Implant mechanics stop people from playing Eve - Solution

EVE Technology and Research Center Player Features & Ideas
, ,
1

Destriouth Hollow
This thread as become really really long and filled with comments. Therefore a summary of my reasoning and proposal:
Current implant-game mechanics leave you with 3 choices:
a) Don’t play eve, stay docked/tethered/logged off and train at max speed with +5 implants for max SP gain in total safety. You won’t be playing eve.
b) Play eve (undock) and keep in the +5 implants and train at max speed. You will risk additional 500million isk no matter what ship you fly. (even when pvping in a 2mil tristan). You will become ridiculously risk averse or lose billions of isk. This is a dumb choice for most interesting game-styles. Therefore it is not actually a valid choice.
c) Play eve, leave the expensive implants at the upwell structure. You will lose SP whenever you actively play eve.
=> Eve online currently punishes active playing with SP-loss compare to inactivety. This bad game design.
My Solution:
Allow people to benefit from their learning implants, if they are inside an upwell structure that is set as their corps home station. Upwell structure, because then people could still destroy the pods. Don’t allow people to transfer their implants to annother structure to ensure that implants are still lost to keep the implant market healthy. Obviously benefits from hardwiring implants and pirate implants (slave etc) still need to be with you to grant the bonis, as they would be op otherwise.

I have an issue with the current implant mechanics and I think it affects many people in a psychological way that is bad for the health of our game.

As it is +5 implants GREATLY boost your skilling time while costing a noticable chunk of isk. Therefore I want to maximize my time beeing in my +5 pod to max my skill progression and I don’t want to have to replace the pod.

I don’t mind hopping out of my +5 pod for crabbing (pvp, pve) as I could technical use that isk to buy skillpoints. However I don’t pvp as much as I usually would, because every hour pvping costs me SP, even while beeing logged out. This is also the reason why I don’t use pirate faction sets over long periods of time, as they only provide +4 to skilling. Therefore I always try to keep it short and head home to my +5 pod, to not miss too much skill time. Therefore actively pvping in my mind costs me isk and SP, even when im not fighting or losing my ship. I think this is bad game design.

I’m sure lots of people don’t value their skill progression high enough to stop them from roaming. There might even be people who never though about this or don’t use implants in general. As the raging success of things like pokemon, TCGs and simple browser games have shown us, a major part of humans like to progress and collect. Therefore a lot of people would probably fly around more often or switch their gamestyle if the current learning implant mechanics were changed.

My suggestion:
Allow people to benefit from their learning implants, if they are inside an upwell structure that is set as their home station. Upwell structure, because then people could still destroy the pods. Obviously benefits from hardwiring implants and pirate implants (slave etc) still need to be with you to grant the bonis, as they would be op otherwise.
Or just remove learning implants completly to remove the bad taste in my mouth ^^

The way my psychology works, I want to always understand, plan,optimize and perfect everything. My opinion and behavior might be rather extreme because of this. I however think the same issue affects a lot of people to a lesser degree or even subconciously.

What do you think? Should eve continue to punish people beeing out in space and reward people for sitting in station all day? Is the current state good for the game?

2 Likes
2

Or… just remove learning implants and attributes. Even CCP have said they are bad and in the past wanted to remove them but panicked over impact to the LP market.
Anything short of that is just creating a stopgap measure that is still built on a bad system.

4 Likes
3

I feel like you need to stop projecting your person risk aversion and blaming EVE for your problems.

+5s are nice, use them when you go AFK from the game for a month or so at a time. But don’t blame EVE because you feel the desire and urge to try and min max something that won’t matter in the long run.

4 Likes
4

I’m not risk averse in general though. I don’t mind yoloiing ■■■■ into enemy fleets, even solo. Fitting and risking a 200mil battleship to have fun is totally fine. I would yolo 40mil cruisers into fleets all day, if I had a 30% change of killing something before I die.

However risking 5-600mil in implants everytime I yolo out in nullsec would be ridiculous. Losing SP every minute I am out feels really bad too. Therefore I don’t roam as much and always try to keep it short and go back on the same day. If learning implants weren’t a thing, I would probably have my chars logged in and out in enemy space constantly and only go back if I really need to (reship, alliance CTA etc)

5

Does it, though? I have not used implants in years on several characters and I keep training just fine. I only use implants on those I-Like-To-Live-Dangerously-characters when they are not being used at all, ie. when I cannot play at all due to RL. Then they go on implanted vacation. I use implants on other characters, however, which do not do anything dangerous in particular to make them train things faster for their future roles. Implants

The implants are not the issue here at all. Your desire to min-max everything is the issue. If you’d just use implants when desirable and feasible and don’t use them when it’s not feasible, without worrying about a few lost SP that do not matter at all when you play for years and years, you would not have had this issue.

