EVE General Discussion

No need to be defensive. No one is attacking you or anything. Just trying to help you understand what they were talking about.

Only one slight error in your post though.

Small hybrids I does not provide a 500% increase in DPS in your example. Going from 0 to 5 guns is not a 500% increase, at least with our current understanding of maths where dividing by 0 is not possible.

In the drone discussion above it was about going from 4 drones to 5. Same would apply if you could go from 4 hybrids to 5 through skills training.

But 0 to 5 isn't 500% more (or more simply, what's 500% of 0? Is a question that makes no sense)

It's never had classes that's just something you imposed upon yourself.

Wait, I have not proposed classes. I said "career"....note the quotes. Basically it is like how character creation once was, but only after the NPE so the new player can make a more informed choice. Possibly with some free SP to help "teach" them how how to allocate SP, and b "teach" it could be by making a bad decision as well.

Past that nothing is restricting the player in what they train.

e: qine

I just started up a new character to try out the opportunities and the newbie system's anomalies.

I farmed the Rogue Cloning Facility for a bit, to gather some civilian mods for my Ibis. I ended up putting together two Ibis together, one for mining and one for combat. Both decked out in civilian modules. I ended up with about 80k ISK to start buying skillbooks with.

I started trying to run Guristas Burrows. I had to warp out once or twice to complete them but it was doable. Decided to buy two tech 1 rail guns off the market since my character already had the skills to use them. This made Burrows and Hideaways incredibly easy. Dang, I am uber leet.

I quickly earned over 100k ISK running anomalies in the newbie system. I also looted a Adaptive Invulnerability Field and sold it on the market for 145k ISK. I'm rich!

I got an expedition for a 4/10 from one of the Hideouts. Too bad I can't complete it as a day 1 noob.

Stole some loot from a noob's wreck in one of the anomalies. Other noobs warped in when I was flashy yellow but they didn't want to shoot me I guess.

Eventually I got bored of the noob system and flew over to the career agents. Somehow I magically knew about them even though I am a clueless day 1 noob. (Progression is much faster doing the career tutorial missions of course. But CCP doesn't do a good job of directing you there. There is an opportunity that tells you to open the agent finder to find an agent and get a mission. They should probably hint that you should choose the "career" filter in the agent finder and go to those guys. Maybe they plan to delete the career agents eventually)

Now I've done the exploration and military career agent missions and I'm in a Merlin. No more civilian mods, upgraded everything to T1 and meta 2-3.

I find myself wanting more cap, and powergrid. I can't run a small shield booster more than a minute or so on my Merlin. It's kinda lame that I gotta train some shield skill to lvl 4 before I can start training the skills to boost my passive shield amps. Also kinda lame that I gotta train two skills to 3 before I can train the skills to use normal data and relic analyzers.

But overall I had fun. End day 1.

Which is another misunderstanding.

Drones V is a big step over Drones IV because it unlocks:

• A 5th drone: 25% more drone DPS
• Drone Interfacing: 10% more drone DPS per level
• T2 Drones: 20% DPS boost over T1, ~5% over Empire faction.

Since Drone Interfacing III is a pretty quick train, it's easy to see that as part and parcel of the Drones V train. But really, compared to somebody new you could be forgiven for calculating the difference as 25% for Drones V, 30% for Interfacing V (IV is as long a train as Drones V is, and V is just huge) and 20% for T2 Drones for a total of 1.95x the DPS out of your drones.

As a new player you can get your wallet out to reduce that advantage though. For a bit over 1M ISK/drone, you can upgrade to the Navy versions which cut the equipment bonus from 20% to just 5%. If you've got the deep, deep pockets you can spend 6M ISK/drone and go for Augmented which are on par with T2 (for DPS, they're ahead in some other stats).

My point is that weapons work a bit differently. For most of them you can match T2 stats with Meta 4, so the difference comes down to the weapon skill itself (0.42% more damage) and the specialization skill (2% level, again we'll assume III) for a total of about 1.10x.

One your favorite weapon slot gets the tiericide treatment though, there likely won't be an even DPS option until you get into the higher meta stuff. Training lvl V for your weapons will become slightly more necessary because you can't use Meta gear to catch up to the T2 variants. Well, you can... you'll just end up spending half a billion ISK on a set of FN Blasters.

Also worth a mention in the various exploration and mission help game channels. There are usually folks there who will take it and they're pretty good about tossing you back a cut of the rewards as a finder's fee.

I'm trying to pretend I'm totally new, but even with a new character it's still hard to firewall the experienced player's knowledge.

Investigated an Angel Hideaway in the noob ship and rapidly discovered how fragile they are in unskilled (55k SP) hands.

Ehhh, while I am a firm believer that the 5 level system is the great equalizer between newer and older players, I don't have a huge problem with a more structured NPE that provides a better core set of skills for a particular type of career in EVE. A system designed to give new players a distinct starting point and designed from the ground up to help a new player make sense of how things work in EVE.

I don't even have a big problem with adding in a few more specific basic skills given once the player decides what general career they are most interested in pursuing at first.... although that is a slippery slope as just throwing exp or skills at new players for no reason (or with no distinct purpose) is generally a poor idea.

The only reason why I'm not too upset about the idea, if it is done in a very structured (career oriented) way is for two reasons:
1: If the player decides that career path isn't for him/her, they can easily shift into something else... usually with few wasted skills.
2: Everyone has 3 alts they can start on different paths, the one they tend to gravitate to will end up being their main.

I wouldn't change the sandbox nature of EVE for anything, however I do recognize the massive confusion (due to lack of structure) can be overwhelming to new players, hurting new player retention. Perhaps it wouldn't be such a bad thing to ease them into realizing they can actually do anything they like, as opposed to other games, by starting them out with a NPE that seems a little more normal to them.

No, you just need to have a main that's much older and the experience that goes along with it.*


Edit: If we are using that first video as an example.