Skill Discussions

I love the SP concept in general.

But since I'm a rational person, I can still see a few shortcomings - especially for new players - that could and should be addressed.

I have found one of the keys to enjoying eve as a relatively low SP character was knowing when to ignore the advice of some veteran players. Many people will tell you that you need near perfect skills to do a thing or that thing is not worth doing at all. They are almost always wrong.

I was told I needed at least 10 million SP to fly a battleship in level 4 missions effectively. I was making enough money in level 4s to buy two plex a month and all the ships I wanted starting at around 4.5 million SP. I still don't have 10 Million skill points. Yes I lost ships early on, but I cannot imagine it would have been better to just sit in level 3s until I had BS 5 and T2 guns.

In PvE the only real solid advice was don't put all your money in one ship, and get T2 drones before flying battleships.

I am a new player. I have one account. One Charcter. About 2.5 mil Skillpoint and about 1.2 bil isk in cash and assets. short below of 2 months gaming.

I would assume that puts me in the category "bloody noob".

I would like to address 3 things about the "skillwall"

what i can do after 2 months (which i would also see as the determined casual lvlgrind time for maxleveling a WoW char)

skillwise to do exploring scanning down everything in highsec and could probaly scan down a lot in low and nul (with increased risk of course as i need a scan frig to get to my scan strenght)
Basic PI
fly ships up to battlecruisers of one race with halfways reasonable gear
fly a noctis (skillwise and own one)
rat in nulsec
participate in frig-gang pvp in the roles of DD, tackler and logi
i have rudimentary tradeskills to sell my loot at my own price tag
i can do lvl 3 security missions and fly DED 4 sites
theoretically i can do minor mining and minor hauling with the tutorial ships iteron/venture.
i can easily replace any of my ships and implants (+4s)

i think that is not so bad for one month. In pvp i can do tackle, ewar, logi and dd.

unlike my WoW Mage that could only do DD and crowd control and crafting. the time spent grinding levels, skills and gear still was much much more to get to a usable point than in eve to get to this.

Sure i do not have really big shinies but i can participate in bigger operations as as tackler small scale logi or ewarsupporter Unlike WoW where you can forget that with anything less than a max out char with good gear. you have 0 impact on high end chars as a newb.

while in wow thats the end of leveling and the start of endless farming in eve there ist still much "uncharted land" to go.. systemwise, skillwise and pathwise.

I'm sorry for you that your friends left but i do not feel like them. I climb a molehill and see much land to go and a new hill on the horizon, knowing behind that a chain of mountains will be at the next horizon with more land in between.

Sure i'm not a pro in my stuff, but thats making stuff interesting making ends meet. I recall i was absolutely new und untrained in explo and i asked around looked at ships and modules to get as much strenght to my core probes as i could. practising on my routes to take it up against all the competition in scanfrigs, drakes and tengus vying for the same sites as i did. Hitting signatures and beeing up at 98% and then trying to squeeze the final 2% out of my 5 probes. The process of scanning will not be the ame when i skilled the skills and easily scan down stuff..the intrigue will be lost doing the process. even if i can run more sites than now.

Scanning for Radars and finding DED/4 in highsec selling and/or give away the positions to older players who could run them got me some nice acquintances looting/salvaging with my little frig behind them financed my noctis. After a day it was paid for itself. Seeing the rotating buttons of the tractors and salvagers sucking isk out of the wreckage the first time just woah. Small stuff, small successes which may not mean anything to you anymore can still be a lot of fun to newbs. At one day scanning, salvaging, etc will be routine doing incursion vanguards in 8min tact will be routine to get isk once ive got my shiney. But never will i forget 3 spider tanking frigs doing scouts or my myrmidon joining in in an vanguard crew "we dont lose ships" actually surviving learning a day later, armor comp skills what is that?



OP, i think and i might be wrong with that, you were to impatient with them. You should have started a plain new char rather than buying a new and show your friends the little stuff you can only enjoy as an innocent newb and possibly re-discover it for yourself. Beeing a newb is something special - you are only once. and when you stop beeing it you will never be it again (in this game).

After all skilling through all skills takes about 17 years with max implants from day one so i'd surmise even day 1 - vets have quite a bit "skillwall" ahead of them. But we have that feat in this game that we can skill multiple characters afk.

One point i concede though. I find it dickish of CCP that only one skillqueue per account be active. And for your "problem" i would think would be the simplest solution. with this people without money to pay for multiple accounts or time to farm billions isk for alt accounts and beeing able to reach specialisation in more career paths.

2 c from a newb.

1. Make new friends in EVE. There are no rules against making new friends.

2. This is your opinion. However this is not fact.

3. again, opinion. Not fact.

4. My opinion here is that you were doing it wrong. Maybe if you'd actually tried played the game instead of reading up on things you might have actually learned something.

5. So when they go to college, do they moan and complain after a month because they are not masters of whatever they are studying? Some things take time. Part of the reward of EVE is accomplishing something or completing a skill that lets you do something new. If that doesn't sound like your thing and you want stuff handed to you on a silver platter, go back to WOW. EVE is not meant to be easy.

6. What happened? did you learn that SP are not the be all and end all of this game? player skill is just as important as SP.

7. You are of course an expert. You have been playing for a couple months. Why you could probably write a number of books detailing everything there is to know about EVE and CCP.

8. Well I guess you are wrong again. I know plenty of people with only one account. Players that have been around for years.