That’s because of CCP’s lack of competence. If they wanted to fix this “issue”, they could just remove implants and make some of the slots available for more Hardwirings. Just look at Slot 6. A ton of useful implants are available for that slot but you cannot use PG and CPU implants at the same time because they are in the same slot. Make more slots available for Hardwirings and move some hardwirings from overcrowded slots into the new slots and everything will be just fine.

On the other hand: If people like the OP are so worried about learning implants, I wonder how they why they would be using expensive hardwirings. Feels kind of incoherent if you worry about 500M in learning implants but not 500M in hardwirings.

1 Like
6

500mil for hardwirings is quite extreme though. In general the stronger/more expensive your ship, the more effective hardwiring becomes. Using 500mil hardwirings on a 3bil leshak makes a lot more sense than on a 10mil tristan.
I have been using even +5s before when inside my 2+b rattlesnake.

For continious pvp and lots of taken fights however ships worth several bil are not feasible. With these expensive ships you need to find your engagements very carefully and risk averse. If you just want to yolo stuff into stuff and hope to take something along you need affordable ships and cheap implants. That’s where 500mil learning implants have no place.

Removing implants would be a good way to do it I guess, but it would need a lof of change. My proposal would solve the problem with minimal changes from CCP. Instead of checking your current pod for +attributes you it could just check your upwell-homestation aswell aaaand fixed for now (:

7

It was an extreme example based on your +5 pod. This argument is nothing new and in the past people have even voiced concern over their cheap +3 implant pods, which are significantly cheaper. A pod with 2 +3s is cheaper than 1 single EG-603 implant, for instance. If they are worried about these values, there will never be a real fix to the system, with or without learning implants. :smile:

8

That’s really on you and not on CCP or EVE.

9

The difference is that hardwirings are a part of the fitting. They only benefit you while you play and you don’t lose anything while you don’t play.

This is different for learning implants. They do nothing to make your ship better (shortterm) and not having them in gives you a disadvantage even while logged out or docked. It constantly loses you SP, one minute at a time.

To me not having learning implants feels like my wallet having a leak, that every couple minutes a coin drops out and falls down a gully. Only at home you can pick them back up. That would make walking along the streets really annoying, even if it’ just a cent per minute, wouldn’t it? Especially when you are that aware of it and always hear it pling when it drops down the hole.

Annother aspect is that SP to many are much more valuable than isk. For the longest period of time you could not buy SP for isk and any lost SP would still be a lost SP years later, no matter what you do. Even still if you have 80+mil SP, they are incredibly expensive to buy. The cheapest way to get them is currently to stay docked with +5 implants. (:

To supplement this with a little math:
Each day beeing in +5s gives you
(5+2.5) stats * 60 minutes * 24 hours = 10800 SP

At 80mil SP a large skillinjector gives you 150000 SP at currently 907mil isk.
That’s 6047isk/SP

So each day having no implants you passively lose 65.3mil isk. To compensate that you would need 1.9bil isk a month in skill injectors. The benefit is just way too ridiculous.

2 Likes
10

Should have just ended the OP there.

This isn’t about mechanics stopping people from playing EVE. OP, it’s about you.

Here’s some quotes from your OP:

“I have an issue”
“I think it affects many people”
“I want to maximize my time”
“I don’t want to have to”
“I don’t mind hopping out”
“I could technical use that isk”
“I don’t pvp as much as I usually would”
“I don’t use pirate faction sets”
“I always try to keep it short”
“I think this is bad”
“I’m sure lots of people don’t value their skill progression”
“I want to always understand, plan,optimize”
“My opinion and behavior”
“I however think”

It’s totally understandable that when a post is written, it’s written from personal experience. However, trying to make this out to be an issue for people, when you don’t really know that to be true, is just another example of an “I want” thread.

The game already provides a mechanic to switch freely between clones with no timing impact. There is no issue to be solved. It already has been.

[quote=“Destriouth_Hollow, post:1, topic:177248”]
Should eve continue to punish people beeing out in space and reward people for sitting in station all Looking at the issue from a different perspective - being out in space is way more fun than docked up. No punishment included.

1 Like
11

That’s not how it works.

Important parts in bold.
I don’t think we should be looking to change something just because someone “feels like” they’re losing out, when they really aren’t.

