I started a new account recently. It was a caldari alpha that I’m turning into a mission runner. The goal is a pimped out rattlesnake for running missions when I don’t feel like doing null stuff.
It’s been 4 weeks… and the toon has something like 3m skill points. He’s in a sentry fit VNI running lvl 3’s to build standing. He already had a bit of a head start with core skills from his time as a caldari alpha (pre alpha-upgrade)… but took a detour to train and implement PI. From your list he can adequately fly the Heron, Kestrel, Osprey and Ferox. But he can also fly the Merlin, Condor, Bantam, Griffin, Atron, Navitas, Tristan, Maulus, Incursus, Imicus, Algos, Catalyst, Corax, Comorant, Caracal, Moa, Blackbird, Drake, Vexor, Exequoror, Thorax, Celestis, Myrmidon, Worm and Gila.
You’re looking at a ship offering including all factions, a large spread of ship types (from carriers to bombers to black ops) and a large range of weapons systems. If you trained those 21 ships… you’d actually end up having quality skills for about 80% of the ships in eve… not just those 21 ships.
Make another list, which includes a T1 Frigate for Exploration and two for different PVP setups, 1 Inty, 1 Bomber, 1 T1 Dessie, 1 Dictor, 1 T3D, a T1 Logi, 3 non-T2 Cruisers for different kinds of PVP (or PVE), 1 T3C, 1 HAC, 2 T1 BCs, 2 BS, a Blop, a Dread and a Carrier, which need much less SP, while still being versatile and useful. I’m curious. Really, if you don’t think my list is realistic, please show me another. There are many more shipclasses missing, mind you: Titan, Super, Fax, JF, Freighter, any kind of Mining or Industrial ship, Marauders, Command Ships, HIC, Recon, T2 Logi Cruiser, T2 Logi Frigs, Command Dessies, Ewar Frigates, … if I didn’t forget anything. And of course all the other racial variants of the shipclasses in my list - as they normally have very different boni and use-cases.
No way a toon can fly all these ships decently after 4 weeks without injecting. That’s just unrealistic. You don’t even get all the T2 guns in that time, not to forget Gila/Myrm/Vex which will have T2 Drones and proper skills for them. And so on. I made a relatively short list, because if things get competetive, it is much better to fly 21 ships with good skills, than 100 with T1 and suppport skills to III. I mean 4 weeks, that is barely enough to get the shield skills and a bit of navigation or active armor and cap skills.
That is not true, as you can see in my list of ship classes that are not even included. What is true though, that many of the support skills will be useable for other ships.
The whole point here is not wether or not you can sit and somehow use a ship after time X. EVE is a competetive game and with many players being here for 7+ or 10+ years, the new player will need years to catch up in SP. Now some older players who don’t like newer player to be a challenge, will always hate the idea of faster SP progression for everyone, because they know it means faster SP for them too, but new players can become dangerous in a shorter time.
It is not either one or the other, it is all three and more. How much ISK you can afford to spend on your ships, how many friends with much experience, SP and ISK do you have on your side, the specific circumstances of a fight and so on. Fact is still, 3M SP vs. 75M SP means a great difference, if both players are average smart and PVP focussed. Sure, if the one with 3M SP has 10 friends with him, the average outcome differs. If the one with 75M SP has 10 friends with him, it will too.
A faster SP progression would force everyone to focus on other ways to gain advantages, such as organizing in groups and better their PVP skills, instead of being able to rely on a combination of +20% EHP, +20% Speed, +20% Damage output, +20% Damage application, +20% Cap, +20% this and that and then the other thing. Player Skill over SP, needs a faster SP progression. The ever widening gap between old players and newbros needs at least some correction, otherwise the game character is sooner or later lost. At some point it will just be too late to catch up with SP/ISK/the power to supress others development. I don’t know if we’ve already reached that point, but if not we are pretty close to it. After that you can’t recommend EVE to a newbro with an honest heart giving him or her the expectation that the game will fulfill on the promise of a mud-pit for everyone, because all they’re going to be is either a pawn or a feeder. As an outcome of losing, that’s okay, as a guaranteed development from the start on it is boring. It seems some older players are bored because no strong fresh blood is coming to challenge them, while some others are super happy that they can finally settle in the safety of standstill.
