Attributes are pointless

Please can we just get rid of them now.

They are a relic of a bygone era.

No, they’re not. Attributes make sense. In order to be good at firing your guns you need to have good perception. In order to be good at communication with the agents who are other people, charisma will help. Makes all the sense to me.

What should be got rid of is the modification of attributes. Neural remaps are not logical. You remap your character once and that should be it. That’s the kind of ‘personality’ you picked for him and he should be stuck with that throughout his life. You shouldn’t get to shift him from one end to another every now and again.

I like the attribute system. It could use some overhaul probably, and some improvements, but all in all, that’s not something I would call a ‘relic of a bygone era’.

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OK, don’t remove, but I agree a HUGE overhaul. ATM it is just a barrier to people trying new things.

I think attributes would have made more sense if you could earn the points to add to them, over time, and the first time I saw it I just expected it to be that way as I’d seen that in other games.

I completely forgot it existed after the first remap.

Don’t even know how I have it set.

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Except that’s not how attributes are used. They confer no benefit to any game mechanic other than skill training. As well, neural remaps aren’t about changing a character’s personality. They exist solely to allow players to periodically optimize skill training rates. If two characters both have Gunnery V, the one with high Perception is no better a shot than the one with low Perception. The only difference is that the former was able to train that skill faster.

Because of that, I tend to agree that attributes (in their present form) are more or less vestigial, much like the learning skills of old that we had to spend a month or more training to optimize future skill point gains. Those learning skills were eventually deprecated, and though I was a bit salty about that (having invested the time to fully train them), looking back, I can see it was for a good reason.

That said, at this point, removing or remodeling attributes would be a non-trivial task, primarily because of implants. A training clone with a set of +5s runs about 500m ISK, and I would guess that’s probably one of the first major investments most players make in their characters. So removing attributes altogether would have to involve some kind of ISK reimbursement to avoid players losing their collective minds over the change. Injecting trillions(?) of ISK into the economy might have a detrimental effect.

Even if you remodeled attributes so they had a mechanical effect on gameplay instead of training speed, that may also be fraught with potential issues and backlash.

A couple years ago at Fanfest, CCP talked about removing attributes and even the skill queue itself, and moving to a model where characters accumulate SP over time (possibly accelerated by boosters) and spend that SP to buy skills. IIRC, Dust514 used this model. However, nothing has moved on that front, and I would suspect it’s because someone looked at the implant issue and realized it would be a logistical nightmare to implement fairly.

TL;DR: Attributes are not awesome, but changing that system would be a major PITA.

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Just CC past that point. Who needs experience?

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Except that they don’t grant such benefits…

nvm @Hatch_Nasty beated me to it.

The attributes play an important role in slowing down your ability to shift from one playstyle to another. This is intentional, as it is not healthy for players to constantly try to min/max whatever the latest fad is.

But what new player wants to spend time learning?

New players don’t need to train skills in order to have fun.

That’s why I put the word ‘personality’ in quotation marks. It’s not real personality, but something like that for lack of a better term. And, no, having a high-attribute perception is not going to make you a better shot than someone with low-attribute perception, however it makes you more adept at learning gunnery skills (i.e. faster). In that sense it makes sense to me.

Just like someone in real life who has great spatial awareness is more adept at learning to fly a plane, but it doesn’t necessarily mean they are a better pilot than someone who has less of spatial awareness. It’s about base characteristics (attributes in EVE) that make you better disposed to doing one thing or another. The actual skill at doing something complex is usually achieved through practice (skill training as EVE analogue).

You’re right, they only affect skill training, but skill training is part of game mechanics. Part of how the game works. I like it that there is no ‘flat rate’ training. I.e. training all the skills at the same base rate. It’s more complex than that, and based on a certain profiling of the characters. Which I like. But, I do agree that the system should need an update. It can be improved and made more interesting.

I don’t think it makes sense to draw IRL analogs, for two reasons:

  1. EVE is a game, and
  2. Capsuleers aren’t even really human. We’re clones, immortal infomorphs who can inject and extract skills from our minds, teleport our consciousness across interstellar distances, modify our brains with implants, and survive the physical destruction of our bodies. Neural remapping is just par for the course.

And when you’re dealing with an infomorph, those characteristics are malleable, both with hardware (implants) and software (boosters). So it doesn’t make any sense that they should be fixed and unchangeable.

EVE Online is set in a far-future, transhuman, post-singularity universe. Widen your perspective beyond humanity’s limits in the 21st century.

You think that’s air you’re breathing?

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hehe i can’t even remap because i’ll lose a point permanently

Disagree. You seem to interpret it on those terms, I don’t. Capsuleers are humans. EVE is a thing existing within the framework of reality. Real people use it. It is based on real-life analogies and laws. It’s not something summoned into existence from a complete vacuum. One of the reasons it is so appealing to me, is precisely because of its parallels with real life.

Just because technology advances, doesn’t mean we have to throw everything and the laws of physics out the window. I see a lot of posts lately where somebody comes up with some new idea and then justifies it with ‘‘but the technology has advanced and that’s why it needs to be changed’’. This is a justification for exactly nothing.

Laws of the universe still stand. Humans are still humans. We haven’t changed in the past 20,000 years or more. Technology advances, but just because it advances, doesn’t mean all random nonsense gets a pass. There is a clear sensibility to having attributes in the game. If you don’t see it that way, then I guess you don’t. But it’s not yours to change it either.

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I am a frozen pizza. They say, you are what you eat. I am going with frozen pizza.

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No. Capsuleers used to be human. We’re now immortal infomorphs. Special. Different from the human masses that populate most worlds.

To become a capsuleer, our minds were digitized, and our original bodies destroyed. The virtual image of our mind is all that’s left of who we were, and that information is now just bits stored in a digital medium—copyable, saveable, transmittable.

To interact with the world around us, we capsuleers find it convenient to download our minds into clones. Those clones are made from human tissue, but they are just shells, interchangeable and ultimately disposable. We can resculpt them. We can swap them at will. This body is better at learning skills. This body is better at mining. This body has combat bonuses. This body I don’t need anymore, so I’ll just destroy it. Soon, we’ll have warclones, bodies made specifically for ground combat. In the future, there’s nothing to prevent CCP from adding purely mechanical bodies for us to inhabit (e.g., combat mechs or something). In fact, I would posit the only reason we have human-like clones at all is to keep us from going insane.

This is why all attributes are mental (Perception, Willpower, Intelligence…). There is no Strength, Agility, Endurance, etc., because once inside your pod, your “body” becomes meaningless. Whatever ship you board is your body.

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BRING BACK LERANING SKILL! :rolling_on_the_floor_laughing:
Never mind blackout, want to see a player drop! :grimacing:

That’s only your interpretation of it.

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It’s not my interpretation. It’s the lore of EVE Online. Go read it. Go watch a few videos. You are not human. You are an infomorph, a posthuman entity, a copy of a human mind that once existed. The original mind, and the body it inhabited died the day you became a capsuleer. It was biomassed and is no more. The bodies you now inhabit are merely clones, lifeless corpses animated by your downloaded consciousness.

I’m sorry if this truth fills you with existential dread, but it’s a fact nonetheless. If you don’t like that, complain to the writers at CCP.

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