EVE General Discussion

Shrug.

Thanks, all I needed to know.

I started in June this year, and personally I really like the learning curve of EVE. It's all about finding your own way in the universe, and if you're lucky you'll find a corp full of good people to help you on the way. It's also not unreasonable to say a 6milSP pilot could outfly a 60milSP pilot. New players get their a**** kicked more due to inexperience than lack of SP.

The learning curve of EVE keeps the insta-gratification plebs away. This is the type of game you either love or can't stand playing. There's plenty to do while you still have low amounts of SP. Think of it as an opportunity to explore more of what EVE has to offer.

Because people cba or don't know how to train new players. I don't, I don't like it and I am not going to bother doing it but I am going to tell you that the only reason a corp has an SP requirement is so that they know that you have spent some amount of time playing Eve and know how to use a stargate.

You could have your 10m SP in mining and be entirely useless to a corp that doesn't mine or you could have your 10m SP in shooting missiles and be entirely useless to a corp that mines =p

Most good corps don't have an SP requirement but even some good ones do but it has nothing to do with SP being important. It's a measurement of time spent playing Eve (or time spent playing skillqueue online because you don't actually have to play Eve to get SP =P )

…it is you who have moved the goalposts and enhanced them with a strawman.

Again: new players can take part in everything the game has to offer from day 1. This is my stance and it hasn't changed. It is a counter to your claim that new players are locked out of the relevant game content, for months or even years. They're not. No content has any such lock-out. There are tons of things you can do with every bit of content EVE has to offer and any number of those are accessible to new players right out of the gate.

You are trying to shift this supposed content lock-out into saying “…but I can't use this particular tool in accessing the content”, which is something completely different. The tools are not the content — they are just that: tools; they let you approach the content in some slightly different way, that's all.

No, it's like saying to someone who wants to play the forward in a football match that, hey, the libero position needs to be filled. You won't score as many goals but you get to move around a lot and have to get a good eye for the game. At any rate, they're still participating in the match. The role you're describing is the one filled by the guy who, rather than participate, choose to mope bitterly on the sideline because they believe that the only thing you can do in the game is shoot for the goal.

They really don't. See my signature.
What keeps players from branching out broadly is that they think “trying” means having near-perfect skills and every last bit of top-tier equipment in the book. It doesn't. “Trying” often means as little as training a single skill to lvl 1; often it doesn't even take that much because you can try it with what you start out with (especially with these new massively expanded starting skillsets). My avoiding a repetition of “limit a player's ability to branch out” is very deliberate here because there is no such limit. It is only a matter of active, deliberate choice. You can branch out any time you like to anything you like. SP is never a factor. If it was ever a cap, then it was on the choice of old players' ability to branch out as they got older, as clone costs started to rise dramatically, but that mechanic is long gone so not even that cap (at the other end of the skill spectrum) exists.

If you want to argue that it's a bad thing to do so in some cases (branching out to capships without solid support skills will end in an ALOD killmail), then I might agree with you to a point, but that's just it: you are still branching out; you are still trying that other thing. Even though you perhaps should be in some cases, since you will inevitable make a mess of it as a new player, you are not actually limited in your ability to branch out, old or new.

It's not a good compromise because we know from the previous attempts that this solves nothing — especially not the problems you want to solve. As with everything else related to starting a character, it only benefits old players. Again: it has been tried; we know the result already; it doesn't do what you envision.

You keep saying it like saying it will make it true but I've looked and looked and I think you are wrong about being able to jump in. Sure you can do whatever at low SP but you are going to lose or be dead weight. SP is an artificial cap and unless you actually provide evidence to back up your assertions you are wasting your breath speaking to new players. Sure Vets might agree with you but to the new folks it just looks like you are attempting to protect what you feel you've earned. I get it.. I just think its rather selfish at the expense of folks who want to enjoy a wider breath of Eve.