9. I beg to differ

10. Yes, because the game hasn't been going for almost a decade already. CCP should hurry or it might not last another decade.

11. More opinions from our new expert EVE player.

12. So are you suggesting here that new players should start with 100mil SP? It sound a lot like you are. Maybe they should also get a free titan.

13. Yes you are

14. No you don't. You are just moaning about something you know nothing about instead of trying to learn how to play the game properly.

15. How exactly? They are making the battle cruiser skill a racial skill. You can still hop in to a BC in the same amount of time. Some might say they are making it easier for you to get in to a BC.

16. Nothing because nothing needs to be done.

17. Features and Ideas sub-forum. But maybe you should be more specific when you post there. Post exactly what you are trying to skill up for, how you are doing it, how long it takes, what your goal is etc etc. Don't just pluck random numbers and rubbish assumptions out of your backside.

18. Undock, do some epic arc missions, speak to people in the game, join a training corp like RvB or EVEUni, go to lowsec and have a fight. In other words, PLAY THE GAME.

19. If you truly want to see it grow, stick around. When you have an actual idea about how the game works, then think about how exactly it can be improved. Post your suggestion in the correct forum and don't act like a child when people say things you dont like.

20. You sound like you think you know what you are talking about but you don't. CCP know their game. If you start demanding changes when you obviously dont know anything about the game, do you really think they will listen to you?

There. I think I answered your questions. No doubt you will not read what I wrote and just say "You have not answered my questions blah blah blah.

If all your friends quit, go meet more people in game.

Skill points help you, but if you keep putting off doing anything until you reach some far reaching goal, you're going to be bored.


Also, the phrase "don't fly what you can't afford to lose" comes to mind.
What good is being able to fly the best ship if you won't?

Most likely, the guys who can fly all the high class tech II ships won't - they'll be coming at you in a tech I frigate because the loss of that ship won't hurt much.

EVE is a game of lies and bluffs, imo.
Example:
I came up on a venture who was mining, he bolted. I left his wrecks alone, because maybe he went to go get a different ship, maybe he had friends; I didn't feel like replacing my thrasher at that point. ;) But maybe he left because *I* was the scary one.

I just started a week ago, on my own. This game is really only limited by the individuals that play it - get out there and be scary. :)

That's the general idea I get from CCP with regards to the general direction that the game has been going for the last few years, basically confusing the trees for the forest....They add specific features to bolster certain aspects that matter to a specific portion of the player base, but don't concentrate at all in aspects where being an new player or an old player with lots of SP, or rich doesn't matter at all and that would mean evolving EVE's storyline in a very global way that affects everyone.


Seriously, does anyone care about Dust 514 when we've been concentrating on space based combat for the last 10 years and controlling the resources from that environment?, that it actually matters what happens on the surface of a planet?....The only way I could see it matter is if controlling a planet mattered to the sovereignty of the entire system, and when enough planets are under control, then control of the entire solar system becomes possible....

It would unite those that play EVE the space game with those that play EVE the ground combat game in common cause, but given the huge amount of planets in eve, it would require a huge amount of players if every planet in the eve cluster was conquerable, so I say only the temperate ones should be fought for, since their atmosphere and temperatures don't require people to put on special suits, and allow them to colonize the planet and turn it into a civilization in time.


This is just an example, and there's many more to expand upon, but I want to keep the message short...

That's kinda the plan

It not mattering in the big scheme of things or it never gets further developed?


I mean we all saw the videos where a dreadnaught fires on the planet surface almost 2 years ago, and now we have to settle with using destroyers and special ammo when the ships have to remain at 300~400 kms above the surface of a planet to avoid entering the atmosphere as gravity is a pain and tritanium explodes in contact with oxygen which is the main component in a ships hull, the ships don't have that kind of locking range nor do the small guns they use have the firing range either.


It's an operation made in heaven for a dreadnaught because it can lock and fire from those ranges with no special ammo needs, and we're not getting what was shown, so CCP should be ashamed of itself for releasing half done content like this....It's one of the reasons why the game has become a chat channel with graphics for me and I hardly play it these days.

I'll start this by saying that I am a new player myself. I just started in late July of this past summer. So, you want someone to give answers to precisely your three questions? Here we go.

So all I am asking is what is being done about this
huge problem EVE faces?
There is no problem. People have gotten too used to games giving them the "golden carrot" within a few months. It's refreshing to have a game out there that still makes you either wait, or pay out the ass to bypass the training time.

Who can I talk to about this to make it apparent?
Try pestering actual CCP employees, like Dolan or Soundwave.

This game is truly great but how does any new
player have a chance at experiencing that
greatness?
I moved to nullsec, and was flying in 200+ man fleets when my character was roughly a month old. Was I in the doctrine ships? Of course not. However, EWAR frigs and tackle ships can be effectively flown by a day one character. They don't need to be in anything bigger (and more expensive) until they've improved their playing skills (not just SP).

To close:
Hell, my sp training isn't even specialized. I went wide instead of deep, and after 8 months, I can fly any T1 subcap. Throw the certs out the window, find out what you need to train to get you into the ship you want (with meta weapons as needed). Some skills are relatively pointless to take to L5 anyway, unless you are out of other useful stuff to train. Tactical Shield Manipulation is a good example. You hit L4 to use T2 hardeners, and you're pretty much done with that skill for now. Cloaking is another good example.

The gap only goes so far. Because there are only so many skills which can effect the ship you are in.
After a certain point, you are mainly just polishing some very small details.