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Putting this plan into action will become more costly most likely then using a character Bazaar. I am sure whatever ISK/Plex/aurum players had to spend to get a 80-110mil SP Character will be vastly cheaper then attempting to create one out of this new method.

Second off, Why are you screwing your long term established players who have dumped tons of cash into your company since 2003 and later by punishing them with the new implementations that you put into the game. Your userbase prides itself on how long it has been in this game, the times it has weathered, taking that advice and teaching the newer players and knowing the long term investment is what they pay for. EVE was always the game that you put the time and work into and it paid off in the long run. It was always changing, always new things to learn and learning those things faster then the Veterans was OUR Competitive edge. While I might not have 100-200M SP I also never cried when I came up against a 2003 player. I either booked it depending on what we were both in or I used what I learned over the time i played, or the group I flew with to defeat the veteran. We either got stomped when we first started.. or coms erupted in cheers when we were able to take down that player after a long fight.

In this new setup you take being a Veteran away and tarnish it. It no longers if your a 2003 player, or a 2009 player. You can just Plex/Isk/Aurum your way to the level of characters YEARS ahead. Worse off, players who are already in this game now can do the same also. Now you suddenly have a 2016 player with 80m SP. Sure he could of purchased it off the Bazaar, but that Character has a history to it, that history of it mattered, the name of that pilot carried weight depending on who used to fly it for being the lucky one to own it. You could have a player in the bazaar one day who is into EVE at the start.. purchasing a character in the future could be mittens, or Grath or progod.. one of the known players with a vast history, someone in the corp going "Do you know who you just purchased" the new player going "no" suddenly looking it up and going "HOLY ****" this toon was in some epic **** in his past. With this new system, Veteran is dead. The Long game of eve.. Is Dead. Current or new players can just Buy SP and Buff the living hell out of characters. Making Wrong choices on your character won't matter anymore because you can just hit the market and buy more SP... Take what you didn't mean to train.. and sell it and recoup the loss. What Happened to the risk? Where did our Long term Reward go? This game has always touted a Risk Vs Reward system, it seems every year you remove more of it and the reason a lot of us got involved. No one joins EVE because its Easy, because its Space WOW. They joined it because of the challenge and camaraderie that YOU PROMOTED.

I understand improving the New Player Experience. Making it easier to LEARN the game. I understood the change to wanting smaller fleet battles for less stress on the server, I accepted this. I accepted suddenly having to take hours longer to move across a region on my alt in a rorqual. I tolerated the factor that over the years you made my damn rorqual I was excited to train into... Effing useless except as a high priced - fuel eating Boosting ship. Replaced by a little less Boosts from an orca and a POS that protects everyone and does the same thing the rorq does. But this just removes the Veterancy and the History this game builds every minute its online. You will have no reason to host a New Player Experience when they can just quickly Buff the character to the SP they need upon first entering the game. The day the character was made no longer matters. Why have implants? why bother planning out a Skill queue, I can get all the ships I want ... NOW. The NEW players that actually don't use the Character Bazaar and use EVE-MON, and the mobile apps, make a path of training for what they want to do and play for the long game.. you now effectively say.. Screw you to.

This is not Improving the new player Experience, this is removing the player experience. The players will not have to go thru skilling up and learning how to fly a frigate, finally getting into a destroyer.. then a cruiser.. finally into a battleship, finally getting t2 guns trained, they won't get excited about finishing Jump cal 5 and getting into that carrier.. because they skipped the entire player experience buying a few items off the market. I remember finally getting into a Dominix back in the day... then my CEO putting me into Structure in an Ishkur.. because I never trained armor fully. Now you can just buy an item and click it to V. That pain and groan of how long a skill is and that rush and joy of finally finishing it will be gone for a new player. At this point they will only have Long skills to train and might say screw the game it takes to long to get something trained. You still then lost that player because they got the Instant gratification of skills trained and suddenly hit the wall of a 45 day skill. Then having to train every 45 day sub skill under it for it to work right. Is that the way we want EVE to go?

