EVE General Discussion

wow, that offhanded d-bag comment really struck pretty close to home for some of you.

It was never intended to be anything more than my personal opinion, yes i stated it as fact but really i was giving you IQ credit that you would know it was nothing more than my opinion and that i hadnt just completed a doctoral thesis on d-bags and EVE.

But the resonance of the statement sure makes you wonder.....

You forgot , on purpose perhaps , to not quote the part where i said that if you ''skip ships'' in level then you'll loose a lot pretty fast.The slow progress is there for a good reason..And then we can go to that other thread here on GD right away about how new players don't make enough isk to replace their ships.

I didn't forget, just didn't see that part as all that relevant, more options doesn't necessarily mean jumping into T2 and T3 ships from the start with T2 equipment fitted.

But from what was mentioned in this thread about 'Rise' it seems that what is said in this thread maybe irrelevant anyway. I assume Rise is a planned addition to the game, so I'll have to check that out.

Thanks for the information and that link is useful.

If anybody hasn't read it and is interested in the subject matter of this thread, it's worth reading.

The (counter)point is that, by and large, the options are already there — they're just not being used because new players are a) being lied to about what they need, or b) enter the game with preconceived notions about how much they need.

If you know what you're doing, you can build into any activity in the same time it takes for a new player to understand how to even navigate the skill tree or get new skills. Of course, new players don't know what they're doing, at least not without proper guidance, but there's a ton of different paths available to them from day one.

right because 450k SPs is realy shocking for a vet player it will give me 1 rank 2 skill from 4 to 5 big whoop. dont get me wrong i will do the missions once they made this change but seeing it as abuse is ridiculous 450k SP is of MUCH more value to new player then a bitter vet.

also i like you to provide a good reason to exclude existing players? because i started at 50 or 60k with all my toons so why should i not get that oppurtunity aswel? much more the players that recently started would be excluded aswell which is worse as new players can get more SP because they started later how wrong is that

I agree. I think the problem is that the first few days or week isn't well documented in terms of what you can do. Most guides hand waive this time as for career missions, but you can finish those in a matter of hours. It's that time between hour 4 and week 2 that gives most newbies their most questions. I think it would be good to compile a list of content to try in that window that isn't simply an abbreviation and suggestion to join a corp. Not that it's bad advice, but a more complete activity option list would probably calm the rabble.

Gently adjust the game to negate SP?


For those who remember UO what, 15 yrs ago? They did a similar thing where you could buy 3/4 trained chars,the GM made a gate... you went in.... come out with... 85% taming, WOOT, months of time saved.

Sure its a revenue stream, but once you've done it there is no going back.

Other revenue streams would be name change & history wipe

they could also purge old chars not used for 1 year then give 1 year notice to all database of account holders that chars will be biomass after 1 yr or 6 months. Then to keep your char from going biomass you must sub once at least every 6 or 12 months.

This is what Origin did with UO....but you could make a strong point to say that it also killed it.

I think this could be a serious way to compromise

In my heart there can be no changes,maybe CCP could develop EVE.2 , make some changes that they couldnt really patch into EVE, but essentially the same game, but when you mess with the real mechanics of the game, ie buying skill, you have hit the cheat button, sold your soul and the game will lose its magic and die.

I am not sure it is about selling your soul...
The "money versus time" option needs to be there, as long as it does not lead to a pay-to-win perception.
We see many ALODS that show that a player with a high skills pilot and shiny mods can be killed, and there is a difficult intangible thing that can't be bought in Eve: the How-to-fly, How-to-fit and knowledge of the metagame.

I do agree with you though that drastic changes like making characters destructible or locked, because this was not done from the start, would be a huge risk for the game at that point.

I disagree about the power of high SP. The power/benefits of more and more SP is best described as having decreasing returns to scale. That is the more time I put into training the less benefit I get for a fixed period of time. Early on, a months worth of training will increase a character's "power considerably". Adding 1.25 million SP to a new character means that that month old character has quite a bit of advantage over a brand new character. Let me be concrete here. Suppose Bob creates “Bobby” his Eve character. Then exactly one month later Joe creates “Joey”. Bobby will have quite a bit of an edge over Joey because Bobby will have that additional 1.25 million SP. However, skip ahead 6 months and now the SPs are 7,500,000 vs 6,250,00. A difference of 20%. After a year, that difference will drop to 9%, 2 years later a 4.35% difference, and 3 years later a 2.86% difference. This is true for any lag between Bobby and Joey although the magnitudes will change. For example, suppose Bobby started 5 months before Joey, then the SP differentials at 6, 12, 24, and 36 months are 500%, 71.4%, 26.32% and 16.13% respectively. Further, the extra advantage of those SP are constant while the SP required are increasing in a convex manner (i.e. the amount of SP needed to get the same sized bonus is increasing, this can be seen by looking at the number of SP for a Rank 1 skill, level 1 requires 250 SP, whereas level 5 requires 256,000 SP but the bonus that level five gives is of the same magnitude of the previous levels).

And when we factor in the myriad of ways that Bobby and Joey might interact it becomes even more dubious to assert that Bobby is more “powerful” than Joey. If for example, Bobby became a miner, but Joey a combat oriented pilot, in a combat setting the “less powerful” Joey would probably Kick Bobby’s ass. When it comes to mining, Bobby would mop the floor with Joey.

And then there is the issue of ships each person has selected as well and how you define “winning”. And as has been pointed out before, there is the social nature of the game and that Joey can always make friends with Johnny and together they can go kick Bobby’s ass.

My point, SP is a dubious way of measuring a characters “power” given the decreasing returns to scale, the ambiguous meaning of power, and that there are ways to surmount this “power” outside the SP system.

Note: These SP numbers are based on the assumption both characters had a uniform distribution of attributes and no implants—i.e. they are both training at the same rates.