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

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524

No, they’re in space. They have no idea what a university station is or why they would need to use one, either.

Remote injection causes way more problems than this does. This was designed in such a way as to not completely destroy the market. Here, it’s not all skills, and there is still a profit to be had seeding markets and buying low and selling with a markup. All that goes away with remote injecting. This is the least market distorting solution.

As for the “there are other things” nonsense…come on, dude.

525

I can buy any book on the planet and have it shipped to my house for free.

I can download 95% of books onto my phone, desktop, tablet, or Kindle instantaneously.

You’re telling me in the year 394957563027294 that human beings are immortal, but they have to go to a ■■■■■■■ store to buy a book?

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526

In eve terms I was a new player not too long ago, a bit over 2 years. And I gotta tell you, you guys are completely missing the mark here.

Instead of doing all this, what you should have done with skills is simply color code the magic 14 and give players a much, and I mean much better presentation and introduction to markets. Open the market screens, make a nice presentation, inform them about bigger trade hubs, different pricing, etc.

When I played as a starting character, one of the issues was that the skillbooks in the new player hubs, and not just skillbooks, modules, starter ships, all of it, is grossly overpriced by market manipulators. The game completely failed to inform me about different markets, different prices at those markets etc.

I could have left the newb system a huge amount of time earlier then I did, but couldn’t because I was grinding measely newbie ISK to buy stuff (skillbooks included) at the super inflated prices locally.

I had no idea about Dodixie, Jita, Amar, Hek, Rens etc. This is what you need to change.

2nd, the biggest problem I ran into was the overview. Its such an incredibly critical part of the game and you, CCP, surprisingly just can’t get it right for whatever odd reasons. Your players can and share some very nice overview packs between each other, but you can’t. Why ? Fix this.

Fixing the overview is also least time / manpower consuming fix you will ever do. Seriously. All you gotta do is just examine the popular packs and use minimal common sense to see what makes them good. Then just copy the settings and make them default. You’re done. How difficult is that ? I honestly can not understand how you guys, as devs, can’t do this.

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527

This should definitely be getting done, too, yeah.

528

hmm… well I see why the skill book traders are upset about a CCP induced artificial limit to their markups, but also see the need to grow the game with the Alpha’s

To spice it up, consider eliminating Attributes (Intelligence, Wisdom, Perception, Willpower and Charisma) and just give Omegas a 40 across the board and Alphas a 20. Get rid of the one year waiting time to change your attributes. Capsuleers can still use Implants to raise stats up to 45 for Omegas and 25 for Alphas. May see a lot more PVP players training Charisma skills and actually providing boosts to the fleet!

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529

This isn’t nearly enough.

It is completely obvious if politically incorrect to understand that the skill point system is one of many legacy features that once served the game well but is now crippling Eve’s uptake of new players.

But it isn’t that new players can’t figure out how to buy skill books, it is because things have moved on and they just don’t have the incentive to wait some artificial amount of time until they can play a game - not when there are so many other games out there and this one’s secrets have already all been revealed.

Time for Eve to move on. Just do away with skill requirements altogether. They are no longer a goal to strive for but instead an obstacle to playing the game.

We need a war on all the stupid stuff that people love to argue makes Eve the game it is. If it is a sacred cow then it is time for it to be slaughtered.

The skill point system is the first concrete wall - protected by self interested zealots - that the new player runs into. Very few new players are going to stumble around New Eden like blindfolded, chained, circus freaks for months and months unable to play the game properly without giving up.

We need a level playing field for all players. If you pay the subscription, then you get access to the whole game. We don’t need more players like we have, we need the new players that are out there now, so the game must change to match them, not stagnate to preserve the current dinosaur population.

The alternative is we continue to enjoy Eve Online: Purgatory.

I’d also throw in aggressive Asset Expiry to put the brakes hoarding and the general accumulation of wealth…

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531

Done cleaning up, please continue from wherever you were.

