Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Doesn't matter. In fact, it would probably just make the whole thing even worse for new players since it further restricts what they can do with their already small SP pool. All the other issues remain.

Above all, the fundamental problem is the same: it's a non-solution to a problem that doesn't exist in EVE to begin with since the solution is borrowed from a completely different design and since it's that design that causes the problems respecs are intended to solve. Since EVE has a radically different design, it doesn't have those problems, so adding a “solution” actually does the exact opposite of what it's supposed to do: it causes the problems we see in those other designs rather than solve them.

A simple 80% trade-in of any skill(s) trained to get back SPs would be an awesome feature.

The cost is 20% of the time you spent training said skill (or some percentage so that doing a quick skill train for your toon's attributes then converting to SP isn't faster than training a slow skill).

One interesting result of such a change would be more complex decisions like: I really need skill X now. I will give up skill Y and Z to get the SP to train X and go back and retrain Y & Z over the next several months.

Yes, the problem is that some players are so stuck in the xp/level/class-based mode of thinking that they can't get their heads around how the EVE skill system works, and why the supposed problem doesn't exist or why SP remaps is a horrible horrible idea that only breaks things.

No, I'm not. I have no idea what kind of pretzel logic led you to that conclusion.

Incorrect. I'm going “this won't work because A, B, C, D … Z”. The “why”s have already been explained at length by me and other players. None of those points have been addressed — just brushed aside without any visible understanding of what the problem actually is, nor without any justification why any of if is needed other than pure entitlement and a wish not to stand by your own decisions.

What evidence is that? People not understanding the skill system is not evidence — it's an argumentum ad populum fallacy. No matter how many keep wanting or believing the game to work like a class-based system, it is not how EVE actually works, and as such, neither the supposed problem nor the solution is applicable.

The way they are changing things today, there isn't the same kind of problems with skillpoints becoming irrelevant. If anything there is a drive towards make ships that take relatively little training into good competitive PvP ships. T3s anyone ? How about battlecruisers being almost the only other competitive ship ?

The thing that people always forget is that there are almost no such things as dead skills in eve. Things are swings and roundabouts. Everytime they tweak the balance, an old ship becomes suddenly more viable again.

Almost everyone only flies a handful of ships frequently. And yet they have skills for very many more ships. But sometime in the future those ships they fly now won't be as effective, and something else from their back catalogue will move into the rotation.

The only reward of having been around longer is that you can do more stuff. In a straight fight, total skill points don't matter and applied skill points (ie those that effect this exact ship) matter; a much younger character can have more SP than me in a single ship. That specialisation can let them beat me in one fight. But I can adapt and get a ship that beats them. They can't. Buuuuut my being a veteran doesn't mean that I should be able to do EVERYTHING. Just some things, most things even, but not everything.

Looking into a wider sense, a much much younger character can be a far FAR better builder or trader or researcher than my character is. If I want to get into that, I literally have to start from scratch. If they got into it straight away and have a 6 months lead, why should I be able to decide I want to do that (i've heard you can make money that way) and then inside 24 hours have perfect skills that means him taking 6 months of training actually doesn't matter. I'm just better.

If you give anyone the chance to have every skill without actually having those skillpoints (remember total vs applied... you only need SP in what you are doing now), then you are turning eve from a long term game of hard lessons and patience into a game where its all in the short term. I mean why not let people trade in PLEX to get a million SP while we are at it ? Why not?

Why Eve is a good game is because there is no way to just force your way into being awesome. You have to, over the course of many months and years chose your skills with some degree of common sense and with a goal in mind. This idea destroys that. It makes eve a game about classes and pre-set skill sets to respec into. That's not eve. That wow.

…and when that actually happens, you'll be compensated. As it is, though, the standard buff/nerf cycle is not in any way a “punishment” — it's balance. You will still just as capable of flying the ship that has been adjusted, as well as numerous other ships that you'll collect in the process. You have lost zilch, and the compensation is commensurate with this loss.

The beauty of the EVE skill system is that you never need to replace anything — that's the hallmark of those class-based systems where both classes and levels limit what you do, and if you want to do something new, you have to replace what you already have. Here, if you want something else, you just go and get it.

