Devblog: Skills On Demand - Changes Coming To The Skill System!

[Cpt_WhiteEye]

You guys talk about buying skillbooks like its a job for ppl. And they do it hours and hours every day.

I personally spent less than 15 minutes the last 3-4 years to buy my skillbooks. Because they are widely available on markets. Literally you can be in any system in eve and you will have to travel less than 10 jumps to get every skillbook. Not talking about the fact you can preeptively inject every single skillbook the game got to offer in one go. But if not every you can go and buy 30 of them at the same time and that should be enough for 3 years of training.

So while you try and make it a HUGE deal to buy skillbooks. No one actually spend this much time to get them.

[Soleil_Fournier]

@Anderson_Geten

What he’s saying is , he wants the attribute implants to become consumable. That would remove the need to switch clones, would increase the market volume, possiblty increase the isk/lp worth of FW factions, and remove the fear of death you have when you have attributes implants.

Meh. I spent big money on my slave set. This would cause issues. Simply setting the attributes to 24 or 25 and leaving everything else as is would avoid those issues.

[Querns]

@Mizhara_Del_thul

Oh look, the strawman brigade is swarming. You know you’ve hit the buttons when this many goons come along all at the same time.

Don’t flatter yourself. Goons are naturally attracted when those with terrible opinions are ejaculating their noisome word salad all over the internet. It’s basically our mating call.

[Salt_Foambreaker]

The changes seem ok, but I cannot believe this is a priority. Pet Dev Project IMO.

Whatever happened to the list we used to vote on?

[Merkelchen]

All my favorite Eve stories start with, “So I was out collecting skillbooks I needed and…”

[Querns]

@Cpt_WhiteEye

I personally spent less than 15 minutes the last 3-4 years to buy my skillbooks. Because they are widely available on markets. Literally you can be in any system in eve and you will have to travel less than 10 jumps to get every skillbook. Not talking about the fact you can preeptively inject every single skillbook the game got to offer in one go. But if not every you can go and buy 30 of them at the same time and that should be enough for 3 years of training.

So while you try and make it a HUGE deal to buy skillbooks. No one actually spend this much time to get them.

Even if this is true, it can still be easier. Nothing of value is lost by making it easier.

[Soldarius]

I feel sorry for the people that trade skillbooks. But honestly, this is something that has been a long time coming. In a universe where we have instantaneous communications via fluid routers as well as FTL travel, why must we fly from system to system to acquire a physical object that is nothing more than information?

I also agree that this will simplify the Eve Online NPE, which will hopefully increase new player retention.

On a side note, I feel the same way about blueprints. I feel like we should be able to access them from anywhere.

[Anderson_Geten]

@Soleil_Fournier

Meh. I spent big money on my slave set. This would cause issues.

slaves are not attribute implants. They are armor % bonus implants, that incidentaly give attributes.
With this modification you would still have your slaves, just no +4 attributes . Instead you would consume a (weekly? monthly?) booster that gives +5 all and would get purchased from LP stores. And if you went to fight someone in a small frigate, you just switch clone (to not lose your slaves) but keep getting the +5 effect.

[Cpt_WhiteEye]

I could after this. Start a new toon. Join 0.0 mega alliance. Set remote home system to 0.0 office. Self Destruct. Buy 1 ship 5 injector and required skills. And start ratting or mining instantly.

And this seems fine for CCP.

[Querns]

@Cpt_WhiteEye

I could after this. Start a new toon. Join 0.0 mega alliance. Set remote home system to 0.0 office. Self Destruct. Buy 1 ship 5 injector and required skills. And start ratting or mining instantly.

And this seems fine for CCP.

And so your grand plan for avoiding this tragic fate is to… put a 20 minute speedbump in the way? Huh?

[Tanaka_Seiko]

WhiteEye, you could do that now, whats the difference? You would just buy the skills and the injectors in jita or wherever, use em up and bloodyjump afterwards…

[Zachri]

@CCP_Falcon

E X A M P L E S

Please be a professional. How CCP is perceived is in part derivative of how its representation is perceived.

