Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Yeah, I wasn't gonna put that much effort into it... I see your thread made it on there too...

Think the op's point is more that EVE is based on ISK risk vs reward. But in the case of Learning implants its basically possible to lose potential training time. Which is a unique risk as it cannot be recovered. Whereas you can always make more ISK. It's a risk that directly contravenes the primary goal of a new player out of the gate: Advance as fast as possible and experience all the cool stuff you can.

Learning implants make a new player very risk adverse and being too risk adverse in a sandbox game means you're missing out on quite a bit. A risk adverse new player is a player that isn't trying out all the awesome things that might hook them into paying that sweet sweet subscription money to CCP.

Hell, speaking from experience, I've never really PVP'd. Why? Because the implants in my head cost too damn much to risk. Period. If they weren't there, I'd be all over low sec, null sec, FW, etc. But I'm not risking faster character advancement for it. It's easy to wave away the risk as an older player, as you can already use all the cool toys and are churning away on skills where losing a few days isn't a huge deal. But for players trying to get up to that par, its a huge deal and a major turn off if you're just starting out.

Balancing "Advancing faster" vs "Getting to do cool stuff" is kind of a suck ass design principle. You're pitting the two biggest goals against each other. "Leveling up" vs "Experiencing new gameplay content" basically.

No, its not. Missed the point. If I fly a 5m ship and it gets blown up, I have the luxury of time to earn another 5m or PLEX to just buy it. If I lose 100 mil in implants, I do not have the luxury of time to earn another 100 mil. I must immediately have a new set of implants on hand, where my clone is, at all times. Otherwise I have permanently lost training time.

I can risk the 5m ship, its not a biggie, it can be recovered. All I lose is ISK and pride. Training time loss cannot. Jump clones are a awkward stop gap with the exact same problem.

Additionally, if I do not know about Learning implants when I first play ( and I didn't, as the tutorials are arse ) or cannot afford them ( As no newbie can ) then I have effectively lost potential training time as well. When I first started out this ended up with me using my first character just to churn up ISK for implants and learning skills for a second character. Then I played the first gimp character while the second character trained the "proper" skills ( which were not fun new ship/toy skills ). Because according to EVEmon, the second char would surpass the first in total SP because of it. While having better skills because I actually knew what did what and what to train the second time around.

This is a terrible first experience for an MMO. A genre where most players typically only give a new MMO one shot and base their first and lasting expression on that first shot. Its very hard for an MMO to convince someone to give the game another shot down the road. I quit for a good year after only playing for a few months the first time. Because I got bored with nothing much to do because of the risk aversion of having implants.

Its fine for EVE to be Hard Mode(tm). That's its thing. What's not fine is having a new player experience akin to telling someone they're going to train to be a kickboxer after they've already been in the ring for 5 rounds.




We're not talking about combat oriented implants.




I only just renewed in the hopes that the game had changed some of its more offputting and awkward ways. The removal of Learning skills is what gave me hope. Having game mechanics that adversely affect or drive away new customers makes no sense from a design or business perspective. I must admit I don't understand this weird attitude with some of the EVE community where they're not happy unless other players are unhappy and oppose ideas to improve the game based on nothing more than what is basically just "WELL IN MY DAY WE WALKED UP HILL TO SCHOOL. BOTH WAYS. IN THE SNOW."

You can't seriously tell me the best thing for EVE is to be as difficult to attract new customers as possible? It seems like whenever someone suggests something on here to make the game more accessible there's always one group that sits there yelling "GET OFF MY LAWN!". -.-