Should there be a free SP reallocation option for low sp characters?
It’s just too easy to make mistakes on eve and too hard to decide what you really want to do/fly.
Even with 33m sp on my character I feel like I’m missing out on so much important skills. That I can only fly a few viable ships for the things that I’m doing. And it takes months to spec into the bare minimum of flying specific frigates or destroyers. Not to even mention anything bigger.
Of course there needs to be a limit to this to prevent players abusing the system. I would suggest something like:
5m sp or under: Free respec in a month.
5m-10m sp: Free respec every 3 months.
10-20m sp: Free respec every 6 months.
20-50m sp: free respec every year.
All respecs limited to a maximum of 3 times combined. (maybe resets every few years not sure)
This would make it much easier to actually figure out your playstyle and the ships you like.
This would make it easier for returning players to actually switch around their playstyle and try something new without having to start from 0.
And this would make it possible for more experienced players to actually switch out to different ships if they get bored of the ones they’re flying.
In eve a big problem is burning out of the game because content is just so limited and it’s not like other modern gmes where you can just “do something else” in the game. Yes you can always do something else, but not on eve, especially if you’re low sp. I guess you could go farm t0 abyss with your 30m sp character, but there is no reward at all in there. People just won’t do it. If there would be an option to actually respec into some other form of content from now and then I think a lot more players would stick around after they’re burned out from their previous activity.
Put in a solid universal train and you ahve the cores skills for life. Add to that. This char is a repurposed alt. she was a scout like char. solid cores in place and now I add what is needed as I see trends in pvp. CPU and pg only need training once. Eve has that at least.
Most other games you…reroll. and reroll. And…reroll. Why I have 5 80’s in wrath.
rogue, paladin, hunter, priest, dk. the hunter doesn’t have healer spec (eve logi)
like the priest or paladin. the paladin…can’t do ranged dps. DK and paladin can be my tanks the others can’t do.
Also I know you are looking for free but the pay options are there. I personally took up the skill extractor offer of late. One of my chars has a deep dark secret. She…was a miner/refiner. I “fixed” that lol.
Basically I left scrap metal only. I use that when low ballers have it so bad I jsut melt my loot and cba to flood sell orders.
Personally I don’t think it’s needed, nor do I think all that high a percentage of players make such poor choices in their first 10, 20, 40 million SP etc that it halts gameplay for them. I wouldn’t be against it either, lots of games feature respecs and it’s not that hard to code or implement. I’d charge a proportionate ISK fee for what amounts to a neural reprogramming session though.
That said, this is pretty much what Skill extractors/injectors are for, which does mostly the same thing for an ISK or Plex fee. It’s also not that hard just to get what use you can out of your “poor life choices” alt and start one that’s more focused.
As usual, the thing to be wary of is “could anyone find a way to exploit this?”. You could potentially see players farming up chars in whatever manner got them to 20 or 30 million SP fastest, then switching the char over to something more lucrative. Or selling/trading chars with respecs ready, which would bypass the Injector market and cut into CCP sales. Or flipping a whole corp of chars over from miners to mercs in a single day (which might be kinda fun).
Sure, it might be a convenience here and there, but at a certain risk to cash flow for CCP. In the meantime I think they’ve got bigger fish to fry. Continuing to add more entertaining and viable activities to the game, for the most part.
I wouldn’t say I specifically want to respec, but I feel like even with 33m sp I don’t have much of a choice with the ships I want. As well as how can I know what I want without trying it first? I can try something and realize that I actually don’t like this ship and I’m stuck with it because there’s no real way to respec.
I would agree that there should be a cost associated with it and point to skill extractors. You’re pretty much spending 400m for 500k sp which don’t really do much. (And under 5m sp you can’t even do that, which is a couple of months of training already.)
You’d be better off to spend ~400m more and buy an injector instead. That way you’re not losing anything at least.
What I mean mostly there should be a way to be able to try stuff before you buy into it. I am mostly pvp spec and since there’s not too much content pvp wise in eve sometimes I would want to rat. And lets be honest there’s nothing exciting about ratting in eve. Most npcs are very straight forward and there’s no mob/boss mechanics like in other mmos where the dungeons / raids are actually fun. When ratting it’s basically “isk is fun”. I could go rat guristaas and farm my 1m/h, but not much more with the skills that I have. I could do the t0-t3 abyss, but it’s not as fun nor there’s any reward associated with it.
Well, I hear you on ship choice and activities etc. Although much of that is just because 33M SP really doesn’t cover a huge range of ships or activities, no matter how you slice it. For the EVE “old school” crowd, they’d basically say “33 mill? That’s like 18 months of Omega time. 18 months is nothing! I’ve set up training queues longer than that!” So their recommendation would be, suck it up and start training now for where you want to be.
CCP would probably want you to chose the extractor/injector route because that’s more market activity and store sales for them. But add the expense to the loss of @ 20% of your SP makes that a bit of a burn. Or maybe jazz up the expert systems route for more “try before you buy” options.
I’ve often criticized CCP for dragging their feet on modernizing and streamlining the options EVE presents to the playerbase. It’s not 1999 anymore and people have too many other choices for their leisure time and dollars. That said, I don’t think CCP would ever go for free complete-SP respecs.