First off… if you dont’ see a list that has Amarr T3C, Gallente Carrier, Minmatar Dread and a pirate BS requiring Caldari (Rattlesnake) and Caldari T3D as unreasonable… I don’t know what to tell you. How about pick 1 or 2 factions?
Second… as I said it was an account I had already trained up somewhat as a caldari alpha. It had max alpha skills for caldari ships and weapons and started training gallente when I went omega with the account. He’s got somewhere between 3 and 4 million skill points. lvl 4 in caldari and gallente frig/destroyer/cruiser, lvl 3 in BC. T1 weapon systems, T2 tank/support systems. Focus mainly in missile/drone, but has some Small and Medium hybrid gun skills from the Caldari Alpha stage.
And of course it has PI… because PI income rocks.
Is that “decent”? Perhaps not by your standard. It’s certainly a very useful account that can fly around 30 T1 ships. Can I suicide tackle in an Atron? Sure can. Can I suicide gank in a catalyst? You bet. Can I run level 3’s? Yep. Can I fit a useful T1 Ferox for a fleet op? Yep. Can he sensor damp you into oblivion in a Maulus so a friend can kill you from range? Yep. Can he ecm you with a griffin? Yep. Can he rep your armor with a Exequoror? He can. Can he rep your sheilds with an Osprey? Well he could, but Ospreys are horrendous to look at so he never would. Can he scan sites in a Heron or Imicus? Sure.
You can sit in 30 T1 ships, and you can fly them as in “fly” them.
Useful as a meatshield, unironically yes. Any additional bro is always a worthy addition to the fleet. But you know there are limitations on how useful a LVL 3 Caldari BC, T1 Weapon, minor weapon support skill, Ferox is. One limitation will be your range. Knowing that, you might try to be a bit more humble about that skillset and not brag about being a useful part of something when you are only semi-useful and you should work on being more than that.
Depends on your skills as a pilot, but generally yes, sure.
Depends on the target and wether or not you are in a crew, benefit of the doubt: yes.
Okay… But why would one of the worst possible ways of income land on that list?
Yeah, you can hold some ecm/damp on targets someone else is killing. I can do the same in a venture or a shuttle, if a shuttle had a midslot. Can you do it persistently without running out of cap? Is that ecm reliable by having some of the skills training up?
You can activate some rep modules, yeah. Can you persistently or even semi-reliably play the role of logi though?
Though that is not all he can do, is it?
He can also active armor tank, use drones of different sizes on boat that rely on drone damage/skills, possibly can use neuts, rapid light missiles, heavies or hams.
Of course, also that.
Not to forget the exploration/scan skills.
Right. Great, what can I tell you? You’ve got it all figured out. You are probably getting a lot of fun kills on that toon, with all these different ships which you can decently fly and all these different roles you can take. Purely awesome. Not to forget the PI. And you only need to inject some more skillbooks and you can basically fly the Rattlesnake the Bharghest too!! You do also active hull tank, do you? T2, I hope?
p.s. your entire “don’t need that” attitude comes from the same place where you overestimating the usefulness of shattered 3M SP lies. Doing that on an alt for the lulz might cloud your judgement, as you can easily even out any hardship that might come upon him with your main and your mains wallet.
It warms my heart to see that without reading you align with Teckos and snuggle up really really close.
My arguments are strong enough for you to avoid discussing them and instead retreat to insults. While his arguments are possibly weak enough that his friends have to jump in and troll this thread.
Great job. Very impressed. Oh wait… no, not funny enough. Try again.
In other words a relatively new character that could move to NS and do just fine and will get better with time.
I find it interesting you complain about min-maxing and that your criticism towards Lena is that Lena is not min-maxing…
Oh, BTW, given how awesome Goons are at logistics and many are always looking for a profit, I gave up owning a carrier. Used to have one, but now when Goons deploy I just burn to the staging system in a travel-ceptor, and buy crap off contracts. When we are done, I throw stuff on contracts at a reasonable price, and get back in my travel-ceptor and burn home.
Not meant to prove anything, just a point of reference that sometimes owning those awesome ships is more of PITA than they are worth.
No. Protectionism is a form of granting an unearned benefit–protection from competitors. I am not in favor of degrading the value of the investments people have made without some serious justification for it…and you have not provided any.
For example, you write the following:
People already focus on that because the other side has gotten pretty much the same advantages.
