EVE General Discussion

WARP DRIVE makes eve boring

really - add warping align time 300% on gun aggression and eve becomes best game again

You mean like Skill Injectors?

Traditional MMOs require you to play the game to "Level Up". Most of them also include "Character or Level Boosters" for those that don't want to wait.
No one is forced to buy them. You can still level your character the traditional way. It's an option.
Unlike other MMOs, in EVE's case it's an option I remind you that requires a resource that is obtained from people who are leveling the traditional way.
If people didn't sell their SP there would be no SP to buy.
It's players buying a player generated resource.
It's brilliant and totally in keeping with the EVE framework.

Have to say sitting next to pilgrim pilot who is 1 hour old feels quite weird

The real grind in traditional MMOs are not the skills/levels but the gear. It's made real with the treadmill of ever increasing power on gear across content updates.

Uhhhh.
I'm glad you've been playing for so long. But sad to see you've been playing only bad ones.
Time gates aren't the devil. Like most things in life, how it's applied is the defining factor. FFXIV gates gear progression with time. You can only obtain a certain amount of Tomes per week that are used to buy gear. However, that's not exactly stopping you from doing anything but waving your stats in someone's face. All content is playable with minimum requirements.
Likewise, Eve's time gate is more of a 'Before you fly a AHAC, you better be able to fly T1 Cruisers" sort of scenario which I don't think anyone would argue with. I'm not letting someone sit in a Titan if they can't even fly a Frigate.

I don't like the idea of skill injectors because they trivialize an aspect of a game. Any cash item that trivializes an in-game feature isn't typically a good idea. Like the Neverwinter example: Sure, you can go farm for 3 months or just buy it in the cash shop. Eve has adapted this feature: Sure, you can train those skills for 3 months or just buy injectors and be done with it. It's effectively a powerlevel aspect.
Luckily, Eve hasn't adapted the "This is impossible without the cash shop" idea like other games have.

Remmeber the character bazaar? It used to trivialise training for specific ships.

Oh wait, it's still there.

I don't like the idea of the bazaar either.
I needed a JF alt. So I made a new account and started training it up.

Both of these will tend to be rendered irrelevant at best and entirely misleading at worst when a character changes hands. No one benefits from these being maintained.

First numbers stated something by the way of 20% loss of SP. If we suppose the alt accounts in question stopped training prior we're seeing likely a gain around 70% - 80% their training capacity of useful SP.

That said given CCPs latest attempts at quantifying who had how many accounts there are per player that isn't too much. Either way that number should be going up rather than down, which really sounds like a good thing rather than flushing a useful part of the sub down the drain.

^ this is true. So true. Perhaps the 400-pound gorilla in the room is the mass of unrealistic expectations so many have re: how the game works and the disappointment they feel when they can't have everything "their way." You don't have to spend years watching your skill queue and mining before you can PVP. We prove that every month or two with the CAS Combat Day. Other public fleets do the same.

True that skill injectors are going to make a certain group of players space-rich. True that they are going to enable access to "top tier" content like capitals and the like to anyone willing to spend the money to get it. Hell, with PLEX anyone willing to spend RL cash can fast-track to the same kinds of massive piles of space-money these veterans have accumulated...but money has always been a shortcut vs. time.

I am seeing a lot of veteran players mad enough to quit over this and I empathize. I understand the perception that CCP has "sold out" by allowing newer players to potentially fast-track to the "level" these veterans have achieved in terms of what they can fly and do.

I also understand that CCP needs to maintain and grow a player base over time, and leaving an un-crossable gulf between those veterans and newer players is a massive barrier to that goal - which makes it a massive commercial risk for CCP and a massive existential risk to the game itself. Perhaps PLEX and skill trading are the least-bad options right now. Personally I'd have voted for a lore-driven "wipe clean" to effectively re-boot the game - but imagine the howls of rage if that were to pass.

So let's do what the smartest gaming community has always done - adapt and get on with it and see how things go.

One of the better upgrade's :)