But is it fair for a day old newbie to compete with a decade old character?
Also, this argument is such a myth. Not only do we have skill injectors, but also skills have a ceiling, which is quite low for individual activities. An older character can just do more stuff.
Anyway, all these “limitations” are removed when you band together with other people and use friendship to take down your foe.
Also, you don’t even have it as hard as the people who started in 2003. They rebalanced initial skills, so new characters have more skills on creation.
less. I remember that creating “caldari achura monk” long time ago granted player a “missile launcher operation” skill at 5 and plenty of support skills as well. Plus generally “unneeded” charisma was very low in favor of other stats for faster learning learnings and core skills.
There’s certainly not much data available in the forum …
… but it does seems likely the sum of bots plus SP farming alts is growing, and that the player/character ratio has changed significantly.
This would mean that “average players online” and similar statistics aren’t stable, and may be going through a period of relatively rapid variation.
We’ll probably never find out. It would be unreasonable to expect CCP to behave differently to Blizzard (for a long time the market leader in MMOs) who wouldn’t say anything useful even while they reversed from adding servers to consolidating them.
Ok, I cannot say how the game was in 2003, since I didn’t play it then.
However, apparently at some point before the Vanguard expansion, characters did start with 50K skill points. This got changed in the Vanguard expansion to 400k.
All new characters will now start with approximately 400,000 skillpoints rather than 50,000.
According to some earlier comments, new players are suppose to be able to defend themselves against vets, they are just unwilling to do so, of course i disagree with that.
Skill injectors are an option, but not everyone can spend hundreds or thousands of RL money to create an instant vet.
If a group of 3 or 4 alphas where to engage a vet in a blinged out T2 or T3 ship, I’m putting my ISK on the vet.
Bots have always been in the game, I don’t honestly think the numbers have increased any, we’ve just gotten better at spotting them so they are more obvious. I remember a decade ago there where bot fleets strip mining ice belts in HS, and running lvl 4’s in drakes.
SP farms, yeah thats something new, but it also doesn’t matter a huge amount stats wise, since all we have for eve is peak concurrent users, and SP farms are only logged in for a few hours at most every month, so would have minimal impact on PCU.
as for the player to account ratio, it hasn’t changed that much, back in '12-13 ish, they said the average number of accounts to actual players was around 1.5, during the most recent AMA that number had increased to 1.8 so a slight increase, but still not all that significant.
One of my friends was at Evesterdam and someone there was saying that the average vet has 13 accounts. I would be really interesting to see the ratio of plexed accounts vs subscribed and Alpha
Eve is not unique in this, in any game veterans are going to be way ahead of newbies in all respects, both in terms of gear, in game “levels” and just plain old experience with the game mechanics.
You jump ahead a decade or so, newbies are still at the same basic 2003 level
Nowhere near, newbies got a major boost in terms of useful SP when learning skills went away, the tutorials give better rewards and no longer consist of “here’s a Rubik cube, now go fornicate with yourself”.
Newbies have it easier now than they used to, the ships that they have access to are significantly better balanced than they used to be. They also have access to skill injectors and have always been able to be on par with older players in Battleships and smaller in terms of SP with specialisation fairly quickly (in Eve terms); there being plenty of information available that can give a newer player the SP to be effective in Eve, leveraging the SP is where a vet in a cruiser has the advantage over a fairly new player in a cruiser, even given identical SP levels and fits.
On top of the CCP support for newbies, most people who make others explode are usually more than happy to share their knowledge of the dark side; if as a newbie somebody explodes one of the best things that they can do is ask how it happened, and how do they stop it from happening again.
Veterans are a font of knowledge when approached properly, and many will adopt and nurture newbies with the right attitude and are willing to learn from their mistakes.
and the veteran players are now elite with near infinite access to ISK and equipment. There is no way a newbie can compete with that.
C’est la vie, seniority has advantages; both in Eve and the real world.