OP, you’re better off just pulling those implants out of your and just playing the game instead of trying to min max it. You’re not going to look back 2 years from now and thing, “Golly gee, I’m sure glad I spent those 2 years staying docked for the maximum SP instead of undocking, having fun, and getting better at the game!”

The longer stay this way and keep this mentality, the more likely you are to just stop playing the game altogether. I’ve seen this happen to 8 of my friends over the past 5 years of my EVE career. They get caught up in the whole “I’ll undock when I’m ready and have max skills” only to never actually undock because they’re constantly telling themselves, “just a bit more SP, just a bit more SP.”

1 Like
12

It is an issue though.
CCP themselves have verified that it is an issue.
Trying to divert the argument at this point from that is just being dishonest.

2 Likes
13

I mentioned in my OP that my background in mathematics and economy makes this more extreme for me personally and I am obviously well aware of that.
Since I have been running a corp for years and talked to hundreds of people on teamspeak/discord/mumble I also know that this is not an issue just for me. A big chunk of the playerbase has these thoughts conciously and subconciously.

On a general note:
This line of arguing is always problematic. If you express something with a personal note it’s always “It’s just you personally and doesn’t apply to everyone”. If you present something as a general fact/consenus however it’s “you cannot generalize this, person XY is an exception”. Both ways of talking have their flaws and these arguments always come and cannot really be answered.

14

No they haven’t. They’ve said they’d like to change it and that’s all good. That doesn’t make it an issue.

The OP doesn’t speak for anyone but himself and the game doesn’t give everything to everyone. Too much development in the themepark direction.

Choices have consequences and just because the OP doesn’t want to undock, doesn’t mean that applies to everyone. Lowsec is full of people in vanilla clones and people in expensive clones. Nullsec and Wormhole space has people flying around in vanilla clones all the time. Min-maxing doesn’t drive everyone.

15

And CCP should care why?
You are not the first claiming these things and you will not be the last. But at the end of the day, you just need to get over it.

16

Claiming what? That these issues affect people negatively and tend to make eve more stagnant?

There is more than 1 person that are affected by this, which is a fact. These people dock up more than they would usually. Also a fact. Less people in space and more ppl docked is bad for a lively game. I guess we can agree on that? A lively game attracts and keeps more players. That is also true, is it not?
Is there any flaw in this logic? Please point it out specifically.

Now the question is, which disadvantages would this change bring along? What benefits are there to keeping it like it is? I guess there are slightly more dead implants right now, which is good for the economy. Any other disadvantages?

Now the only question is: Which solution is more advantageous for eve? Where do the benefits overshadow the disadvantages? I think it’s somewhat obvious here.

Free SP each month, that would cost you 1,9b isk otherwise just for staying docked is way beyond overdoing min-maxing. That is bad game mechanics that heavily enourage doing nothing but staying docked as much as possible.

17

Yes.

This is something your risk averse mentality has placed upon yourself. This is not a mechanic of EVE Online that “punishes” you. This is a roadblock that you have decided for yourself.

18

Please stop calling me risk averse. lol…
First of all I’m not risk averse. I have lost 69b on my main alone over the years because I don’t mind soloing into fleets or staying with my ratting ship to see if i can kill the attacker:


And that is just my main. With my others chars together I easily break 200b in losses :slight_smile:

The difference here that it’s not “risk”. “Risk” is something bad that has a chance of happening. This however has no chance involved. Not beeing in +5set loses you isk/SP. Period! No chance involved! It’s the difference between trying to jump over a wall with a chance of not making it and continously crashing into it on purpose.

19

Again, this is wrong. You’re not losing any SP.

I frankly don’t care what any of your killboard or how much ISK you’ve lost says. Congrats? None of that has any bearing on the fact that you’re so scared of a mental roadblock that you’ve put on yourself to the point where you’re now asking CCP to take care of it for you.

20

If you stay docked you get SP. If you undock with your implants you get less SP. Therefore you lose SP. Are you really arguing that? How?

You are the one who keeps calling me risk averse. That might make it easier for you but just is not true. Excuse me for correcting you calling me stuff I am not.

And why am I scared of a mental roadblock? I have been playing eve for lots of years and I have adapted to the current mechanics. I hop into an empty pod when I want to pvp and hurry back afterwards. When I’m really need a skill to be done ASAP (doesn’t happen very often) I stay docked till I have it. I function in eve with the current mechanics and the game is still fun. However why wouldn’t you improve an issue when it has no downsides? I’m asking CCP to improve the game for a lot of people, myself included.

Do you have any argument that isnt basically: “It’s just you and noone else cares”?

1 Like