Player Features and Ideas Discussion

this is a dumb idea

buy PLEX and sell it to buy a character

Mind you, such dumping has already happened when CCP removed learning skills. Sky failed to explode.

The only real problem I see with that is that it would be 'easy' to gain SP. In the sense it wouldn't require constant attention to skill queue as would be in case of incubation. When think about it, IMO this is the core problem: if such unattended skill gaining was permitted, why not allow, say, one year long skill queue? Similar effect.

Choices are lesser issue. Even with backdated SP choices made would stay made.

My opinion is that of course it would require careful balancing of how much SP would be given this way but I'm still not convinced it would break the game.



I think it nicely sums it up. "If I got calluses on my ass training titan, so everyone else should." Though I try not to think this way, I understand people who do.

My idea:

1. You can buy missed skills only once per character. This applies for the life of the character. This prevents players from buying a years worth of skills, putting the character into hibernation, then doing it again one year later.

2. You can only buy up to 75% of missed skills. This prevents someone who has paid and played since Day 1 from losing their earned advantage.

3. You lose 5% of missed skills as a penalty. This somewhat covers the 'bad decisions' that would have happened had the person played through that time.

Personally, I don't have a problem with a subbed account accruing training time while skills are not being trained. But you have to do it up front. You can dump 12 months of sub into the account, and when you get back to civilization you have 12 months of SP to invest.

I think that this would only be minorly abuse-able (it takes well under a year to spec for any sub-capital FoTM) and you would have to have the forsight to keep a number of accounts full subbed for long periods for it to become genuine abuse, and even then it is no more abusable then having multiple alts training different things and sitting them in station doing nothing until they are at max skills, it just changes when you make the decisions.

However, this is totally different from buying back skill points.

I have two characters from 2004 that I abandoned when I made Valea, and I'm sure that a lot of people made new accounts instead of biomassing their old characters.

The real problem is that by letting an account unsub, you make the statement 'I am not playing eve anymore'. That can be because you are poor, or because you don't have time or because you actually quit the game, or whatever.

So, if you are in fact rewarded for leaving the game for whatever reason then it totally goes against game mechanics. And yes you would be rewarded. Being able to freely invest skill points really is a massive advantage.

Everyone who actually PLAYS eve trains various odd or out of character skills (I have mining director, for example) because that is what they needed at the time. You're journey through eve is seldom a predictable one. When you come in with 15mil sp to dump, you can come out with perfect skills for what you want to do NOW, not what you ended up needing to do 6 months ago.

Giving people an active reason to not play the game is just awful. Unsub your accounts today, and next year you will be leader of the pack.

That's why this is a bad idea. Getting an advantage by not playing (not just not logging in, but actually not even subscribing) is just bad. Anyone can make unlimited rookie accounts and come back to them as needed to do whatever roll they need doing at the time. Ten million SP can get a character into basically any sub-cap ship in game with nearly max skills. And you get that for 6bil, as many times as you want.

To contrast it to any other MMO, you do not get experience when you are not subscribed. Why would you ? You have to go out and earn those levels. When you come back you don't get a pop-up saying 'Well done for not playing for 6 months, you are now level 70'. That would insane. While eve has a different training model that gives you SP when you aren't logged in, if it didn't keep the basic rule of 'No sub, no sp' then you are going to end up rewarding large numbers of people who quit an account but still actively play (who can plex with isk) handing them ANOTHER high SP character for free.

It would also radically devalue all characters, and I think that is a bad thing too.

Exactly. And this is what would have to be balanced.

First, no proposal in this thread allowed for reactivating player having real advantage in number of SP. In every case reactivated player would have lower SP than that being active during this time.

And "how much lower" is the question which makes whole thing interesting. Suppose there is proposal to give 10 SP (exactly, ten) per year of inactivity. If you disagree then it means you're against just by principle and there's no further discussion about it. But if such insignificant amount is acceptable then it means there's some level of balance. For everyone involved it will be different but I'm sure one could be found which would be acceptable to most (or cause least public bitching).

Fair enough, everyone is entitled to their opinion... you can't please all of the people all of the time. There should be a vote which includes currently unsubbed players.

Vets will at some point have to give way on a few of these issues. What good is it being ahead if there is nobody to be ahead of? We need ideas to bring players back and I don't think a catch-up training speed implant for resubscribing players is a bad one.

I think gold ammo is different as it would affect all players and almost 'require' people to pay money to stay ahead in fights. A catch-up implant would not give anyone an advantage.. their skill numbers would be the same as if they'd never unsubbed and it would take the same 'overall' time.

This does seem to be a "I don't want people catching-up to me" issue, which is natural.. but imagine what it means for the player count and CCP... more players returning than what might have without it; and then when they do a lump sum to CCP. A small price to pay for the vets I feel... how is it any different from the officer edition?

I don't class this as an advantage, but a disadvantage turned into neutral. You're just back-paying your subscription. I'd be against gold ammo myself, but a catch-up training speed implant feels fine to me.

I wish I could like this many times over. This is the bottom line of all the argument against this thread and sums it up perfectly.

It's not about choices being meaningful or not. It's about whether someone else makes same choices as you.

My feeling is that the bottom line of all arguments against is that in case this feature was implemented in any way, a couple of vets would ragequit.