EVE Information Portal

Skipped over the last few pages as it just seemed to be people raging about having to spend the next 4 months retraining things having not read the devblog properly!

It will be interesting to see how it plays out. As it stands I've got Cruiser5 in all but caldari (which is at 4) - so I can currently fly all battlecruisers. I can fly all field command ships except for the Nighthawk.
Currently if I want the Nighthawk I'd just need to train cruiser 5.
Providing after the changes, once again the only thing I need is Caldari Cruiser 5 I'm happy. I don't care what the skills are called providing I can fly everything I can now at the same level - judging from the blog this is what will happen - so I'm happy.

Good job CCP, the change to make things like BC required for BS and so on is a good one. Will stop people jumping up into bigger ships so quick on the whole - although I can't decide whether that's a good or bad thing for Capitals.

Regarding removing tiers to make certain ships more useful - awesome!


Edit:

Please for the love of god make it so we don't have to re-buy ANY skill books for this. That'll really mess up those in wormholes.

HOLY *censored* BATMAN! Quick, to the Wall of Text response mobile

Skill progression changes
I think there are two mayor sides to this
- For those new to the game / training new characters: excellent news! I think this makes a lot more sense
- For those who have many characters / very deeply trained characters: oh noes, this is going to be FUBAR

Since the majority of the current customers are veterans, it's good to take their worries seriously. For example, I just finished training basically all (combat) subcaps on my main to V, and just respecced Int / Mem to finish training those skills to V. The prospect of possibly having to go back to training Perc / Will skills and figuring out how to best use refunded skill points to get back most of my skills in one go makes my head hurt a bit. Without specifics, it is hard to tell how bad the head ache will be though

That being said, I think in general, the reason for change is clear and good, so as long as player concerns for these changes are addressed, I'm quite happy with them

Ship lines
This idea is really exciting. I'd consider renaming some of your choices though, because the meaning of the names is not very self-evident, at least not to me. As an idea, consider to the following
Combat
- Brawler: close range combat, good DPS + tank, low agility / rang
- Skirmisher: mobility based combat, good DPS + agility, medium range / tan
- Sniper: long range combat, good DPS + range, low agility / tan
- (idea) Tank: Ship class with a local repair specialization, medium DPS and range, low agility. great self repair. These would be the race ship for solo PVE or PVP
Support (I would split these up from the start, because you probably want to have attribute range control a bit better per ship type then just as a group, and also because the group lends itself to extension for new classes
- EWAR: EWAR bonus, low DPS, medium range / tank / agilit
- Logistics: Logistics bonus, low DPS, medium range / tank / agilit
- (idea) Exploration ship class: I would love to see exploration become a lot more prevalent, and adding specific exploration ships would be awesome.

You can flesh out the specifics a bit more by also setting targets for attributes such as lock speed, ECM strength, etc. On top of that, you can make the races a bit more defined by setting different targets for these attributes per race. I can totally see this giving new ways to specialize, new strategies, etc. I'm bubbling with ideas.

The thing where it gets tricky is when you talk about specific skills to specialize. I would really like to see some examples of what you are thinking about. how does that relate for example to current support skills, such as the existing ewar / gunnery / missile / shield tank / armor tank skills? Also, how powerful will they be? If they become a "must have" for some ship classes, you really will have to address that as part of the skill progression changes as well, since it means it might be much better to have less races but more specialization skills instead of cross training. Also, this could easily become either very overpowered or useless

A second major concern is how this relates to T2, and the T1 vs T2 balance. Currently, T2 usually means more specialization then T1. However, if T1 ships get more specialized, they risk making T2 ships almost redundant. That is already the case with some T2 ships, most specifically the HACs and Field Command Ships. T1 DPS ships, especially battlecruisers, already do the job so well and are so much less expensive that the T2 version is a lot less useful to most. This is much more the case when it comes to larger fleet fights, which unfortunately dominate a lot of the PVP. So I would like to see more specific ideas on that as well

A third concern will be the way you implement these changes. I personally think you should start with all frigates and work youe way up size wise from there, instead of doing it by race or as a big bang. I think knowing the capabilities of the smallest entity will help scale the next level properly, and the next level from there on. Personally I'd love to see the gap in tracking / sig / speed to become a bit larger to make classes more distinct and have one class need other classes or the proper support at all times.