Maybe something like “self-only, character bound skill extractors” that are somewhat cheaper and only have maybe half the SP loss penalty, bought for Plex from the NES store only. That’s about as close as CCP would likely come to something like this. Plus it would minimize any potential for the weird exploits players manage to come up with.
I understand that ccp would never introduce something that would cut into their wallets, but wishful thinking isn’t banned right?
That being said I think it really hurts the playerbase with an issue like this. Especially newer players. They get trapped into a corp that spams new players and are sent on a path that the corp believes to be right. Say mining for pve and nullsec sitting on gate for pvp enjoyers.
There’s so much to do in eve and most of it is out of the grasp of a player with low sp. All you can do is wait. Kind of reminds me of those old browser games where you have to wait for your energy to recharge to be able to do anything.
The 1m sp is already a very good step in the right direction, however I don’t believe that it’s enough.
I’ve heard of expert systems and the complains about them from the community and I somewhat agree to it, but I think that something like this should be in the game for free for new/low sp characters.
There’s really no harm done to at least allow players to respec their skills for a certain amount of time or a limited amount of times. Skill extractors are way too expensive and injectors also. Even if you could extract skills under 5m you can’t really farm up the isk required to buy one. Yes you can buy it from the store, but at that point just climb the sales ladder and buy more skillpoints instead.
Especially for pvp. PvP requires you to fly your ships at pretty much the peak capacity they can, else you just die. This requires a lot of skills into specific fits. And as we all know that pvp isn’t content you can just get into. You need to spend a lot of time finding other players willing to fight you on somewhat fair terms. (You can always yeet your ship into 20 ppl, get dunked and call that pvp.) But most of the time it’s hard to find and if you want to do something else on the side you simply can’t do it with any efficiency. Sure go rat that c1 anom or t1 abyss. That’ll net you 1m isk in profits per site. (I’m pulling the numbers off my ass but you should get the point)
Another alternative would be to actually add engaging pve content to the game where the isk you make isn’t all the fun associated with it.
Still think it should be free for new characters. Don’t think that new players are the ones ccp are trying to milk.
New players are content for old players who are the cash cows
When I started and not able to fly hac’s…I got navies. Its close enough for most purposes for most cruisers. Caldari especially. Cerb and navy caracal worked off same princibles. Not up to speed if patches changes this markedly.
Frigates, dessies and cruiser, imo, give flexbility enough to see what one should like. And doesn’t like.
I’ve never been partial to “healer” class. So logistics training came many years later when the true main was putting in skllls just because.
Now I did like e-war support, so back in the day recons then widow was the chosen Blops in time for main. They changed ecm, main runs minmatar caps…at least I can walk into the panther if I wake them up.
There are story missions that excite the mind without extracting the wallet so that leads you into the type of pve content you mentioned above that you’re seeking.
Indeed it is. On the other hand it’s also a long time to realize you made “poor choices” or none at all ?
This “old schooler” would even argue that none of those 33M sp are poorly spent - they will always be useful at some point.
Not all of my sp at that moment (40M) were spent completely usefully, I’ll admit that, but the game constantly throws you some delicious side tracks, and throws you off your previously envisioned goal. This “old schooler”, although not much of a sticker to plans either, would advise to “stick to the original plan”, because there are too many diversions to get anything useful done. Need to have a plan first, of course.
Anyway, that’s how I experienced it, and still do for what lies beyond 200M sp.
CCP also seems to have addressed that “re-spec’ing” question with … skill extractors/injectors
Sure. So lets make it anything below 5 million SP.
5m-100000m sp: Free respec every year.
No. Respecs should not be stackable.
Funny that you say this, and yet you are arguing that there is so many things to do that 3 respecs isnt enough because you could switch what you want to do.
You could farm T3 abyss with a 30m SP char.
You make it sound as if without respec, you cant skill anything. This is not true. At most, you save maybe like 15 days out of 90 days worth of skilling.
So what if it takes you an extra day to skill something every 10 or so days. Its not life-ending or anything.
Just train something else. Respeccing doesnt fix the problem that you have to wait, nor does it prevent you from skilling into whatever you want.
Whats the minimum amount of time you need in order to try, for example, mining? Cant you skill into a venture in like an hour, and also skill into T1 Miner in like an hour as well? Cant you skill Astrometrics and relic and data hacking in like an hour to get level 1 and access to T1 data and relic hackers?
You keep repeating this sentiment, but its not true. It takes an hour or two to get into anything you want. Want to fly a Heron and hack sites? 2 hours. Want to mine in a venture? 2 hours. Literally takes a few hours to try whatever you want to try.
You seem to want to be able to do mid-to-high end stuff without having to wait an extra day or two to skill into it. That is not “Trying something new”. That is “Trying something new, and then being able to farm from it, proficiently”.
My alts that fly Rorquals have 30 million SP. 30 Million SP is no small amount of SP.
If CCP does choose to impliment this, they would do it for something far lower than 30 million. Probably give someone with like 5 million to 10 million SP a chance to add an extra respec for free. At which point Ikaru Caderu will be back and arguing that she deserves a free respec too, even though shes 50 milion SP at that point.
I agree with your O.P, it makes perfect sense to allow players to respec once in a while and it would help a lot of players who either come back to the game or have enough SP to respec into another specialty.
