EVE General Discussion

The main reason these SP dailies shouldn't be in the game is that TRAINING should be the only wait to gain SP, skill trading also should not exist, and just because it does isn't justification for this abysmally bad dailies system. It's a bad game mechanic.

You said it yourself, 20% more sp, how is that *not* major. That is a very significant boost. If CCP wanted to increase SP generation then they should've just increased the training speed overall, but that wasn't their goal, their goal was increased logins by exploiting people's fear of missing out, simple as that.

If you truly think this isn't a major reward then you and I have very different ideas of the concept of major in this context. It's not the isk value, its the amount of training time it amounts to. If the daily reward was just an isk bonus, there would probably be a lot less complaining, except that to make it have the same effect on players it would have to be a *lot* of isk.

One suggestion that had been made, that CCP completely ignored, was make a new type of LP, similar to the Analysis Kredits for doing Project Discovery, that could be used to acquire SKINs or avatar accessories, possibly ones that were unique to that point set, it could conceivably have the same effect on logins without further breaking and devaluing the training system.

I'll say again, the only way any pilot should be able to gain SP is through the passive training. Not from dailies, and not buying them. That is *my* main complaint about this system, CCP's exploitation of people's fear of missing out is a side complaint to that.

If that's what this feature was supposed to be about, they would have just given everyone +5 to base attributes and called it a day.

That's not what they did.

...wtf, CCP?

If someone feel that 20% extra SP is worth his enjoyment of the game, I suppose that, for the same reason, he always use +5 implants to speed up training. the effect is roughly the same. And naturally would avoid any PvP where he would risk his pod, as he would lose training time.

If he instead realize that training speed isn't everything he would enjoy the game way more.

This is what the PVE'ers have been asking for, for years........... new ways to PVE, and CCP has apparently listened, which is good. It will be voluntarily and not include SPs, so what is your point with posting this here? And to your last point, PVE has always been a themepark-type mechanic, and has been always present in EVE.

dailies report success i would think

Well the being in your face part they explain is due to that people have complained that the events were not visible enough before, so it is a player request. I am not easily distracted with stuff like the new "your face" framework, so I don't mind that.

I think the most important thing about the new events is that it now makes sense to run the missions/whatever it is together with other players (see the CCP reply in the comments section of that blog), as all get the reward. This is a great step for the game, the less solo grind and more teamwork/ socializing/ player interaction the better IMO.

Eventhough this is an interesting discussion, I still don't get what this has to do with the daily opportunities discussion?

There is a cutoff point. It's diminishing returns. 10,000 SP to a 1.5 Million SP toon is a higher percentage gain in SP total than the same amount to a 50 Million SP toon.

You'll still PLEX that alt if you want it advanced faster so you can put an injector on it. If it's a training ALT, it helps make more ISK faster. The issue is that you now have options because it matters which of your 3 toons on a given account you complete the task with. So you have greater flexibility in training.

One of the primary complaints about the Skill Extractor/Injector inclusion issue was that people without money had no way to advance their characters like you could with the Injectors. Well, now even if you're dirt poor but can make your EVE account payments, you have a way to accelerate training. ... and no, I don't think that's a happy coincidence. I think it was very intentional to address that complaint, one of many problems that the dailies idea solved.

Yes, the vets again had their past hours of grinding SP over months and years value reduced. I don't begrudge the feeling that might exist there, but, all things change. The game has to try new things and adapt or it won't have the relevance it needs to. A change might make us feel like what were we doing all that time in the past but the real questions are...

Did you have fun? Were you Challenged?

It's not diminishing returns, 10k SP is 10k SP; diminishing returns would be like the injectors, where you actually get less SP rewarded when you have a higher starting SP.

Hello,

I would like to express why my personal impression of the daily opportunities isn't a completely positive one.


To do so I will first have to explain why the skill queue as a video game progression system (vgps) actually has its benefits. I will not dive into the discussion on whether or not games should have progression systems at all and how impactful those should be, although a look at game development in recent years will show that they were bolted on to anything with a heartbeat and everything else was reanimated and then a progression system was bolted on to it. So vgps' might offer some benefits.

To classify the skill queue(a), I will compare it to two other vgps' I know: experience points and levels(b), learning by doing (c) and ingame money(d). (b) does have a certain drawback. As a Bethesda developer once put it "For some reason you become better at lockpicking by slaying an ogre. And even if you pick a thousand locks you won't get better at lockpicking if you don't slay that ogre."
(c) adressed this issue by implementing progression mechanics for various skills. This lead to some odd player behavior though, e.g. bricking the sneak-key over night or letting rats bite your character for some time to level your defense. Also for some skills, especially in the social and trading department, it's very difficult to invent progression mechanics that don't cry for exploitation. But that's not the point.

The point is that we are looking for a suitable progression system for a multiplayer sandbox video game here. So a game where you want your players to pursue a multitude of activities, most of which you didn't think up yourself and indeed won't know players would want to do until they do them. So in the first approximation we are looking at an infinite amount of activities here. Therefore if you don't want to exclude anyone from your progression system (and you do not want that), (b) and (c) don't qualify. For (b) this should be obvious, for (c) this becomes true if your development company only has access to a finite amount of programmers (and most of them probably do).

So with (b) and (c) disqualified this leaves us with (a) and (d). (a) was obviously chosen for Eve, but also has a specific disadvantage. Players often want to progress faster by playing "better" than other players. With (a) in its pure form this is barely possible (remaps, training skills).
Enter (d). (d) is quantifiable and can therefore be used as a measurement for success. It is possible to say that player A played better than player B because he generated more money during the same period. You will find no shortage of examples of this metric being used just by looking around in these forums. And with training implants, the character bazaar and skill injectors (d) has expanded its influence to also affect (a) (and with skill injectors also vice versa).
But why is (d) even suitable for a sandbox game when the activities that earn money are clearly only a subset of all activities? Well, the keyword here is multiplayer sandbox, so it is still an infinite subset. I am thoroughly positive that stuff like gambling websites, singing ransoms, third party escrow services, virtual prostitution, video streaming or alliance propaganda were not thought of by CCP when they built the first release version, yet all of these activities have the potential to generate ingame money.
The disadvantage is of course that, since you can exchange progress between (a) and (d), they can no longer be seen as two separate progression systems, but a single combined one. This is again quantifiable, so you could say that two features are better than one.

Back to the daily opportunities. In their current state they are a system of type (b) and have the potential to turn into (c), but that's the end of the line. They will always be only applicable to a finite set of activities and the more creative stuff, e.g. "scam one person in Jita local", will be really hard to implement. They merely merge into the current progression system, they do however shift the progression from player-created activities to developer-created activities. This is what I think negatively of. The margin by which they do that is of course up for debate.

Thank you for climbing,

Violet Hurst.





PS:

Would you like to share what you consider the optimum model? No strings attached, just asking.