I do not agree with the concept proposed at Fanfest to remove Skill Training queue and the Attribute system.
Skill training is a core component of the EVE experience. Years of training and experience flying ships back to back gives you the satisfaction of accomplishment from your time spent investigating what you need and training what you want. The desire to want more abilities, accomplish more things, is what drives a pilot to work on something. Say you want to be in a MOM ratting in null sec, you need to research what it takes to use light and heavy fighters, what you need to have enough fitting space for capital shield extenders, you need to find out how much capacitor it will take to run a network system. You build your training queue to reflect that effort. You spend your time to create a plan for your character to grow into that specific design. Every time a skill completes day after day, month after month, you see your character build from the work you did prior. You took the time to say I want this specific thing as fast as possible. So you redo the attribute distribution to optimize your base skill queue speed. You work towards getting the implants to further speed up your progress, looking into which mission sets provide the proper module drop for attribute boosts. All of your effort has made you better prepared for your final goal. You took a character in EVE and made it what you wanted it to be. You made it a unique pilot in a sea of identical pilots, you became something better. You became someone different because of your choices.
Rip that all away, remove all sense of requirement and planning. Everyone’s provided a daily skillpoint allotment. You have no sense of accomplishment. You log in for 10 seconds a day to get 30k skillpoints. After 1 month of playing EVE-Launcher-1.0 for a total of 3 minutes you mass dump those skillpoints to get the required level 3 of racial BS/BC/C/D/F skills and you’re in a Carrier. That was exciting, that was satisfying. There is no self-accomplishment that you worked for that. Same reasoning as to why skill injectors have no satisfaction to their benefit. You instantly get the end result of something without having to work for it, without requiring effort to be made. No time was spent planning out what you needed at what time to properly attune your character’s attributes. No game analysis was done to look into what mission’s rewards could help boost your training speed. No effort was made to work on certain skills before others in a design to better yourself as a pilot with those skills. You didn’t have adjust your skill train on the fly from working on the racial ship skill to the capacitor skills because you’re running into issues with cap from an MWD in a new Vexor even though you were fine in a Tristan. You didn’t have those stepping stone moments in your career, you went from a Tristan to a Nyx in one second, without a thought into what that takes to fly.
In 2010 it was estimated with the skills in EVE that it would take 33 years to train everything to level 5. There was a purpose to look into the path you wanted to follow with your training queue. With millions of variations on your queue, you had endless choices to hone your skills for whatever ship looked the coolest to you. EVE Online is played in months and years. It is not played in days and weeks. In 15 years, my character still works on things that I’m missing from my skill repertoire. And in 15 years I’ve seen the rise and fall of groups in the dozens. Seeing new players get excited over learning about skill injectors and fall out after 3 months of playing EVE and don’t feel like anything was accomplished. Alone, character attributes only coincide physically with the training time of a skill and nothing else in the game, however, realistically it connects so many things together. You tie in what you want to train with everything it takes to be a pilot in EVE. Though it may be daunting to figure all of these things out, that’s the pull of EVE online. The complexity and the rabbit hole of information that you can delve into. You can stay on the top surface and just look at the basic values to be a pilot, or you can dive into that research to see the connected dots that have woven EVE’s components together.
EVE Online is built on the concept of non-simplistic. Everything in EVE has a surface level value of what it can be but it’s true value will be much more in-depth and expansive with multiple facets of information. You can take a hybrid turret and say it shoots out to 40km and that’s it. But what really is said is that it goes to 30km with perfect accuracy but with falloff into 40, radial tracking that allows smashing shots at 31km but only grazing shots at 38km. Removal of the training queue is a change to the system to remove the in-depth facets of the character attributes. You remove the core concept of EVE from a part of itself.
Exact time frame during Fanfest presentation by CCP Nomad on the upcoming changes removing skill queue - EVE Fanfest 2022 - Day 2 - YouTube