Your belief is naive. What you want to happen won't help new people, it will help veterans with multiple accounts, like it always has everytime anything like it has been done before.

no one is against helping 'new people' or the game overall. It's just that after all this time, everyone with any sense (ie people not tied to an unrealistic worldview or ideology) knows what works and what doesn't.

this is pretty much the method of pay2win games, they are designed to be money generators, if you dont put real money into the game then your going to be grinding to death to make anything, buy a plex its not that expensive and your life will be much easier in eve

Yeah, so I'm not talking about race, but class. And fantasy vs. sci-fi doesn't matter when you're talking game mechanics; when you look at damage reduction, stuns/cc, single target DPS, AoE DPS, stealth capabilities, nobody cares how the game explains how these abilities are achieved.

SWTOR, for example, the Trooper and the Scoundrel are completely NOT Force-sensitive (you can't argue hocus pocus magic with them), and can tank, heal, DPS, AoE DPS, crowd control, and stealth strictly using various devices, technobabble-explained just like in EVE. But they do NOT get all these abilities on one character; you must, in fact, level up and gear up both archetypes AND you have to respec in order to use ALL the abilities over the course of one play session.

The comparison is NOT flawed. 1 EVE character = a whole Legacy in SWTOR, which takes a whole lot longer to level up and set up than a single character. In EVE, if you focus training on one race and just a few ships (frigates, for example), you are a very narrow specialist, the equivalent of a single character, and this is achievable within a few months tops. If you choose to go "all ships" then you're building a whole account-full of characters, but none of them is going to be higher than level 30-40 because you simply can't play all of them at once. Just like you can't fly all the ships at once in EVE.

Ship = role = class-in-other-MMOs. You want multiple ships = you're training multiple characters at the same time. Takes a LONG time.

As luck would have it, it's not blatantly false. Quite the opposite.

Indeed. The problem is that new players arrogantly refuse to listen and instead choose to assume things based on completely unrelated games. They then become rather agitated and belligerent when their baseless assumptions are challenged. So again, it's a player problem, not anything that is even remotely connected to SP.

How can I realise something that isn't true? The simple fact of the matter is that the player in question can take part in the activity. Your absolute refusal to accept this fact doesn't make it untrue, and trying to paint a wholly unrepresentative picture where you try to equate “not having the same position” with “not even being in the game” just means you're being deliberately dishonest about this whole thing.

It remains the case that this person gets to do exactly what they want to do: play football. They are not relegated to the sidelines. They are not forced into some demeaning servant role. They are not locked out of any content. They're just in a different position that is less likely to score a goal, and you are confusing this with not even being on the field. I can't really determined if it's just stupidity or an active decision to grossly misrepresent the whole thing that's causing you to do so…

Of course it is. No matter how much you wish it to be the case, there are no “newbie roles” that sit in sharp contrast to some imagined “vet roles”. It's all the same, only with different equipment. Hell, even fleet boosting can be done on day 1 at a small scale.

Don't misquote me.

But yes, Memphis is 100% correct: the comparison is not flawed — ships are more akin to other-MMO-roles than anything. You keep talking about narrative, but narrative is irrelevant. There is no difference between “technology” and “fantasy” because they're just a theme pasted on top of the underlying mechanics and dynamics. An EVE character is something that most MMOs don't even offer as far as “classes” go. Again, all you're doing here is demonstrating exactly the kind of flawed assumptions that new players carry with them as baggage from other games. You're assuming that an EVE character is like any other MMO character, when it is really nothing of the kind.

In some other game, you may be a “mage” (usually the role of blocker/disabler). In EVE, you may also be a “mage”: you undock in an ewar frigate. That is your role for the outing. On the next outing, you may instead be a “cleric” by flying a logistics frigate instead. Or you may be a “ranger” by flying a recon ship. Or you may be a “paladin” by flying a fleet booster. The difference here isn't one of theme, but one of how standard roles are implemented through mechanics. In most games, they are distinct and exclusive classes; in EVE, they are ships.

You are also missing the simple fact that every such role has a newbie-level equivalent. That is why they can take part in everything EVE has to offer; why no content is locked out for them.