EVE Information Portal

Getting rid of tier system - YES

Ship Lines - SO CONFUSED. This sounds like this will be a formalized thing in game. Will there be skills specific to lines (piloting or in industry). Will T1 ships be getting Line-specific bonuses like role bonuses? Will ship's current role/line be changed to provide a battleship sized extension to that line in any race (turn the geddon into a giant arbitrator?) I concede that the ships in eve already fit into a classification system like this. I understand that with only ship bonuses to go on, understanding a ship's role can be difficult for people that don't spend all day on ships & modules. However, I'm even more concerned that by rebalancing ships along these lines, the versatility of the fitting and slot system will be curtailed, transforming the current state from "only half the ships are worth flying" to "half the ships have only one use, and only one good fit for doing it." How will the formalized ship line concept interact with certificates? How about CCP overhaul ship descriptions for the first time in years, you know, make them informative and useful for someone who doesn't know everything already? Make them more than just flavor text.

Skills revamp - oh god why. Huge pain in the ass. You WILL **** people off. Using day-one, fresh out of character creation, training time to sit in the ship IS AN ABSOLUTELY TERRIBLE METRIC, despite being a completely easy one to figure out. How about instead you consider the training time for each t1 ship class to lvl 4, then map the additional time to get into the t2 versions. I dunno, maybe something like THIS http://content.eveonline.com/www/newssystem/media/8742/1/Shiptech_1920.jpg
Also, what's wrong with the current organization of t2 skills? covops - > recons, assault ships -> heavy assault ships-> field command ships seems perfectly reasonable. Yes, electronic attack SHIPS (not frigs as in picture), logistics, and marauders don't really fit in some kind of t2 skill tree, however they could easily be made to do so, considering the oh-so-onerous secondary skill requirements are shared by other t2 skills and are generally recognized as important skills to train for any combat pilot.



Yet somehow I'm quite sure we won't find our battlecruiser 5 skills replaced with a set of lvl 5 racial battlecruiser skills. Everyone knows there's a canyon between sitting in the ship and being well skilled for it. This is particularly true for resistance bonuses (drake), ROF bonuses (hurricane), and cap use bonuses (logi), where the getting level 5 provides the marginally greatest benefit as opposed to the smallest. For most people, being rewarded w/ level 4 in the racials is the same as having to retrain at least 2 of them to lvl 5. [Edit: Apparently we will get all racials at 5. Great. Rest of my post still stands however.]

People have complained about the tier system. they have NOT complained about the skill tree. The fact that you need lvl 1 for a ferox and lvl 2 for a drake is NOT a compelling reason for eliminating the tier system to necessitate overhauling the skill tree. Also, we LIKE that the destroyer and battlecruiser skills as well as the t2 ship skills are not race specific. Really, we do.

Please don't mess with the skill system, CCP. If you're worried that new players will click on a SIN and see they're 4 months from sitting in one, I've got bad news: messing with the skill system won't change this. Can you please focus your dev-power on things everyone (you and us) agrees has been broken for years? Fix damps, rework ECM, eliminate the tier system, rework the wardec system, iterate faction war, rebalance pos defenses (ANCHOR LIMIT IN HIGHSEC GOOD GOD), keep balancing ships, nerf/buff drone poo, spool-time for capital jump drives, make nullsec isk and sov mechanics player based and not moon based, repeat your promise to fix industry next year, and balance incursions.

"capitals will no longer require BS 5" epic troll

Most people here seem to be focusing on what skill reimbursement strategy CCP will be taking in response to this change. I'm not too concerned about that. I see no reason to believe that we will not be well compensated for our existing skill investment.

There is a much bigger problem with this change: the amount of training required to fly each race's T1 ship line dramatically increases.

Currently, the total amount of training required to get each race's T1 ship skills to V is 17x.

2x (faction frigate) + 0.5x (destroyers / 4 factions) + 5x (faction cruiser) + 1.5x (battlecruisers / 4 factions) + 8x (faction battleship)

Under the new proposal, training for that same ship line jumps to 23x.

2x (faction frigate) + 2x (faction destroyer) + 5x (faction cruiser) + 6x (faction battlecruiser) + 8x (faction battleship)

(More accurately, training a single faction takes the same time for each, but training each additional race adds the equivalent of rank 8 skill to the requirement.)

