Player Features and Ideas Discussion

One thing that bother me with EVE is that everyone can learn everything if they are in game long enough. It just kills natural need for cooperation and specialization, two important aspects of game.

So i have proposal of forgetting skills that are not 'used'.

Limitations in forgetting:

1.) it will not affect skills that are lower than lvl 3, you can only forget lvl 5 and lvl 4, except specialization skills that you can forget completely. Forgetting skills hoes from highest specialization branch, back to the forgetting limit. For example: you forget Large Artillery Specialization because you used just Medium guns for long time. But you will not forget Small Artillery specialization since it is prerequisite for Medium guns specialization.

2.) it will not affect 'basic' skills (skills without prerequisites)


How it will work:

1.) every time you use any activity, module, ship, etc, all prerequisites skills that are already learned are 'active' and hidden timer for them is counting forward
2.) All skills that are not in 'active' use are in hidden timer counting backward. You need same amount of time to forget skill level as time you needed to learn it.
3.) if at any point you 'activate' skill by using anything that requires that, hidden timer reverse and it's counting forward again.
4.) if you don't want to 'activate' skill trough your activity you can put it back in learning queue.
5.) Re-learning skill that you already have is activity based, but if you are using it and put same skill in training queue both timers are counting so you learn skill at double rate.


What are benefits:

- it will still allow everyone to learn every possible skill, but if you want to 'know' them all perfectly you need to put them in practice on daily basis. In time you can allow skills you don't need to deteriorate to some level and focus on using skills you need
- all this is activity based, so it makes sense that you are good at what you do, and slowly forgetting about things you don't do
- also in time you can change your orientation bu simply 'activating' some skills
- skills that takes long time to learn will also take long time to forget, so you really need not to use them for long period to forget them
- This will bring activity based specializations, but still very much under players control. All players will get more 'personality' with better defined role in their corporations, and corporations will be more like real entities with positions that need to be filled, and not just collections of know-it-all players.

All this is just rough idea that needs lot of suggestion, debate and polishing, but i think it will add greatly to players interactions and cooperation.

-1

Not to be harsh, but everyone of your "benefits" is a negative. Nothing is gained with this method. Losing skills for any reason is a bad thing (keep your clone up to date). They used to have standings lower over time if you didn't do a mission periodically. That had obvious problems and was taken out. The time it took to raise standings with one corp caused all the others to fall. With skills, add the time it takes to afford the ship, fittings, blueprints, etc.

This also hurts long-term players. I have a lot of skills and making sure I use them all would be a task. I also have cross-trained a lot, thus it is much harder to use such varied styles all together. I also tend to train related skills to 5 before I fly them; I don't want to lose things before I get to use them. This doesn't even touch on returning players, alts, or non-docking ship operators. And man, if there ever was a bug with this system...

When the game came out it would take over three years to learn them all. Sever years later I'm still training. CCP adds skills often enough that we will never train them all. That is the solution to the "shoot, I trained everything to 5" problem.

Sorry, not to be harsh, but bad idea.

Well, probably it is... but throwing ideas, even bad ones is OK, we can then eliminate them :)

Currently it takes more then 25 years to train every skill to lvl 5, even with best implants and skill queue optimization.

There is no problem.