Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I've been seeing a lot of discussion about clone costs and such, and was wondering if a total revamp to the concept of clones might be in order.

So, instead of more expensive clones for having higher skill points, the cost of the clone would be solely based on what sort of implants you wanted to plug into it. Like how if you want to fit large blasters, you have to buy something larger than a frigate.

Of course, higher-grade clones would fit all the implants the lower-grade clones could. The required clone type would be based on the highest denominator, e.g. four +1 attribute implants and a single +2 attribute implant would require a gamma.

Basic breakdown, costs and implant types not strictly proposed but rather as an illustration:

• Alpha - 100k ISK, can plug in +1 attribute
• Beta - 250k ISK, can plug in X01 skill hardwiring
• Gamma - 500k ISK, can plug in +2 attribute
• Delta - 1mil ISK, can plug in X02 skill hardwiring
• Epsilon - 1.5 mil ISK, can plug in +3 attribute
• Zeta - 2.5 mil ISK, can plug in X03 skill hardwiring
• Eta - 4 mil ISK, can plug in +4 attribute
• Theta - 6 mil ISK, can plug in X04 skill hardwiring
• Iota - 8.5 mil ISK, can plug +5 attribute
• Kappa - 11 mil ISK, can plug in X05 skill hardwiring
• Lambda, Mu, Nu, Xi, etc. - higher-level hardwiring and faction/pirate implants

This is an interesting idea, but also seems pretty pointless. Why not just have a cheap clone that can plug in everything from the start? What positive gameplay does the game gain from this system? Are you maintaining the current tiering of the old system because it's great or just because it existed in the old one?

From what I see the only positive portion of the current clone cost system is, that it acts as a minor ISK sink. Everything else is pretty much a negative. While ISK sinks are needed the system shouldn't be designed in a way, that such a minor benefit is the main strength it has. I guess the real question that needs to be asked is: If you just want to tie the costs to implants, why not just make the cost of losing clones the cost of losing the implants?

The one reason I see of not doing that is, that as a side effect of having no implants will allow convenient and cheap traveling by podding. The thing is, that you can still do this today and the implants are a much more important prohibitive factor then the actual clone cost is, so I'm not sure it's a really good reason of not bringing the vanilla clone costs to a minimum.

I dont get it really...
Those who use expensive combat implats has the risk from that anyway, why add to that risk by clone-cost?

Honestly, the risk of ship, equipment, skills (t3 ships) and implants is enough.

The Clone value is just additional pain in the process adding another 60 million Isk to a death to **** people off.