As a result, the amount of training required to fly all races' T1 ships has increased by the equivalent of 4 Battlecruiser skills! That's unacceptable. Making players grind much more time to fly T1 ships is a bad thing for the game. It punishes both newer players and players who want to cross-train into a new race. I understand why you are making the changes and I support streamlining and simplifying the skill requirements, but you have to consider the rather massive amount of additional SP required by the players to fly the most basic ships under the new proposal.

There's a simple solution to the problem: reduce the training time for each T1 ship skill.

Faction Frigate (1x)
Faction Destroyer (2x)
Faction Cruiser (4x)
Faction Battlecruiser (5x)
Faction Battleship (7x)

That's a total of 19x, only a rank 2 skill's worth of additional SP required per faction as the result of a few minor skill adjustments.

Benefits:

1. Only a very minor increase in T1 ship skill requirements per faction
2. Actually reduces skill requirements for Frigate -> Cruiser over the current skill tree, which empowers new players.
3. Minimizes frustration for older players.
4. Minimizes skill reimbursement amounts. Even the most generous reimbursement under this plan would require only one 4x skill's worth of SP.

Edit: I'm terrible at basic math. I originally said that my new proposed skill requirements were a total of 18 ranks rather than 19.

Once again, No space likes... Mad as hell

Also, not sure if someone's mentioned this earlier- but I'm assuming that you're going to start the re-balancing with the Amarr due to them being flown the least? As per

If that's the case, make sure that us skilling into Amarr and the changes (more powerful hulls) don't make them WINAMMAR for the time while the rest of the races get iterated or you modify your strategies.

Another side issue that I can foresee is that without weapon and ECM re-balancing happening alongside these changes there will still be a a significant amount of 'throw-away' ships instead of more variety for us sub-cap fighters!

Thanks for the lulz and the tears again!
Hru

Goon Pet detected. Sorry, couldn't resist.

But seriously, I doubt CCP Soundwave has any hidden agenda to help Goons.
Please take off your tinfoil hats.

But this just means that the alt is, what, 30 days quicker? I mean what's that in a carrier skillplan which (if done right) takes a hell of a long time and the racial BS skill is one of the smallest parts?

Surely all this will do is get more newbies into carriers, and that's good for people who want to gank them? For anyone else (for example, goonswarm as you've mentioned), this turns a year skillplan into a 330 day skillplan. That doesn't seem to be terrible.

Rationally, I'm ok with it. But something in the back of my mind does say that BS IV isn't right, but I can't rationalise it so it's probably not sensible.

Bummed that I would need to retrain battle cruiser to 5 on 2 other races..
But thats the way it should be. Currently I fing rock in a myrmidon despite only having the cruiser skill to 3.

I'm okay with this long term.

Well I admit that having capital ships being accessible after Battleship IV is the most controversial change of them all, since you normally wouldn't get into one after 2-3 years of playing, but training Amarr Battleship to V will still come handy for those extra 5% resists on that nice ship called Abaddon (fot those people who fly Abaddons of course), and Amarr caps are quite good too, so I would probably train for them if I was flying Amarr ships otherwise...and 30 days spent to train BS to V doesn't seem like too much of a big deal compared to the rest of the time it takes to train to fly a capship effectively.

But I like Destroyers and Battlecruisers being incorportated in the ship progress chain. Of course you might say that capships aren't part of that chain, they are separate game and noobs shouldn't fly them so I maybe it's for best to leave their requirements unchanged. Maybe change the skill training multipliers of subcaps to speed things up a bit (like x1 for frigs, x3 or x4 for cruisers and x4 or x5 for BCs), but I suppose everyone could have a different opinion on that.

Also, giving all racial BC skills to V to people who trained their BC skill to V is generally a good idea, but then they will have around 3-4million skill points given to them out of thin air. So those skill points should be assigned to the rest of us as well. Maybe it would be best if, instead of that, everyone should be given as many skillpoints as it is needed to train both Destroyers and Battlecruisers to V, and some extra ones to distribute as they like. But that's yet my another opinion and I know many people won't agree with it.

But then, nothing is final yet. I expect CCP will still be making some changes, and hopefully for the better, despite being impossible to get an unanimous decision on what "better" is.

This is interesting. It makes frigate V for newbs easy (too easy?) but is an interesting idea.

I hate to turn this thread towards more serious matters, but this seriously needs addressed.

There were 22+ pages of people in before Chribba!?!?! On a dev blog?

Oh the horror!