You might like or hate a mechanic, that is something personal and also a valid opinion of course.
But the reasoning you gave can be applied to all other aspects to EVE as well:
Why do we have 5 skillevels and not only 3 per skill… everyone trains them anyway to 5 at some point
Why do we have ship insurance…just a gotcha trap for the absent-minded
The same goes for structure fuel…why do we need it? An unnecessary nuisance.
Today everyone and their mother is flying T3s like crazy. It is the most used lowsec PVP ship. Why was the subsystem skilllevel loss upon ship destruction removed? This meant you had to think if you should use the ship or if you are capable enough. It was a unique feature of T3s.
I know that the reason given for it was that people can now instantly reapply the skillpoints with injectors - alright. But what stopped FC from just implementing another new penalty on the lost skillevel? Just a timelock on the retraining of the for a week or two or relatively to the dice throw to which skill it hit in the old system to replicate the impact of the ship loss and just countering that they now have skill injectors?
I generally don’t like it if they patch out consequences. Everything should have consequences and FC should not patch that out but put more of it into the game.
Consequences and decisions matter in this game. And i like to think about consequences and also decide stuff - that is what the game is about.
Oh please. Why must everything be penalties? This is supposed to be a game after all. Entertainment. You know, fun. Eve is not the SAT to prove how big a brain you have or how superior or “tough” you are, ffs.
It’s all about balance and engagement, friends. Crap like the learning skills that you HAD to train before you could train were annoyances. They added neither fun or engaging content. They were a grindy time sink, plain and simple. I’m glad CCP/FC got rid of them. They need to keep that up and remove old annoyances that exist because certain vets like to view them through rose colored glasses or, worse yet, have fallen victim to the “I had it rough so you youngsters need to as well” syndrome.
I understand your perspective, but I think you also have to look at the issue from FC’s perspective as game designers. With every change, they have to ask whether they are improving the game for most players? Will it make EVE more fun or will it make the game more tedious? Ideally, any game designer should strive for the right amount of challenge, the most fun, and the least tedium.
For example, the T3C skill loss mechanic added consequences. Consequences add challenge, and this is good—but only up to the right amount! Too little challenge is boring. Too much is frustrating. It’s a difficult balance to strike.
But if the T3C SP loss discouraged players from flying really cool ships they might otherwise fly, was it good game design? Some might argue that the player is already being penalized with the loss of their ship, why also penalize them with the loss of SP? Especially in the era before skill injectors, SP (time) was far more valuable than ISK.
When FC removed that penalty, I’m sure it was based on metrics. They could see how many players were flying T3Cs, and if it was less than what they expected, maybe they asked why? If the answer they got from player feedback was that SP loss was too onerous or too risky, they may have decided the mechanic was too harsh. If more people are flying T3Cs today, then that was probably the right move.
At the end of the day, FC wants players to play the game. If certain mechanics are shown to prevent or discourage that, it makes sense for the mechanics to change.
See this is a much harder question to answer than it might seem. Because as someone pointed out you could automate everything in the game and then the user wouldn’t need to do anything, but there are autobattlers etc. out there and they are beyond tedious into entirely pointless.
Fun requires at least some level of challenge. EvE was, and is, full of challenge and thus super-fun for a certain type of person, i.e. those who like a lot of challenge. Whilst removing some of the more ‘boring’* aspects of the game probably makes it more fun for the vast majority of humanity it makes it less fun for those who make up the core of EvE gamers, i.e. those who like a lot of challenge.
Clearly this theory has flaws, as it lumps together large groups of people who are all individuals and thus all subtly different in drives and desires, but it does explain why simplifying (or enshittifying, depending on which side of the fence you are) gameplay often upsets the current players of a game.*
I found the game much more engaging without a skill queue. I loved to set the alarm clock to the middle of the night to put a new skill in or decided i wanted to sleep through this time and put in just any other unimportant but long skill.
My choice. And if i had chosen wisely i would have had an advantage over others. All unimportant today and even just a flex of a credit card away. Unimaginable back then.
Just not engaging anymore. You fill up a queue of 150 skills and just let it sift through with minimal thinking.
Obviously, every game has an audience, and I’m sure FC spends significant time and money trying to understand theirs. Any time they optimize for fun, they are not optimizing for the world in general, but for the people who make up their target audience.
That said, the gaming world is not static. One demographic is always aging out, while a new one is joining the pool of potential players. These ever-evolving demographics do not necessarily have the same notions of “fun” and “tedium.” So any game that wants to survive long term has to keep adjusting the window of their target audience, keeping as many of their existing players as possible, while still attracting new players.
TL;DR: You can’t freeze a game in carbonite and expect long term success if the gaming market—and the churning mass of gamers that comprise it—is constantly in flux.
There’s no straw man from me. I was responding to your quoted text where you’re going on about “the vast majority of humanity,” as if that is what FC is targeting. They aren’t. FC is making EVE for EVE players. However, “EVE players” is an ever-evolving definition. What EVE players were 20 years ago is not what EVE players are today, nor what EVE players will be a decade from now.
Saying that change is necessary and inevitable is not an argument for any specific change, but rather an argument against the idea espoused by some that EVE was perfect at some fixed point in history* and should always remain thus. That is a fallacy, and one that will lead to the heat death of the game.
* Usually whatever version they were playing when they fell in love with EVE.
And it looks like we can only choose one (1) title. For some reason I thought there would be more of a visual thing (guess I was anticipating something a little more elaborate in terms of eye candy).