I haven’t seen one, but my guess is that SP trading effectively does shift the distribution of SP from new old characters to new characters. The old massive SP characters are not going to be doing much SP injecting as it has little return. I can’t get any better at T1 cruisers, only marginally better in some of the T2 cruisers and at a steep price, etc. However, a new character on the other hand will see much larger gains from injecting SP. So my guess is SP trading is resulting in a shift in the SP distribution.
Edit:
And please do not say, “But SP farms!!!” My response is merely going to be, “Yeah, and?”
I doubt that will have much impact on you, so I’ll go the pedantic route (I love me a chance to write a big ol’ wall of text and bore the crap out of everyone else).
Suppose Bob is happily playing EVE and suddenly CCP says, “Skill trading is not a thing, but only if the SP come from characters, here is our mechanics for doing it…” Excited Bob realizes that with some initial RL money outlay on his part he can set up an SP farm that can do the following:
Some PI.
Some invention.
Some station trading.
Some combination of the above.
So Bob gets to work and soon his farm is crapping out 2,700 SP/hour on 5 alts. Bob is injecting 9.5 million SP into the game the first month his farm is operating. And the next month it is again 9.5 million and the third month 10 million SP. Now you might say, “See, these are not reducing the SP at the top of the distribution. These SP are ‘new’.” Indeed that is true. But these are characters, that as they age gain no SP. And most those SP to be going into new characters. See, I see little benefit to buying SP injectors from Bob. I have to pay a hefty price for only 150,000 SP/injector and heck I already have 157 million SP, and my options in terms of fleet doctrines are very broad for any doctrine. But some other guy, why he’ll get 500,000 or maybe 400,000/injector. And he’ll be putting them into skills where he’ll get a much stronger benefit.
So lets keep this simple. Lets say we have 5 characters with 100 million SP each. And 5 with 1 million each. The distribution is very, very skewed. And along comes Bob’s 9 million SP the first month (lets go with 9 million as it divides by 2 more cleanly). And half go to the 100 million SP guys and half go to the 1 million SP guys. By the 3rd month our distributions have gone from 500:5 million to 504:18 million. The SP for the low end guys have gone up 260% whereas the high end guys have seen an increase of 0.84%
Now yes, you argue that our 5 100+ million guys could clean the floor with the 5 low SP guys. But why are you assuming that is how the players are grouping up? Even if we limit it to two teams, we could have 1 team with 2 or 3 of the 100 million SP guys, and 3 or 2 of the low SP guys. In other words, player do not simply segregate in terms of SP. Sure they can if they want too, but that kind of thing often comes at a cost, IMO.
So there is a route for faster SP acquisition, it merely comes with a premium price tag…as it should since it can be destabilizing to game balance.
I don’t know Teckos at all. Though I tend to agree with him, I honestly wish he’d shut up most of the time. He’s one of those guys that seem to fill up every thread with their posts. I skip right past his stuff most of the time, but this time I tuned in, and this time your arguments were lame and carebearish.
I encourage readers to go back and take a look at your arguments and see for themselves how weak they are.
Also, you’ll notice that I never really engage issues on these forums. I’m pretty much only here to harvest tears and make fun of carebears with bad arguments.
If ny indy alt can kill a Tengu in a WH with a medium laser armed failfit Scorpion then by this analysis either he was max skilled for a failfit or the enemy pilot chose the wrong engagement.
The better question is: how much time and effort you would need to spend to learn how to fly all these ships reasonably? I mean not only undock and F1 but really use?
I’m not specialist but i guess for Kestrel you would need to learn to scram-kite, for Slicer to kite, for Heron to brawl, for Hound to SBing, for Sabre to bubbleing, etc…
I can’t remember exactly what we were talking about back in December but this doesn’t seem in keeping with the issue that was being discussed. The suggestion was that an Alpha might be better off using a Daily Alpha Injector every day instead of paying for a subscription.
Omegas and Daily Alpha Injectors have nothing to do with each other.
If I remember correctly, the thought is that it’s possible to skill faster by using alpha injectors as an alpha when below 5.5m sp. You get 1/2 regular training time plus the alpha injector… which is the equivalent of regular training time. Omegas just get regular training time… so 1.5 > 1.
You end up paying more… so if you took into account the isk to buy plex to do that with an alpha account and compared that to going omega and using the excess to buy skill injectors… omega might still come out ahead.
