EVE General Discussion

Why does CCP discourage experimentation in EvE Online?

I don't understand the point in making skills take YEARS to train it's just not fun not being able to do what you want and just having nothing to do but sit in a station and wait for your skills to get to where you want to be so you can finally do what you want to do.

For example , a new player wants to PVP...
He/She realizes if he/she wants to do this as quickly as possible he/she is going to need to do so in a frigate first...
What frigate to choose? There are many and this game does a poor job preparing new players to play.
It all relies on other players and unofficial information and guides most of which aren't willing to assist new players but rather take advantage of them.
Already the player is overwhelmed and assaulted.
Most people wouldn't accept this level of bull.

Say this player decides to keep at it anyway.

Now the player has to wait...

and wait...

and wait...

and this is for a frigate... The player can only imagine a Battleship or a T3 Strategic Cruiser.

I guess my question is why does CCP keep the training times for basic skills needed to even attempt PVP or anything really at a decent level extremely hard to reach?

As new players they are "NEW" meaning they don't understand a lot of the games concepts and mechanics so why punish them with ridiculous training times while they experiment and learn how to play?

Why not make the skills needed for the frigates much more accessible and reasonable?
Instead of 9 days, why not back to the old 4 days? or hell 2 days would be even better? Or even less would be fantastic.

What is the purpose in not allowing the new players to really explore every thing New Eden has to offer at least at frigate level in a quick accessible fashion and once they've decided hey well I want to specialize in Exploration or Mining or whatever they choose then make the larger ships more difficult to obtain?

As it is right now...

it's backwards...

It takes longer to take full advantage of a Frigate and once you can you move to bigger ships quickly.

Instead of being able to take full advantage of a frigate quickly and then moving to the bigger ships in a slower fashion.

In order to take full advantage of a frigate you have to train a bunch of skills.

You need a bunch of different cap skills...
Gun Skills...
Navigation skills...
Thermodynamics...
+ Many More...

These take time to train and should be level 5 before moving to a bigger ship as when you move to the bigger ships these little differences in percentages translate to large differences.

Why would anyone go from a frigate to a Battleship without really high level cap skills? It just doesn't make sense and would only allow you to PVE, if that, which is boring, you just run the same uninteresting missions over and over and over when the meat of this game is being able to go into null and fighting other players or exploring but to do Exploration you need to PVP.

" WELL ADAM YOUR WRONG THERE IS PLACES TO EXPLORE IN HIGH SEC CHH STEWPID " - ignorant player not listening

The best part of exploration portion of the game is Wormholes but guess what you can't do them unless you can PVP and at a high level so you people who want to explore guess what you are going to have to wait a long time to be able to even get to a level where you might be able to succeed at that.

If you were thinking that exact statement made by the ignorant player your missing the point, the point being this game is based on player interactions not dealing with the same computer AI which is no where near or like what a player would be.

Not to mention the sites in the lower security areas are far superior and just all around more fun to do.

If you want to push players out of high and into these less secure areas you need to give them the feeling they have a chance, that they might be ready to take on others, that they might survive.

As it is right now with the current systems in place you have players who want to do those things but just realize that they won't be ready to do them for years and while this game is fun even in high sec if you don't break the monotony you will start to lose players little by little eventually.

I know there are those older guys out there who no longer get the PVP rush they used too because the lines are drawn alliances are made and many aren't breaking. Giving newer players a speed boost to reach the skills of these other guys AT LEAST in frigates would bring a large group of people trying to make their mark out in low and Null and giving these older guys something to shoot at also breaking the control holds some of these older players have and will never lose with the current systems as they are.

I hope this has been an enlightening and interesting read and perhaps won't fall on deaf ears but that is just foolish hope I suppose.

If you are going to respond, please do so in a constructive manner.

Enjoy,
Adam G.

YEARS JESUS IT LITERALLY TAKES YEARS

Reserved

Alright OP...


The skill and ship class system is ingeniously designed such that newbies CAN compete while providing veteran players with perks that provide and edge here and there... but nothing so brokenly overpowered that a newbie has no chance.



- All skills cap at level 5. No matter how many years you have played the game, you cannot exceed that limit. And lower level skills (ex. [Racial] Frigate) are very quick to train relative to more advanced skills (5 to 7 days for frigate level 5? Try getting cruiser to level 5. Or Battlecruiser. Or battleship. Those are 30+ day skills. Same applies for all their respective weapon systems too).

