Skill Discussions

I have yet to find anything really broken about the skill training, but i would really like to hear your side of the story. If there are any truly broken aspects of training i would like to hear it.

-Interested Gamer, Dan Adoudel

I have 3 skills that have always kinda bugged me.

Starbase Defense Management is in the Corp Management skill group. (seems more like a weapon skill imo)

Jump Portal Generation: Just feels like it should be cyno related (electronics) or Navigation related. Astrometrics V is a prereq...but astrometrics skills are generally about probing...

Covert Haulers require Industry V. But if you read the skill description, it states: "Allows basic operation of factories.4% reduction of manufacturiing time per level." It's not like a hauler is a mobil factory. Just seems out of place.

Not that these are broken. Misplaced is more the feeling.

Longer duration means less cap use over time. I have at least one fit on one alt where Afterburner V makes all the difference in the world.

What fit would that be? Just asking out of curiosity because I can't think of any fit that would need it unless you're going for cap-stability but then, I never needed a capstable ship.

Anyway - I know what the skill does, but especially when using dualprop, having it at IV allows for more flexible switching between propmods, which imho is more desirable than the decrease in cap use for a mod that hardly uses a significant amount of cap anyway.

I have yet to discover any application for Visibility V.

Agreed. 15 second afterburner cycle is a dreadfully long time in pvp, especially frigate pvp, where the difference between getting the f out and getting popped can be paper thin.

I couldn't disagree more.

I disagree that a tiny, albeit growing minority of players having a lot of maxed out skills is indicative of a problem. Alt proliferation has abnegated specialization completely. Generating content via hefty skillpoint sinks could be great, but suggesting it from the standpoint of "well, I just don't care what I train anymore," smacks of looking for problems rather than solving the ones made clear and present such as "I'm bored with eve, what do I do now."

I have close to 100mil sp on this alt alone, granted that's a smallish number compared to your own sp, but relative to the EVE population as a whole it's well above the average and neither of us is within ear-shot of being literally skill-capped. I would argue there is more than enough to specialize in without feeling limited by capped skills; of course, that requires getting into every little niche there is with just one character, which is not so practical (a problem that might be worth addressing).

My apologies if I have misunderstood your argument, but I have read a similar line of reasoning from digitalwanderer and other resident sp-enthusiasts in the past. I am in full support of EVE's skill system, but I won't hear of the plight of skill-ceiling myth. There are plenty of things to train for, it's just that some of them are no fun and we don't want to train for them or they overlap poorly with other skills (supercap training being the pinnacle of this). I think those issues of gameplay are the problem at hand, not that we lack additional skills or levels of existing skills.

Here's hoping for more iteration in 2012.

Hello Dr

I like your idea, I personally am highly specilized, only playing amarr ships but I can fly all sub caps with 99% of the required skills at 5, I fly the RECON, HAC,BS,T3,Logi all with maxed skills. I personally have always wanted to push these skills higher as i am now just cross training for ships I will never really fly.

However for the new players entering the game it is generally overwheleming already and the skill system in eve is a daughting task when starting with 1 million points. In most places they are told to specilize in a choosen feilds so that one day he can be on the same playing feild as everyone else. By removing this skill wall, new players will say "they simply will never catch up" and they never will.

Also there is the fact that some skills would become overpowered a simple example is the minings skills. it would upset the market the only characters to make use of training these skills would be the auto bots. Invention skills improvements i could agree with maybe untill everyone must have 6-8 to even be competive.

I see your point in relation to combat skills, however for the industry side of eve this would create an unblance.

iISnoTanAlTlies

You make a number of good points.

Adding an extra level or two to the skill system would require remapping the benefits for many if not most skills, and reevaluating appropriate prerequisites to qualify for higher level skills. Essentially a complete overhaul of the skill system. If, for example, it was felt that mining yields would become too great given an additional 5% or 10% bump by training the mining skill to level 6 or level 7, then the incremental yield per level might be reset to 3% or 4% and/or the the base deficiency at level 0 could be set at a lower level.

Or, to largely defuse the "I'll never catch up" argument of the newer player, maybe benefits should accrue on a nonlinear progression, where each successive level provides a diminishing gain as well as requires an increased amount of time to train. This could be structured such that 80 - 85% of the total benefit available is gained by level 4, even if given a 7-level scale. Module stacking penalties and the net cumulative effect of skills and modules on shield or armor resistances are current examples of this diminishing marginal gain concept.

Skill prerequisites could be maintained at current levels. It probably wouldn't make sense to have to train a skill to level 6 or level 7 as a prerequisite to another skill. If anything, prerequisites could be revisited for possible reduction in able to qualify newer players more quickly.

Properly implemented, an overhaul of this nature to the skill system could actually make it easier (faster) for new players to reach competitive levels (80-85% of full potential) and extremely time consuming to reach 100%, with minimal impact on game balance.