533

So what if it is manipulated – If someone is willing to sink enough ISK into Jita or Jita/Amarr to sink the skill book Market indeffintly then good for them. They open themselves to a huge amount of exposure since nothing stops someone from just going to school system and buying it for the original cost. Frankly someone could do the same to the rare drop only skills now in the same way, but they really do not and there is no other place to purchase them. It would really be a poor option for someone to manipulate the skill-book market anyway…since the markup price would go to CCP, removing it from the game, and not to the person driving the market up.

534

Long term effects, away from emergent behaviour, more user types who bind less, indicative of changed decision processes and changed functional model.

A change with good intentions, but long term effects, which also functions as a quick finger in the kettle where frogs are being boiled.

535

these changes seem pointless… but i would like that the skill point go into a bank of reserves when you are not actually training a skill in particular.
witch has frustrated peoples for 16 years (loosing SP)

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536

CCP Falcon,

I can appreciate the helpful information and the new “buy it now” style buttons in the training menus, but I feel leaving the skill books seeded as-is also has value. Your position on new players being confused by having to go buy skill books is best alleviated by giving them a helpful Aura bump the first time or two they click on a skill they don’t currently have injected. Better to teach them how it works the first time rather than confuse them down the line by having two methods of how you can buy skill books.

Also, since we’re on the topic … CCPlease restore the old function to the skill queue where you can see exactly how many skill points (and, by extension, how much time) a player needs to acquire every level of every skill (whether it’s trained or not). This would be easily achieved with a pop-up info panel when the mouse pointer hovers over any skill in the middle third of the skill training interface. The current GUI is really nice except for that one glaring flaw.

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537

I can buy a catalytic converter, a space heater, and a TV and have all of them delivered to my house for free, but in the glorious future of digital death machines, I have to fly all the way to ■■■■■■■ Jita to get a shield booster at a good price?!?!

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538

Currently: you lose say 100mil because you stop your nullsec job and go jumping around to buy a skill book that cost 20million.

After: you make 100mil from your job because you kept doing it and paid 50million premium price for the book so you net gained 50million isk…at the push of a button!

HOW ON EARTH COULD YOU NOT LOVE THIS PROPOSAL ???

539

I like this change. People acting like this tiny thing is the end of EvE.

540

So, just another “gift to gankers” that don’t want to spend the time and effort training up their ganking alts. Again.

Removed learning skills because they whined it took too long to train their alts every time they bio-massed them.
Created skill extractors/injectors to make it even faster to train up new alts.
Create free “Alpha” toons so they could create even more alts.

Changing skill book system so they can train any skill - no matter where their alts are located. (So if they want to train Gallente ganking alts but are located in Amarr space - no problem getting the skill books anymore.)

Meanwhile, this is supposed to be about “new players” yet the “New Player Experience” is so pathetic, I suspect a lot of n00bs spend their first 10 minutes sitting in space (when they first enter the game) and then quit because they have no clue what anything is or how to do anything.

I recently put 3 alts through the NPE as an experiment. I swear, if I didn’t already know how to play, I wouldn’t have been able to kill the first rat as I would have had no idea how to fire a weapon or manoeuvre my ship. Sheesh - you start zoomed out so far you don’t even know you are in a ship !

This change won’t help most n00bs at all as they won’t have a clue about how to use it anyways.

But that won’t matter. The CSM has told CCP what it wants done and, as has been proven, no amount of “player feedback” is going to change their decision.

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541

You can still get all those things delivered. :slight_smile:

542

Good change!
Less time wasted on boring traveling for the skill book that also needs time to be completed.

543

Eve seems much smaller these days. I left a game where every jump under .5 was nail biting. I come back to systems with less than 10 players in high sec. EVE , as a profit making enterprise, badly needs a way to get new players in…and keep them. I don’t believe this is a good way to do that. They will get a rush of “newbies” in who are used to leveling to 100 with $50.00 usd. They will then lose almost all of them. I suggest a six months test. I.e. implement the new skill system. Track player subs for six month. Track both gains and losses. ie. how many “newbies” are still there after six months. If CCP doesn’t get a net gain of 20% then “roll back” the system to the old way. Kind of like giving boosters for a limited time.

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