Last year I had made a post to you guys, and CCP Falcon Responded to it. Explaining how EVE is and how it should be in his opinion.

https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=4972983

But how much of what he said still exists? How much will exist with these changes? Where did that EVE Online go. Where did the EVE Online go that KEPT the player base logging in and subscribing. New player retention is important, I will not argue that, But so is the retention of your established and long term players.You forgot that the rest of your player base exists and just concentrate on changes for the new players. But if you can't keep new players, and you bleed away the old players with changes like these, Who will still log in?

I brought this up in Slack yesterday, and the answer does not seem obvious to me.

How is CCP going to prevent RMT for Skill Points?

An additional consideration maybe.

The skill system as we have it now is artificially convoluted and long ... but for a reason.

In theory it would suffice to let players chose a class they want to play as. Want to be a miner ? Here's your mining barge / dwarf in fantasy MMOs. Want to be a healer ? Here's you logistic ship / wizard in fantasy MMOs.

Instead in EVE, we not only get a mining skill, but it also comes in 5 levels of which level 2-4 are useless to the player. On top of that you have dozens of skills related to mining. People who played EvE for a long time will remember when various advanced skills where added to artificially extend the time it would take to get maxed out in a skillbranch. CCP has also lowered some skill requirements to make some ships easier attainable by new players.

What I'm getting at, is that the skill system has the purpose of allowing the players to select the classes as they gain experience with playing the game and also increasing the number of classes availabale over time. The time it took me to specialize in logistic cruisers is the time that I could not spend in training for a heavy interdictor for example. It's also the time that some other player who invested in skills other than logistics related ones, could not use to compete with me on logistics. I can join in incursions as a logistic pilot because logistic pilots are relatively rare ... if every Jim and Jack could replace me within minutes, I wouldn't be as valuable anymore.

The questions we hve to ask are, what problem are we actually trying to solve and what are the mechanics that we want to maintain ?

I think helping the NPE is important.
Allowing players to make good on training mistakes or even respecs are nice goals, but we should not fall into the trap of thinking that the monthly sub equates to x amount of SP that must be given to players. I don't pay for SP, I pay for the server being run and maintained + support if needed.
Changing the core game is risky business.

Damn, beat me to it.

This change, as you know, doesn't let you back out prerequisites. I'm just pointing out that throwing this in is unnecessary, and doesn't add anything to the argument against this change.




How do the consequences of skill training choices translate into creating interesting gameplay? Why is gameplay better because I picked a bunch of mining skills and instead would like to fly some PVP ships?

I actualy have no problem with the idea of SP being sold on the market. What I don't like is the link to PLEX/AUR and the diminishing returns.

Everything that costs AUR is overpriced and just goes to pushing up the price of ingame PLEX even more.

Reducing the effectiveness for older toons is ridiculous as well, when you're having problems growing and retaining the playerbase adding penalties to the people that are actually sticking around is generaly a bad idea.

Size matters ! Team size matters ... it says so in the dev-blog.

How does your post add to the content ? My post above did ...

The hell, don't you ever touch the skillpoints!!!

Reposting because orig thread got locked and this is the official thread the isd pointed to (there is a little hope left devs are reading this, although I know ccp is going to ignore all of this - as they always do

https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=451034&p=2



NOOOOOOOOO!






Also this could have a terrible impact to new players.

Players that are attracted by this and used to throw money at games and be instantly rewarded may experience death shortly after undocking... again and again ...
Would the welcomed new community of rich "not-so-clevers" stay when they can´t get their paygasm? Think about this please.

Also it is more likely this would not affect new players as expected.
If one could buy SP for ISK ingame I rather think of super rich player / alliances buying every SP they could get their hands on.
Bye, bye affdordable SP package for new players with several bought plexes from ccp.
Domination with assets, isk and alts gets extendet with domination via SPs.





bye eve o/

Well, one step forward to " Eve is dying.."