Yes, fine line to walk, professionalism.

[Cloon_McCloon]

Back in my day, we had to travel 50 jumps to jita and back for skillbooks, uphill both ways through the snow, and we liked it.

[Cpt_WhiteEye]

I was always excited to go buy my new skills when i was a new player. They should also Buff Drakes because i miss them.

[Anderson_Geten]

@Soldarius

On a side note, I feel the same way about blueprints. I feel like we should be able to access them from anywhere.

Blueprints are not mere data written on a support. They contain quantum marks that can’t be easily copied (hence why copying it makes a bpc, not a bpo) and are needed to assemble the item correctly at an atomic level (some atoms need to be put in a correct quantum state and that needs to be done by using immutable states stored in the bpo).

[Soleil_Fournier]

@Anderson_Geten

slaves are not attribute implants. They are armor % bonus implants, that incidentaly give attributes.
With this modification you would still have your slaves, just no +4 attributes . Instead you would consume a (weekly? monthly?) booster that gives +5 all and would get purchased from LP stores. And if you went to fight someone in a small frigate, you just switch clone (to not lose your slaves) but keep getting the +5 effect.

I get it, but you’re talking about adding a recurring cost I do not have to pay as long as I manage my clones properly. Not only would changing them add those costs, they would eliminate juicy pod kill mails.

[Mezlah_Chipri]

My only question is, where are the ‘Buy for PLEX’ buttons going to go?

All up, this seems like half of the planned deployment, which will complete in about six months.
These changes remove necessary steps (i.e. travel to market hub) as obstacles and streamline the “Spend real world $$ to instantly supercharge your character” mechanism.

Click a button to buy the skill book for PLEX.

Click a button to exchange PLEX for SP (or a prompt “would you like to use the injector we notice you have in your Vault?” if CCP retains the market interface for that).

Viola, Battleship 5 - unlocked without undock.

[Dirk_Kajhone]

I feel that this change, while potentially handy, is not really something anyone was looking for.

For the newbro, my personal experience is that the NPE gave me the books I needed right at the start/tutorial stage (although the last tutorial I ran could hang if you claimed and injected the books a bit too quickly). After the tutorial, I was at a starter system/university, so all the books I needed were right there (or 1 hop away). In fact the skill system sort of gave me my first intro into looking up market items and pricing them.

It wasn’t really until I was well into cruisers and skilling up whole new weapons systems that I ran into the situation of “I want a skill, but the nearest one on market is 5 jumps away”… which is the first time this demand system would have been handy for me.

At that stage, I would sometimes encounter anomalies, like Missile skills in Gallente systems selling for something like 4.5 million ISK… and from the numbers these were seeded skills at University/school type systems, selling for massively more than they do in their ‘home zone’ systems.

Again, this gave me an early-ish intro to the concept of buying things where they are cheap, shipping them 15 systems over, selling them for cheaper than local but still 8x what I paid for them. Between the early “cart skills from school to hub and resell”, and the later “cart skills from region to region”, this made an important early ISK earning and market learning opportunity for me.

If the markup on ‘demand’ skills is less than 100%, it seems it will kill a lot of the early/newbro skillbook trading market (since the max they can make is double your money, and lots of people won’t even bother checking market if the premium is <100%). If the markup is 100% or greater, then it doesn’t really help newbros since they won’t have the ISK to afford it and will end up just going back to the market anyway.

I guess I’m saying, kudos on trying to do something? But really, fiddling about with minor changes that have as many negatives as positives, while ignoring massive glaring issues with entire game features and events… might not be the best use of programming time.

[Tanaka_Seiko]

I do not see that, you would have to spend so much in injectors to really get something out of it.

[Cpt_WhiteEye]

Yeah i guess we should just accept whatever they decide to make. And be happy about it just like you can Acess any citadel from the outside and deposit ur cargo just to then asset safety it for completely freee. If thats fine this should be fine as well. ■■■■ skillbook traders anyway. They are too small to matter.