Also when you make these changes, initial imbalance will be unavoidable. Because of that, I would suggest setting a lot of time apart in next releases for rebalancing, and also some possibilities for players to get skill points refunded in case changes are radical. Building trust with the community that this isn't a one time deal and their concerns will be taken into account will be very important when making such sweeping changes across something that players have invested years of skill points into

Anyway, those are my thoughts for the moment. All in all, it looks promising but quite tricky to get it right as well, especialy in one go, and therefor slightly panic inducing as well. I hope you pull it off and it becomes a major success.

Reiteration of the popular opinion here.

Don't make us train stuff after the patch for stuff we could fly before the patch.

That being said, it's ideal not to reimburse SP, but give players actual skills with equivalent level.

Some other ideas with the float chart:

• Ceptor -> Dictor -> HIC line should retain. Since training for T2 ship skills no longer have the racial T1 ship skills to V, I'd say the requirement to fly a HIC should include Interdictor IV, which has prereq of Interceptor IV. Please get rid of Graviton Physics IV requirement for HIC bubble.
• Buff Black Ops (for example, ability to warp cloaked) and link it to Covert Ops -> Recon line.
• Combat Recons should be split from Force Recon since they don't cloak. A suitable line would be Electronic Attack Ship -> Combat Recon, while Covert Ops -> Force Recon

oh.. and i just wanted to propose complete remove racial specific ships skills..
just frigate, destroyer, cruiser etc skills + one < racial > starship command skill (with 16x traning time) which replace "spaceship command" and "advanced spaceship command".
so to fly condor: you need "frigate level 2" and "caldari spaceship command level 1"
abaddon: "battleship level 3" and "amarr spaceship command level 3"
ragnarok: "titan level 1" and "minmatar spaceship command level 5"
something like that..

Too long have our headlights languished un-loved; enquiring minds must know!!

The BS V bonuses to t1 BS's make some entire fits possible. and give a hefty boost to the amount of dps/rep in some cases... BUT!

Keep BS V requirement for all capitals

The idea is fundamentally great, but like many people have pointed out, all of us who have made sure we are crosstrained extensively are going to be mighty pissed...

So, basically what would happen is overnight I would lose the ability to fly 3/4 of the BC and destroyers entirely and have to retrain, which lets face it is complete crap. Being able to jump literally into any T1 or t2 subcap is something I made sure I am capable of.

As far as retraining gripes: deal with it. If thats what needs to be done to implement a vastly cleaner system, then it should be done. Crap happens, and the trouble is more than worth it in the long run.

I'm glad CCP finally realized that there's a lot of hulls that are currently next to useless. I like the idea of giving each ship a place, rather than:
"Do you want more attack or defense? Attack? Cool. Pick that one."
"But what about these other two ships?"
"Oh, those? Nobody uses those. They suck."
"okay.jpg"

It'd also be nice to see mobility play an actual role. As it stands, it's mostly a matter of using modules to enhance mobility. The base ship stats don't make much of a difference. I think increasing the differences in mobility between ships would help (Instead of a 15 m/s increase of one ship over another, make it something like 50 m/s so it's actually a worthwhile consideration when choosing your ship.)
Unfortunately when it comes to fleets that you can just warp anywhere, it's less of an issue. So I kind of doubt this whole 'make mobility more viable' thing is really practicable... I mean, we are flying large warships here; not cockpit fighters. It's just something to think about. When it comes to real life war fleets, for example, essentially every ship is there to support the carrier and protect it from outside threats, so most of the time they're trawling along at the speed of their slowest ship.

After getting hope after last patch in the new born "old" CCP it seems that they lost either the key to the meds they took the last month or just thinking "f... that BS community shizzle" we now back to our WoW in space plans were everyone should be lvl 80 space paladin in 50 days.

Shame on you CCP

Jump Freighters

Just to clarify - are we talking about requiring racial freighter to V for jump freighters, or racial industrial to IV for regular freighters and racial industrial to V for jump freighters (in addition to the regular jumpy nav skills)? With racial freighter skills at 10x training time (compared to the 8x for racial battleship) it would make for one very long train to get into JFs.