Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Here is my opinion at this juncture: EVE would be different, but not broken, and the market for characters would dry up except for people whose skill is in sculpting particularly attractive avatars.

Take, for example, people who participate in industry of one form or another. There are a bunch of skills which act as "soft" barriers to entry into the profession, but the real barriers to entry are the hard barriers of "knowing what the heck you are doing," "planning three months in advance," and "being able to carry out the plan." The knowledge of how to set up processes in-game, model those processes, and include the externalities such as logistics, to generate a profit from the time invested, are the real skills required for doing industry. Skill points in appropriate skills are a trivial impediment.

There's a rule of thumb that you don't even bother trying industry until you have PE5. I figure this is the same kind of "hurry up and wait" scenario as learning skills were back in the day. Why shouldn't a new player be able to participate in industry? They are going to make many mistakes as they learn the ropes: why should they be punished even more with the inability to compete even when they know what they're doing, unless they wait a month or so for PE5 or buy an industrial character?

What about the combat pilot who flies in an alliance? There are currently artificial barriers to entry: "you must have this exact skill set, be able to fly this exact ship and fitting". That pilot also has to know how to not derp their way through a red gate, target the right target, shoot on cue, etc. Skill points in appropriate skills are an impediment.

There's a rule of thumb about training "support skills" such as Engineering, Electronics, yada yada. Would the game really be broken if, instead of simply gifting new characters these skills we took the skills away completely?

With skills gone, the choices of modules for ship fitting come down to fitting capacity, financial capacity, and availability. There are still decisions to be made, but no longer will you end up flying a meta-3 fitted battlecruiser simply because you didn't have the skills to fly a tech-2 fitted navy cruiser yet.

Some people will miss the little reward of "Skill training completed." Perhaps people will feel cheated out of some illusion of "character development" which they have been conned into from playing single-player RPGs for too long. You don't have levels in Quake, but it's still a fun game. You just get better weapons, and harder enemies. EVE is not an RPG, it's a sci-fi simulator attempting to provide the world an Objectivist reality: you are the product of your choices and efforts. You are poor because you are bad.

Why let an outdated paradigm such as character skills get in the way of people discovering just how bad and useless they really are?

CCP have noted that they're looking into doing away with the attribute system in favour of something more appropriate, which will include a complete rework of the attribute boosting implants. So with any luck somewhere down the line, your wish may come true.

Here's the topic where CCP Rise mentions it most recently:
https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=432569&find=unread

I think you misunderstood my post, I didn't mean the skills were going.
Everyone would still need to train for their skills, it's just the attributes that determine how fast they train that's being reviewed for improvement.

For me, it just wouldn't be the same game without skill training. I'm not saying I would quit, but I would certainly have less incentive to stay subscribed. For me, real life frequently interrupts my ability to actually play Eve. I'm on my second deployment since I began playing Eve. In the past 8.5 years, I've also had numerous time periods where I was kept away from game for a month or two here and there. I've been continuously subscribed that whole time - paying cash for one year subscriptions - because I could continue "getting better" at Eve even if I could not actually play the game.

I would estimate that with some careful planning, I could have saved myself 30-50% of the money I have invested in Eve if I was not interested in keeping skill queues going continuously.

The ability to come back to a better character has also kept me coming back to Eve, even after getting burned out and going off to do something else for a bit.

The only things you can do if RL keeps you from undocking is play skill queue online, EFT online, post on the forums, and read about Eve. I certainly would not stay subscribed just to be able to post on the forums.

Attribute implants absolutely need to go away and be replaced with more implants which benefit the player only when he is undocked and doing something in a spaceship. I've said that in enough different threads, including one which is already linked in this thread, so I will leave it at that.



Sure. The stats provided by those skills should be baked into the hulls from the start. It would make balancing a ton easier.

Skill training is largely the reason why this game is so attractive to me.

A new player experiences a lot of his/her learning curve through the process of training. As an example: Turrets. How is a player going to slowly become accustomed to transversal velocity without ever questioning what it is? The player would soon realize there are training manuals such as "motion prediction", "trajectory analysis" and "sharp shooter" and would then begin to inquire further.
They may ask for help in local or friend other players to help them get started but first, they have to know what questions to ask.

A realism attached to ideas such as this is ever prevalent as the participant applies his growing knowledge in PVE combat situations and as skills progress in real time, masters them such that he/she then engages more in PVP. There are many, many more examples like this but it would be a like writing a novel to list all of them.

This game prepares you in all the right ways. You may find yourself waiting for quite a while to say... fly a black ops, but would you want inexperienced pilots in your fleet? They have to know the value of what they fly first and it can take a very very long time for them to realize this (much like the training it takes to fly them)

I am all for the way it is done currently, however... I understand your frustration when using alts. There should be some sort of grandfathering system that your main can grant alts (Category with most SP trained) reducing the SP training time for those 25% - 50%. Maybe. Just an Idea.

There are no newbies in entry-level pvp. "Entry level" for pvp currently lies at about 50-70 million skill points, at which point the character is not a newbie.

Maybe we could have pvp for newbies if this suggestion passed, because right now we don't. Implants are not going to solve this problem.

My experience as a new player with the training system was: "I want to fly a Merlin. It requires these skills. Okay, queue that skill, now go play some other game for a few days."



What if the new player just sees "Motion Prediction" as another skill book that needs to be acquired and injected? They don't care about what mechanic it encapsulates, only that using it makes their character better. How many people playing the game actually get into the min/maxing side of things, rather than simply figuring out at which distance they can orbit targets to get the best damage by trial and error? There is no such thing as "15km from target, moving in a circular orbit" when you get into an actual fight. All the theory goes out the window.



How do I get experience at flying black ops ships before I can fly a black ops ship? I think a large part of the argument about "people who buy skills don't know how to use them" is simply that the people who buy skills don't have the in-game experience that is gathered over dozens of fights and losses. It's not that you don't know how to use the skills you bought, it's that you don't know how to cooperate in a fleet, you don't know the tricks of the trade when it comes to jumping a blops into enemy territory, and you don't have the experience of doing things under duress. Nothing to do with skill points at all.



Exactly. Nothing to do with skill points. Everything to do with in-game experience.

RvB is a gewn hisec pet.
Sitting in a plex stabbed and ready to bolt is not pvp.
If you try to pvp on a below-50-million-SP character, you'll lose pathetically, SP is just too strong force multiplier.



Yeah, like BRAVE, the living proof of the fact that unless your blob has enough SP it will be farmed easily by anyone who has enough SP.

Eve combat pvp has no fun and interesting aspect, it's a SP vs SP comparison, and if yours is lower, well, go train a few more years, then maybe you can get equal sometime in 2019.

How would removal of skills prevent you ganking miners for fun and profit?

But if the skills are not there to progress, does that make your game broken?

Does a game need to provide you with tokens of "progression" to make it worth playing?