- Only a limited number of skills affect any one ship, module, weapon system, and specialty at any given time.
Ex1: Someone you are facing has about 20 million SP, but how much of that overall SP is actually combat related? He/she could be a HUGE industrial player with limited combat skills.
Ex2: A veteran player has just trained up the skill Large Hybrid Turret to level 5. That skill in no way affects the skill Small Hybrid Turret and thus the veteran will be no better or worse than before at the frigate level.

- Getting a skill from level 4 to level 5 only adds on an extra 2% here, 5% there (exceptions apply). If you simply train up all the skills within a specialty to level 4 (which takes a fraction of the amount of time it takes to get those skills to level 5), you will find yourself flying at about 80 to 90% of the effectiveness of a multi-year veteran with those same skills in that specific specialty at level 5 (which is something that can be easily overcome with the right module or tactic).

- Getting a skill to level 5 is supposed to be a painful train. Many players (yes, even veteran ones) opt to avoid doing it and instead train up other skills to level 4 (again, because it's faster).

- Ships and weapons have been balanced against one another.
Ex: A battleship can potentially instapop a frigate... but the frigate can fly very fast, making it difficult for the battleship's weapons to track, especially at very close range... then again, the battleship can deploy drones to deal with the frigate... and the frigate can shoot the drones down... however the battleship might have a Large Energy Neutralizer fitted to nuke the frigate's capacitor power every 24 seconds... in which case the frigate could use a Small Nosferatu that sucks out capacitor from the battleship every 3 seconds... etc. etc.

- High tech equipment (ex. T2, Faction, Officer, etc) will not give a player "I WIN" abilities. It simply gives a player a linear edge at an exponentially higher cost.
Ex: A group of two or three T1-fit frigates that cost about 500 thousand to 1 million ISK CAN kill a faction frigate worth about 50 to 100 million ISK... provided they are using the right mods in the right configuration and know what they are doing.


tl;dr...
- the point of the skill system is to force you to learn the game's mechanics and nuances in cheaper equipment and ships... that way when you DO gain access to more expensive equipment and ships, you know HOW to use them properly.

- more SP is not indicative of a pilot's ability. It just means that the pilot has more options in what he/she can do.

- no one ship is superior to everything in the game. Even Titans, the largest ship in the game, has its Achilles heel; smaller ships.





As for your complaint that you can't do anything because you don't have the right skills (or that they aren't high enough)... that's a load of crap. You can still go out there and DO things... no one is stopping you from doing that but yourself. The only thing you need to keep in mind is that, yes, when you start you will not be AS effective as a veteran doing xxx activity, but there is more than one way to succeed as a player than pure piloting or character skill.

I have 70+ million skill points and I often get schooled by people with not even a quarter of that. Likewise... there are "bitter vets" out there with 100+ million skill points that I can easily spank.

They don't (see sig). The basic skills needed are all rank-1 or 2 skills, and you can start attempting PvP when you have them a lvl II or III — that's somewhere in the span of 1,414–16,000 SP, which even a new player can polish off in short order.

No skill in this game takes years to learn. The longest is around 45 days.

Mr Epeen

skills < take Years to train.

Keyword skills as in more than one.

To PVP you need T2 weapons so you can use T2 gun systems which almost everyone PVPing uses , if you want to beat them you have match them. So yes you do need to V alot of skills especially Navigation, speed is everything for a frigate and is also important later on once you move to a bigger ship, that extra few M/S could mean life or death.

No. You really don't.
…which is tied to two rank-1 skills, and which you don't need much of anyway since you don't need T2 weapons. So getting the fitting space is a very short train.
No. It takes maybe a week or two to get a good set of skills at a reasonable level. If all you want to do is try things out, it's hellalot less. Again, see sig.

Oh, and also: if you do wait for a month until you can get an all-T2 fit, two things will happen: you will die horribly, and you will lose all your ISK. What you should do is start early with silly-cheap equipment and (still) die horribly, so that by the time you can fly and equip more expensive ships and modules, you have begun to understand what does and does not work.

So many nonconstructive comments, as I said hope if foolish.

Landed on deaf ears this entire post did.

The point I was trying to make in a nutshell is...

Reduce skill training for Core skills and frigates.

This opens up experimentation for newer players to play around with different ships and technologies available in the game and then once they've decided on something they enjoy the most, they can shoot for it.

This would also help push players out of high and into Low and null and just all around allow newer players experience more of what the game has to offer.

…and the point everyone else is making is: it's already as low as it can (and even should) be.

Experimentation is already just a matter of training a couple of low-rank skills, which takes minutes or (at most) hours. The only thing that can't be experimented with this way is flying a capship, and that's probably a good thing since those are something you shouldn't really experiment with — it'll only end in tears.