EVE New Citizens Q&A

1: Complex game = lots of options.
2: Well the null beats need something to train while they're blasting roids :p

I read somewhere that level 4 is 20% SP to get 80% advantage.

That last bit of gain is so ridiculous its not even worth getting
as many are saying. Cloaking as an example.

1. You're asking questions that only the developers know the answer to. Why so many skills? I don't know, that's how they envisioned the game. Ships provide a shell, modules you have on your ship give you the abilities (not the skills themselves), and the skills give bonuses / unlock things. It's a system.

2. The leap is the same between all levels (next level is 5x the previous level):

Level 1: requires 250 points
Level 2: 1414
Level 3: 8000
Level 4: 45255
Level 5: 256000

x the rank of the skill.

It's a geometric progression. You're supposed stop yourself at "good enough". Training "everything to 5" takes 34 years, so you better stop yourself. You get your primary attribute + 1/2 your secondary attribute in points per minute, good luck.

It's designed that way so you can prioritize, like everyone else. Do you want to get another point in your ship, or in the armor skill, or in the speed skill, or what? As opposed to the other guy. What do you want to do first?

Again, there are no race or class limits that block you from training whatever you want. In other games, warriors can't heal, wizards can't tank. Here, feel free to do everything, just take 10 years to get there. Freedom. Up to you.

From that point of view, it's a pretty good system.

EDIT:

Right now it seems stupid to train a skill to 5, not worth the time. In a couple years, you're possibly flying a carrier, that costs 2-5 BILLION ISK (2-5 PLEXes, $40 - $100). At that point in time, it'll probably seem stupid to lose the ship because you didn't train that last 5% bonus to shields and armor, so they killed you.

So, the option is there. They stop at 5 to let newbies catch up to veterans.

@Lena Crews
@Memphis Baas

Yes, drones are almost mandatory to have at level 5.

As you say, Its impossible to get all skills to level 5.
(Unless you pay 28000$)

That makes so many skills and especially levels that
are "useless" and / or unnecessary, seems like a waste
just to confuse players.

Do note that most bonuses that you get from skills are 2-5% per skill level. It's not THAT huge difference between lvl 4 and lvl 5. There are some exceptions of course, the drones- skill for example. The idea is that you can relatively quickly train a bunch of skills to lvl 4 and be 80% as effective as someone who had those skills at 5, which would have taken then considerably longer to do.

why so many skills? It gives you a choice to train narrow and specific or wide and broad. I can justify the case for either, there are benefits for generalization and specialization, however the benefits come with trade offs.

As a new player you can cover a lot of ground training many skills to level 2 or 3 while learning the basics, making some income, and finding out what you like. From there you can pick a few important skills and push those to 4. Some of those skills will be very important and you will want to take them to 5, others can wait while you train more general skills to 4. Some skills you will train because you want the bonus, others because they are a prereq for a new ship, skill, or module. I consider weapon upgrades 4 to be a super important skill as access to tech 2 damage mods is a huge boost.

I'm looking at the mastery tab of a ship I like on one of my alts. He currently has level IV mastery, to get to level V mastery would take 211 days, I have no plans to train almost all of those skills on that character. I did train those skills on Plankton as I said it was a ship I like. However that character can use command bursts, which is an area I have barely touched on Plankton.

Many of those skills apply to many ships like the racial drone spec to 5 for an extra 2% damage on racial drones, which is really insignificant on most ships and not worth the 20 days x 4 skills for most people. In combat it isn't a very significant bonus however it helps get me closer to lv5 mastery on many ships. My goal is to have lv5 mastery on all subcaps and lets just say that is a long long goal.

You're not supposed to get everything to 5.

You're supposed to specialize.

luckily most of the skills are irrelevant and are safely ignored, like science, industry, production, resource harvesting, structure things.

only need gun and spaceship skills! Some drones and fitting help.

You can use aurum or isk to buy skill extractors that do just this. Extract some skills you don't need any more and then use the resulting skill injector to gain the skill points back so you can distribute them where you now need them. There is a degree of loss each time, but it's possible to change careers like this.

There is no level cap in this game. There is no end-game content that you need to get to level cap to participate in. 6 months into this game you can be very well skilled for small ships ( frigs and dessies ) and a year into this game you can be very close to "all level 5" for frigs and dessies.

There is no reason why you need to train all of your skills to level 5 nor should you even be thinking about that. I think you just need to let go of a level cap concept that you have likely been programmed into from most other MMOs. Eve is not like those other MMOs.

I personally like the system very much. Coming up in this game I always had the skills to do what I needed to do and new skills came at a pretty decent rate. 2 years into the game you still get to unlock some cool stuff and be excited about getting access to it while still not being held back for not being "level capped".

I am at a point now where I train skills just to train them. I am nowhere near all level 5 but I have not trained a skill that has made a noticeable difference in a long time.

I think if you give the game a chance you will see that it is a pretty good system as compared to other games.