No, but it is the ultimate nerf-proofing tactic and it pretty much negates the claim that getting the FOTM ahead of time is a matter of luck. More to the point, it illustrates that nothing you do is lost. What you have is still useful and while something you use might lose a bit of its lustre, something other will gain prominence, which means you come out ±0 from that change. Unless you literally can only fly one ship (a state that passes after, oh, day 2 or so), there is pretty much no way to be completely screwed over by a patch to such an extent that you need to change all your skills.

…and that's a nice problem, but you have to take into account the older players who will make use of newbie-helping mechanics to screw over said newbies. There is a reason why Malcanis' law has gained such traction: any adjustment that is suggested “for the good of newbies” will invariably only benefit old players.

New players are better served by learning how to plan out their skills than by having all need for skill planning be removed from the game, and the game as a whole is better off not suffering all the consequences of the wreckage that would result from implementing SP remaps (especially since it also includes screwing over newbies).

No. I read those two sentences and noticed that, if we skip all the thinly veiled excuses, what you're asking for to deliberately add bad gameplay. Making bad gameplay available to everyone does not suddenly make things good.

No. It's the same reasoning as:
1) Snake bites are bad.
2) They exist, though, whether we like it or not.
3) Thus, everyone should be bitten by a snake.

You are not asking for a solution — you are asking for a problem to be universal rather than limited. So yes, you logic fails completely.

I'm not one who thinks respec "needs to happen," and I haven't seen anything in this thread to change my mind on that, but you are being a bit glib about just how long it takes to do what you suggest. You also tend to downplay the substantial advantage of having IV/V skills and access to T2 gear over II/III skills and being limited to T1 kit. That advantage is big enough that it's the difference between being in the game and getting blown out of the sky (or the market, or wherever) in many situations, or between playing a game that feels fun vs. grinding away at a tedious chore.

In the spectrum of MMOs out there, EvE probably has the longest haul (in terms of calendar days) between ground zero and maxing out in any one thing you want to do. EvE offsets this with passive character growth, where as long as you're paying the subscription, you're gaining skills, and you can spend your logged in time doing whatever it is you do. That doesn't mean EvE has no grind; it just means you grind for things other than "XP."

The downside of this is it can take a very long time to become competitive at a particular thing, and there is nothing you can really do to speed that up. The upside is, you can play the game for a very, very long time, and still feel like you have room to grow. However, if you only play one character, then you can only work on getting good at one thing at a time.

When a player has spent six months or a year training into something, and that's the one thing they've gotten good at so far, it's a big deal when that thing gets nerfed into the ground. When you say "just go and get it," what you're talking about is that person spending another six months or a year just to get back to where they were yesterday. And during that whole time, they're not retraining because they decided to try something new, they're doing it because they were forced to. That's a big fat invitation for newer players to quit the game, especially when it happens the second or third time around.

Every time something gets nerfed in any game, you can always say "just reroll." What you call "cross training" in this game is what you get when you have one character of every available class in other games. The difference is, in many games you're talking about a couple weeks or months to "just go and get it"; here it's literally years to "cross train" to a decent level in everything, to the point where you're "nerf proof." That doesn't mean they shouldn't make changes, it just means that in EvE changes have consequences, and they're big ones. And they don't always get them right.

"Cross train" and "just go get it" works fine for the part of the player base that is already in that place; change happens, and you just deal with it, one way or another. And CCP is fortunate to have probably the largest base of very long term players of any game around. But if CCP wants (as they say they do) to make sure the game continues to appeal to new players, then they need to keep in mind that, because of how this game works, their missteps have a uniquely high cost, and that cost is paid almost entirely by new players when it comes due.

About a week for any standard ship. A bit less if you're new.

Not really, no. I'm highlighting the advantage of getting the most out of limited SP, which is what you have if you're new, and why going for IV:s or, worse, V:s is a horribly bad idea as a new player — it's a horrible waste of time and clone cost for what you get out of it. Does it give you an advantage? Sure. Is the advantage significant? Not really, no, unless it unlocks critical support skills or key equipment, and even then, it's easy to overcome by taking advantage of the main aspect of the game: multiplayer.

It also means you can choose not to grind at all — a bit of player skill can take care of that with ease, as can social skills and a good network. “Being competitive” in anything in EVE is something you can approach from a bajillion different ways and generally, only one of them relies on “out-SP:ing” the opponent.

