It’s sup-optimal on purpose. While you can send your ship on an automated route, go AFK and come back in half an hour, I think it’s good for the game that players who play the game that time have an advantage.
What other skills remove significant and intentional aspects of gameplay, like an explict preference for manual piloting to be faster in covering distance?
Constructive criticism (not necessarily an endorsement): -1000m reduction per skill level, ie: maximum -5000m reduction, or 5km from destinations instead of 10km.
. . . . .
On a general note, I wouldn’t mind seeing some new base skills as a whole (not just new ships and weapons).
People are often complaining about the existence of the ‘magic 14’.
While I think it’s good that there are some optional easily trained generalistic skills for new players to get used to skill training in EVE, I do not think the game needs to add more of such base skills.
‘More base skills’ has only one main effect: it puts new players at a bigger disadvantage.
I wasn’t thinking about expanding the “magic 14” - more like optional skills for certain types of distinct play styles. An example being the aforementioned auto-targeting warp to distance reduction - as it only really applies to players that take advantage of auto-piloting on a regular basis.
None of these would be intended as “game changers”.
Such as? Some specific examples would aid discussion.
The Engineering and Navigation skills already represent a significant chunk of training time for a new player.
Most doctrine fits are based around having All V for fitting skills as it is, adding in yet more skills that need to be trained only makes the basic skill grind that much longer.
I remember as a keen newbro leaving a mag-stab offline on my Goon Rail Harpy because I didn’t have all the skills to V (that was truly a spectacular fleet doctrine and an excellent fit).
I’d be wary of any new skills that would be basically mandatory to train.
Those “basic skills” (aka Magic 14) that only lead to months of training time for newbros to open up the full fitting- / usage potential should go the way the learning skills did years ago: they should be removed completely. Same with the character attributes.
On autopilot, I somehow think a “skill” isn’t even logical, because AP is used whenever the pilot is NOT paying attention to the process. It would make more sense to design this as a rig or module for the ship, like an Autopiloting Computer.