You said “there is no way…”. I only argue, that there indeed is a way and the competitiveness of newer characters vs older characters is highly underrated.
I’ll take a fleet of some random alpha characters over a single blinged out ship any day. Obviously, it will be harder, if that blinged out ship is specifically well equipped to handle lots of frigates.
No veteran EVE player can reasonably use the word “fair” when defending their advantages.
Nor friendship, until you can reasonably stop saying “In Eve, don’t trust anyone ever”.
The gap is too big. It was too big ten years ago. And Skill Injectors are a P2W fix. Effective, but why should a new player pay a significant premium to get to the point where it’s fun to play?
Some will of course, but on balance you’d expect it to reduce the retention rate even further.
And the usual solutions: cash, boosting by RL friends, blind luck with a Corp , or a personality which doesn’t match what new players observe in the experienced players they meet. It’s not a good story.
Why can vet players not use the word “fair”? I’ve been playing since 2012. Not sure if you would classify me as a vet player. When I had the time to actually fly out and find solo engagements, I’d gladly take a fight in my T1 frigate against faction frigs, cruisers or dessies. Is that not a fair fight?
You don’t need to trust people when you fleet up and fly in groups. This “in EVE, don’t trust anyone ever” is, in my opinion, a rather overused phrase just like “EVE is spreadsheets in space”. Sure, you will encounter some bad apples here and there, but finding a group of people to fly with is actually quite easy. Just don’t be stupid with your ships and assets.
That is one thing that sets this game apart from other MMO’s. There is no perfect ship, perfect fit or perfect modules, everything is very situational. I do agree that if you fit your ship to handle a group of frigs, your results will be much better. Forewarned is forearmed, is very much a fact of life here. But that is a completely different topic
A ‘decade or so’ after the game started in 2003 was when the game was at its most active.
EVE’s SP system is constructed in such a way that their is a fairly low ‘ceiling’ to the amount of SP you can utilise when flying a ship. Capping skills at level 5 and the ever increasing SP costs of higher levels means that a newer player can match a vet at flying particular ships relatively quickly by focusing training. All the SP a vet has in med/large weaponry and the vast majority of space ship command skills are of no use to a vet when using say a T1 frig.
Skill injectors were specifically designed with new players in mind as well. They provide diminishing returns to high SP players. Allowing newer players to catch up. Despite that, i cannot see a noticeable positive change in player activity.
Isk =/= power. The more and more isk you put into a fit, the lower and lower the returns. For example a faction fit pirate cruiser will cost several hundred mil when put together, but it will not perform as well as 10x T1 meta fit cruisers.
EVE’s most powerful resource has never been wealth or SP, it has always been man-power.
I don’t know why todays generation of players refuse to cooperate with each other. This is even more baffling given how much easier it is to do now than before.
@Maekchu
would you believe i wrote this reply before reading yours lol…
Indeed and that was just the point I wanted to make.
Again, I just made the post cause I didn’t agree with your “there is no way…”.
This is why I always encourage newbies to join PvP corps if they are interested in the PvP parts of the game. Not only do one have other newbies to fleet up with, but they also have access to more experienced FC’s who can do all the target selection for them. The newbie gets to experience ships blowing up (either the opponents or their own), as well as, being able to use the corps resources to learn about the game.
Vets have been telling new players that EVE isn’t fair, and HTFU, since my first visits to these forums.
Nobody who’s watched it happen, and even less those who’ve been on the receiving end, cares about vets’ interests. They need to find rational arguments to defend themselves. And as far as I’ve seen this time around they haven’t learned a thing.
As for trust: I heard that when I first played, and didn’t really believe it. And learned through experience that it was one of the better pieces of advice I’d received. EVE isn’t all bad apples, but sifting through the barrel for a good one is time consuming and unpleasant.
I hope I’m wrong with this, but looking that the bottom line on that ship, you would need to sell 44 Plexes (before the plex vault thing) to pay for that. $15x44= $660.
“honey, we can’t pay our bills, but i got a really cool ship”