Lolno. If a player has spent six months or a year to get to something, then he will a built up a battery of generalist skills that will immediately translate over to whatever he chooses to replace that thing with. When I say “just go and get it”, I'm talking about training one different race or adding the core skills for a secondary weapon system. That does not take 6–12 months — that kind of time frame is more appropriate for “from zero to every T2 cruiser for a given race”. That is a substantially larger adjustment than what you're talking about.

…except that in this game, you can retain the vast majority of your skills and apply them to the new thing you train for, ending up with maybe a couple of weeks to get to your replacement. Respeccing is the same thing as rerolling from zero and retaining your XP so you can build a new class from scratch. EVE dispenses of all that nonsense by being designed so that you don't have to start from zero to do something else. Cross-training means you build on top of what you have rather than do everything all over again, and as such, it's hellalot faster than getting “one of each class.”

Using myself as an example, it took me my first year (or more accurately nine months, since I wasted part of that year on getting fully equipped Exhumers) to get everything for my first race. For every subsequent race, all that was needed were a line of weapons, a line of ships, and one ewar type. The shared support skills that I already had filled in the rest. All in all, it took maybe a year and a half to fully cross-train for everything, and I was a bit more thorough than you really need to be.

So no, cross-train and just go get it was how I did it my first two years. Guess what? I had no problem competing during that time, much less after it. The cost for a new player is minimal since they don't need to go as wide or as deep as I did. Missteps are easy to fix and don't even matter in the long run as long as you don't do something stupid as “try something” by going all-V.

No no no. FOTM already applies to everybody!! The most unbalanced, "best" ship at the moment (for some particular playstyle, e.g. best mission tanking ship) is the best ship. That's just a fact of the universe, and it affects everybody. Either you have one and you have a special advantage, or you dont have one, and you are at some amount of disadvantage. You're affected no matter what.

The reallocation bit doesn't make the ships any less balanced. It just gives everybody the same opportunities. Thus, nobody has any special advantage anymore, because everybody can choose to shift their nerfed skills over toward the FOTM ship, if they so desire (and if it really is so imbalanced as to make that worthwhile).

Limited skill allocation nullfiies the negative effects of FOTM. It doesn't enhance it.

Still, it's only a temporary solution. We don't really want everybody flying the same ship, and thus, the rebalancing would still be needed, until there are no more FOTMs anymore. But in the meantime, this is the fairest way to minimize the impact of the FOTMs that exist. Everybody flying the same "best" ship is still better than 30% of people being able to fly it, and the other 70% being screwed.


Everything else you said is based on the incorrect belief that CCP balancing something will create equalized bonuses and penalties to every single player.

Very wrong. The net effect across ALL players sumemd together will be +/- 0. And the net effect on any player with extensive cross training will be +/- 0 too.

But any other player will have INEQUAL personal bonuses and penalties. If the only battleship I can fly is Caldari, but I can fly all racial cruisers, then if CCP nerfs missiles and buffs lasers, hypothetically, then I lose a battleship and gain (an Amarrian) cruiser. That's not an equal tradeoff. The cruiser is utterly useless to me if, for instance, I am at the point of running level 4 missions. So I'm screwed, until 3 months later when I've finally finished training up Amarrian battleship skills, large energy turrets, and t2 laser crystals.

During those 3 months, my income is diminished, I have less fun, etc.


Some other guy might fly Amarrisan battleships only, but any cruisers. He will have the opposite experience: a sudden, unexpected boon that has no corresponding significant penalties. Why does he deserve that? No reason other than he is just luckier than me to have chosen Amarr for his first specialization.

Together, the two of us add up to a net effect of zero, in terms of the whole game community. But the PERSONAL effect on me is not zero.

Gotta spend less time on this thread, so I'll just respond to the one I think is most important:

What you're describing only happens if CCP does a perfect job of rebalancing all in one fell swoop. This doesn't really happen. Inevitably, when they try to balance one thing, they end up with some new FOTM that is now imbalanced instead, although of course by a lesser degree. If ship A was the best mission boat before by 15%, then after balancing, you might see something like ship B being the new best mission ship, by 12%. It's like waves sloshing around in a fish tank, sort of. They go back and forth being inequal on alternate sides, but settling down lower each time, until it is all even. Someday, they might get everything equal, but not in one pass. Thus, the suggestion being made in this thread to allow you to reallocate some skills to take advantage of the new 12% best ship. I.e., allowing players to move with those waves until they settle, at which point CCP would stop offering any new skills for reallocation anymore.

Eh alright, those are good points. I am convinced against it.