Player Features and Ideas Discussion

CCP recently changed clone to allow the new players to play at low levels for free, so that hopefully they can get to like Eve.

Similar to this, I think that it would be a great idea to reduce the dependency on level 5 skills. Eve should let all players be able to fly all ships without waiting for years of skills to accumulate. For instance, I have been playing for a year now, and still can't fly more one quarter of the types of ship, nevermind all the variations of those types. That is because players have to get to level 5 of one skill before you are allowed to even get to level 1 of the next skill. This should be reduced to level3, or at the most to level 4, of the previous skill before you are allowed to begin getting the next skill. This will enable people to experience much of Eve at a much earlier time.

Obviously if they fly an advanced ship, that costs over a billion isk, and they don't have much for skills, then they will probably lose that ship fairly soon. But that should be their choice. And if they lose a billion isk worth of ship, then they gain by having been able to fly it, CCP gains by getting the money from that ISK, and old-time veterans gain by getting more high value ships to attack. So it is a win-win proposition. Everyone benefits.

So to recap, I am not asking that any abilities of the skills be reduced, only that there be no dependency or requirement that anyone have any skill higher than a level 3, or at the most a level 4, in order to do something; such that they will be able to do stuff without waiting for years of skills to accumulate, how be it at the appropriately reduced ability levels.

Point already mentioned. Deleted for redundancy.

Scipio Artelius, thank you for your reply. Although I do think that vets need a sense of accomplishment, that sense of accomplishment needs to be balanced with being able to keep new players interested in the game. My idea doesn't remove the accomplishment of the vets. They will still have better skills while flying those ships than new players. But a lot of players won't want to wait years before being able to fully play the game. This change would just allow the new players to fully play the game with less of a wait. Think of it this way, what good are all of CCP's great changes going to do if the new players can't play them?

The old players were playing with equal abilities of everyone else while growing in skills. The current new players are very mismatched to the old veterans. And yes, if someone wants to pay a huge amount of money to "buy" their abilities, then they can become equal. In the game industry, this is known as "pay to win" and once a game gets a reputation for that, they will find a hard time getting new players to even give them a try. Very few people will want to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars just to become equal to start playing any game, no matter how good it is.

This game already has the total number of players dropping. That indicates that there are more older players stopping playing the game, than there are new players starting. That trend needs to be changed or else the older players will find themselves without a game to play. That is just common business sense, and something that I have already seen with games that I played before, that don't exist anymore. Some games achieve this by giving everyone the same abilities and having goals for them to accomplish. Some achieve this by starting new worlds every so often where everyone can play the old world with different abilities, and/or start over in the new world with more equal abilities. My idea is simply trying to accomplish this to some extent. within the framework of the current Eve architecture. If you don't like my idea, perhaps you can suggest a different idea that will help solve this problem. But quite frankly, for any idea to solve this problem, it will by necessity result in the vets losing some of their huge advantage over all new players. And until the number of players starts climbing continuously (surges with new releases don't count since they are only temporary), the problem is not yet solved, and thus the game is not yet properly balanced between older vets and new players.

Remember when you had to have battleship 5 to fly a carrier? Pepperidge farms remembers.



Some of it, we all agree, was silly and much of that has been removed. But not all of it should be. As already stated, some things DO need to take time.

IIRC the time didn't vanish, it was shifted to a jump skill needing to be 5'd that didn't need to before. the time sink shifted. May be wrong, someone please correct if so.

that and this really only hooked up cap alts. Mains were assumed 4 or 5 anyway. For the BS op time in their life. Or to tweak a rat smashing PVE BS to make isk faster.

So what exactly are these "previous" and "next" skills?

To move from frigate --> destroyer --> cruiser --> battlecruiser --> battleship --> capital you only need level 3 of the previous skill. That's the clear progression and it already exists.

To move from a frigate to a specialized frigate, for instance, requires level 5 for a few skills (not the frigate skill itself). I wouldn't want to change that. The dependencies make sense, and just throwing open all the advanced classes at once is silly. They all do very different (and sometimes very narrow) things. They represent a choice to specialize and I really don't mind requiring a commitment in the form of SP along with that choice.

This is my main. She's a 2009 character with 130+ million skillpoints.

I cannot fly every ship. I cannot even fly every subcap. hell, I only trained my last frigate V a few months ago.

I do not think this is a bad thing. Can you explain to me why it is?

Now training Advanced Spaceship Command to V to use ANY cap or freighter... this is an enforced time-sink that doesn't need to be. Honestly, this skill needs to be reset to allow different levels to "unlock" different classes of cap. Adv. Spacom. 1 for freighters, 2 for dreads/ carriers/FAXes, 3 for jump freighters and Industrial caps, 4 for super carriers (and whatever the super dread that they were talking of introducing) and 5 for titans.

Or something like that...

If a pilot wanted the full agility bonus on her freighter she could train it to max if she chose.

There's no choice about this skill as it is now other than Do You Have This At Five (YES/NO).

No other skill works like this in EvE.

--Gadget

Thing is there has always been the navy/pirate option here. Some navies imo are a fair mock up of their closest t2 relative. Long ago when lower sp I had the combat char in navy caracals . At the time a decent representation of what cerb would be. And something better than a (then) lacklustre vanilla caracal.

Combat shooty ships this works for anyway. Specialized support not an option here but my take on support is you want that pilot with some seasoning in them anyway. Would also make the case with the force multipliers some support can be...its best their numbers limited by train. Shake and bake logi spam...would not help the back and forth we have on logi arguments safe to say as an example.

There is no need to do that.

CCP already made it easier to fly certain ships or use certain fits and with skill injectors there is absolutely no need to continue making things easier for low SP players. This would also make alts way too powerful and useful without actually putting any time/isk into growing them.