Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Because this is a Skill Point idea I am copy-pasting my usual spiel...

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The skill and ship class system is ingeniously designed such that newbies CAN compete while providing veteran players with perks that give an 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 confer a player "I WIN" abilities. They simply give 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 (and won't cry as much when they die).

- you DO NOT NEED to have level 5 in any specific skill to be competitive. Having level 5 in a skill is simply an edge (exception: when it is required for something else).

- 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 an Achilles heel; smaller ships.



Now as far as corps and their skill requirements go...

They are a using a semi-false metric. The belief is that once you have XX amount of skillpoints you are old enough to have decent "experience" in EVE... such that you don't need to be taught the bare basics... that you can operate without having to be told what to do or where.

What you can do to counter this is to become knowledgeable about the game. Learn what the basic terminology is... know how to fiddle with your overview... know what your ship is generally good and bad at... and, most importantly, SHOW THAT YOU ARE WILLING TO LEARN MORE.
Most corps will be flexible about their "restrictions" if you directly talk with someone and show that you are enthusiastic and intelligent. Those that aren't... they are bad corps and you don't want to join them anyways.

I guess what I'm trying to say is this; the SP restrictions are there to preemptively weed out the general rabble from applying. And it's working (*hint**hint*OP).

And with regards to the meat of your idea...

- your ideas favors certain styles of play over others. It favors those who put more direct effort into things... not the people who play smart and find ways to get the same result with minimal effort (which is a reward in of itself).
Examples:
--- the miner will gain more SP than the alliance manager because the miner is doing more directly measurable things (that can be rewarded with SP) than the manager who is just crunching numbers and keeping the books (which is just as vital in larger alliances).
--- the mission runner will gain more SP (because he/she kills as many NPCs as possible) than the ninja ratter (who kills only certain NPCs of value).

- your idea can be exploited, badly. If you gain SP just for performing an activity then you will have people setting up perma-tanking, perma-shooting duels between two characters and leaving them afk for a couple hours. Come back... all that extra SP has been gained.
Fun Fact: this sort of system used to exist in EVE at the very beginning. This EXACT situation started happening. The system was removed.

- Malcanis' Law: "Whenever a mechanics change is proposed on behalf of ‘new players’, that change is always to the overwhelming advantage of richer, older players."

You think newbies can/would grind? Vets have mastered the art of it. And those "fat cats" in 0.0 have access to places where they can farm droves of NPCs that would make mission runners blush.

- it won't help newer players learn anything about the game. They'll just powergrid up to battleships and then wonder what they are supposed to do... and then die horribly not understanding what happened... in an expensive ship... that they shouldn't have been sitting in in the first place.

- I. HATE. GRINDING. I WILL find ways to avoid doing it. And then I will laugh as other people toil away grinding while I sit on my piles of ISK (that I earned from that scam/theft/gank/market manipulation/price gouging #19843762616921 that shouldn't have really worked).
Why do you want to encourage me to stop thinking smart and work like all the other peasants?

- When there is a mechanic that gives a tangible advantage over other players... it will become mandatory... even if it is designed to be an "option" or "extra" to an already existing system.

One of the worst ideas ever. Clearly the OP has no clue why the current system is both balanced and elegant. I've always been impressed that CCP managed to pull this up from the first attempt :)

Everyone is so hard on ppl suggesting some grinding mechanic for SP in eve (like most ppl doesn't grind isk, which ich even grindier cause you loose ship and you are on 0)

If you are proposing noob or 2 have good chance of killing shiny pimped ship of veteran player, why are you suddenly afraid to be that noob in a frigate? (suposed sp grinding mechanic is in place and some noob noreallifers will overgrind your sp). You should be further in sp just because you started your acc sooner? You will still have your veteran pvp skill over him so why wory and not let some noob that like grinding to grind? If all of you meant what you were saying, he won't have any advantage by grinding SP at all.

+ with ship specialisation mechanics in game, you can have maxed 3 ships and powergrinder 6 different, what difference it does for you ?

If i think about it, i don't see why should someone that decides to spend time grinding SP any advantage over someone that doesn't. If you are in pvp, it's totally irelevant (sp wise) if you have met someone that camped his char in dock for 3 years to get his sp or he powergrinded for them.

Isk grinding is in place and that clearly gives advantage, you can buy stronger ships, or more of them. In the end wars aren't won by SPs at all, but by isk, experience in combat, tactics. So i really don't see how is older player endangered by SP grinder, only difference it makes is that those that want, can get their sp faster.

Well at least there are a couple of people who like my idea :)

When I was thinking about the idea in my head it never occurred to me that it would become a grinding mechanic and would unbalance the game. I figured that it would make sense that by getting out in your ship and fighting, your character was learning something as well as you, the player.

A lot of people have said that an SP grinding mechanic was put into the game and removed but I have never heard of anything like that. How was that implemented? And why was it so bad? No one seems to have given any specifics other than it was in the game and it was bad.

If the idea was changed around a bit and it was only possible to grind out SP's up until your character got to 15 million SP's (by that time I think that although you can't do everything well, you can at least do one thing really well) would that make the idea a little easier to swallow for you older vets?

I think someone also suggested instantly starting out a character with 20m SP's, although i think that's too much, I would have thought somewhere between 5 and 10 million wouldn't be a bad thing as has been said many times SP's doesn't = skill and it'll allow a new player to at least get a jump start on some of the more experienced players. It'll allow them to get into the game and do whatever they want to do reasonably well without making them overpowered.

I do genuinely believe that new players need some way to get into this game far faster than is currently possible and OK my idea wasn't greatly accepted by you guys but I'm not seeing many other people try to come up with a solution either.

That could work as well. By completing all the tutorial missions you can get yourself 2-3 million SP's and some basic skill books to get you started (I know the tutorial already gives you skill books).

Which is why you would need to make them aware of what skills they should be training in and give them the skill books as well. Make sure that during the tutorial they are fully aware of how important the support skills are. I realise that each ship has a recommended certificate for that ships use but maybe you should make gaining that cert (or the one below it) a requirement for even sitting in the ship as well.

For example for the Gallente Battleship Hyperion, you need Gallente Frigates, Destroyers, Cruisers and Battle Cruisers to level 3, Gallente Battleship to level 1 and spaceship command to level 4. The recommended certs are Core Competency Standard, Armor Tanking Standard, Battleship Hybrid Turrets Basic and High velocity helmsman to standard. Why not make those skills a requirement of getting in the ship as well as just the basic's?

No one is afraid of the newbies suddenly being able to wtfpwn us. We're concerned about how much it will ruin things for newbies - they'll get this false idea that the game is all about grinding, and that simply by grinding they can become good at the game. Neither of those things are true at all, and implementing mechanics that encourage that mindset is disastrous.

It doesnt need to be as complicated as people make out, there are skills in eve that all players use (like engineering for instance) but it would help ease the process of tutorial training.

"heres a skillbook, train it for the mission im about to give you" new player has to wait for 5 minutes
vs
"Use these skillpoints to train x skill for this mission i'm about to give youo player can undock and run the mission

I honestly would prefer to see better informed and higher sp new players than the norm, even down to having the first tutorial being all about skills and how to use implants and jump clones maybe even giving new players their first jump clone.

player knowledge > skill points

If you also added in to that why the skill is important even though it doesn't get you into that super huge ship then I think you might be onto a winner there.