collated somewhere.

Sure, that's about right for the career agents at a few hours an evening, being doing one each evening there. If you look at this, you can see that the epic has a lot to it, many missions, and you travel to all four empires, lots of traveling. It takes time. That's pretty much the intention, a trial account last a few weeks, which is about how long it takes especially if that player is doing a few other things along the way like trying to figure out the markets etc.

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The whole SP "think of the newbies" imo is pretty moot, just makes the whole intro thing obsolete by becoming way too easy. And if they just jump into low or null with a corp on day 1, just dumping 10m SP on them (or whatever) is only going to frustrate them even more since reason/skill hasn't caught up with SP yet. Just means bigger ships to lose, rather than little affordable ones, though at least for corps they may even replace those.

I had no problems starting EVE with even less than they get now. What does that say for the type of players you guys want in the game? Will it always be easy for them? Will that make them stick around? What about the people that like a challenge, but find EVE having become so boringly easy even from first impressions? Don't want those around, just the ones looking for easy going social gaming?

meh, EVE isn't for everyone, and should remain targeting the types of players they have always done. Otherwise, it winds up being a game for no one. You just don't change a game after pre-launch concept and final publish, you just alienate your existing playerbase and wind up never replacing them. That's not a theory, it's been played out time and time again with other games. Make it easy, to get people to stick around that like things easy, so they will later whine to make everything easy. Not a good plan.

You are starting to sound like me.

I concur with the assessment that additional sp isn't going to boost player retention, but I think we should refrain from needless hyperbole when making our point. Rise floated the idea of ~1m sp and that's pretty easy to cite.



It would be interesting to see how player retention broke down by race/skill training choices. Gallente ships, particularly drone hulls, give a lot more options to new players without much sp expenditure. I imagine a lot of young caldari miners don't stick around by comparison.

I think you might be misinterpreting what they were discussing here.

Drones V does boost damage but it's not bonused damage.

That is, the boost comes because you can do more damage with more drones as opposed to bonused damage (eg. Drone interfacing) which allows you to do more damage with the same number of drones.

Being able to use 5 drones as opposed to 4 or 3, etc. definitely increases your damage and in my reading of that discussion, I think that's what they were referring to.

1. Assuming there is the bandwidth.
2. No different than a hull with 5 guns for the gun bunnies.
3. Gun bunnies don't have to train to use more guns, they get as many guns as their ships PG/CPU and slots allow.

Really, I don't see the drones are OP claim here. Nice reach though, but not quite.