Yeah, I took a look at the cost of skill injectors. They’re currently around 800,000,000.00 for 5,000 skill points. A lot of key skills take 5,000 points to get to level V.
That’s close to US$8.00 in cash per level V.
Despite the replies above (I’m a millennial suck hole, learn to enjoy the wait, etc) I just don’t get it.
Admittedly I’m an Alpha but once I buy a subscription I’d expect to have access to the whole game (some grinding accepted) not a near endless series of hour glasses.
This makes no sense. Other games don’t allow you that either, so why would you feel this way in EVE? And here i’m leaving out, that in EVE there is content you barely need any progression for. in EVE, compared to other games, it is no different in terms of time spent, but at least you don’t need to endlessly do the same stupid ■■■■ over and over and over again, just to unlock something you might believe is progress.
The title of the thread should be “are artificial delay times equal to time wasted grinding for xp?” and the answer would simply be:
Yes, but ours is better, because there’s an actual game around your progression, instead of the progression being the game itself. Grinding for XP is something people believe is the way forward, because that’s how most games do it. they don’t do that, because it’s a good idea for game design. In actuality, it is a way of getting people addicted to doing just one more grind to achieve the next level/new gear/etc, and companies design games around this fact.
I think i’ve been able to identify a couple of issues with your mindset in relation to how eve works vs how other mmos work. every mmo out there has SOME sort of time delay between just starting out, and reaching the highest levels of efficiency (I am going to be using very generic mmo terms, and applying them in broad strokes, none of these are going to be perfect allegories since eve is quite different from most mmo’s but its the closest we got)
your character does not have a class, but ships are the closest thing we have too it. when your training for a new ship, you aren’t leveling up your character, but rather training an entirely new class. they will be stronger in some areas, weaker in others, and have different uses. but its not a strict power progression of frigates - Destroyers - cruisers - etc. I’ve been playing for well over a decade now and still fly frigs and cruisers more than just about anything else.
and once you get a ship type “leveled” not only do you not need to worry about suddenly having to do it again the very next expansion. not only that, but because most skills are cross compatable, you will find that in the process of skilling up for certain ships, you will end up inadvertently skilling up for others at the same time.
Rather than looking at your drones train as “its going to take me 10 days JUST to unlock drones for this one ship” try thinking about it as "its going to take me 10 days to unlock 5 drones on EVERY ship thats capable of using that many (hint, thats most ships cruiser sized and larger)
it can feel like a bit of a grind to get those foundational skills done i’ll grant you, but thankfully most of them are fairly short in eve terms (just wait till you have 40+ day skills) and the more of them that you check off, the more effective you will become. and from time to time you will find yourself accidentally having skilled up other ships as well. (those drone skills your training right now will serve you wonderfully when you cross-train gallente)
I understand what you’re saying. I just don’t entirely agree with it. If I take a game like (the often decried No Man’s Sky) there is a grind to achieve certain things however I can pace the grind out by pausing and doing some planetary exploration. The point is in that game I get to choose if, when and how much I grind.
I have no choice in Eve. The timers are fixed and immutable unless I buy skill injectors.
Today I spent all day installing a drip watering system (the grind) in my back yard hopefully to be rewarded by a garden. The only timers to be had were the tap timers I installed for the water regulation.
it feels like you’re discarding the fact that in EVE you do not have to grind at all, because it just happens. that’s what makes it superior to the other games, including the options you’ve brought up just now. No need to grind, at all, just play and explore the game and options you have. vOv
Your idea of timers is no different to grinding, except that there is no grinding. 
PS: Bjørn gets it right.
Bjorn, this is the best exposition of the Eve raison d’être I’ve read to date. I think, on reflection, that I’ve been taken aback by the time train involved. I’ll have to accept it and do other things while the timers (sorry, ‘Skill Training’) run down.
exactly, rather than focusing on what you can’t do and impatiently waiting for skills to train. set your queue and use that time to figure out what you CAN do with what you’ve got and work on your IRL piloting skills. the time blows by faster than you might think at first.
its also good to remember that for most skills you don’t NEED them to V its a nice to have not a need to have. faction and meta guns and drones can actually be better than their t2 variants until you hit specialization 3 or 4, and even then the differences can be fairly marginal.
And in case you run out of things to learn, while your skills skill, this might help:
SP aren’t relevant to these at all. 
Yo dawg, i’ve heard you like skilling, so i give you skills to skill while your skills skill! 
Thinking that having skills makes you a better player is all but just an illusion, they help sure, but what good is a black ops if you don’t know how to use it?
Excellent tips. I’ve saved that list in my Eve tips folder and will check them out via Eve University for more detail.
I would like to discuss your following point:
“knowing how to fly your ship well, aka movement, agility, acceleration.”
I’ve had a play with flying with the arrow keys to manually manoeuvre the ship. Flying around the Sisters of Eve Station, it seems to work although somewhat slowly.
Has it any use in avoiding tracking? I’m aware that all opposing players and NPCs should be approached tangentially (spiral manoeuvre) and orbited to minimise their ability to track your ship.
Yes I’m aware that the ‘skills’ per se don’t provide real skills rather they provide advantages such as the ability to reduce ones cap or greater weapons damage as you move from a level I to level V skill in any particular err discipline. I’m at the point now where I’m aware any further railing by me will only bring down the great hammer of player consensus upon my avatar.
I never used the cursor keys, i only doubleclick in space and turn the camera accordingly… or the other way round.
when you know how your ship reacts and moves, you gain more control over it. you’ll learn how long it takes to turn around,or how long it takes to reach a spot 2km away, for example. for example, i usually don’t use the orbitting button, i orbit other ships manually. it gives me better control and allows me to react to people who try to break my orbit.
oh, that’s another one for the list.
tracking? there’s ways for your target, when you orbit it, to minimize tracking issues to hit you anyway. manual piloting makes it much easier to react to that, compared to having to rely on luck and the server not to ■■■■ it up.
same for slingshottig. when you instinctively know how quickly your ship turns around and accelerates, and use that in actual combat, then you have an edge over those who only rely on pressing buttons.
That info might be a bit out, i’ve been playing for ten years and i’ve not got all my skills to lvl 5
Thanks again.
I assume that manual orbiting is done by selecting successive ‘segments’ around the target - an orbit something like a hexadecagon ?
I also assume you use the tactical overlay to judge your orbit?
I have to agree with the OP, Skill timers are just crap plain and simple, Honestly every single alpha I’v bring to the game have all quit with the exact same reason, its not that they cant get into it, or couldnt do the tutorial, all thats been improved, they all say the same thing, “How long till I can fly those big ships” and when they realise the terrifying truth that it is literally YEARS, they bail, all of them.
I cant imagine EvE without skill queue’s so I am not suggesting removal in favour of something else, however I do think it needs tweaked, we have a guy in corp whos been playing EvE for 10 years+, has something in the range of 200+ million skill points and he’s just recently talked about training into a Titan, that has to be the most mind blowing sentence I have ever heard some one speak about any game.
My Solution is simple, rather than reducing skill training times, I think where those times are should be moved and redistributed, change the current system so that the total time required to get into say a titan and fly it and fire its guns and use its modules is far shorter than it is now putting it more realistically into the realm of reachable for new players who have not been playing for 10 years, and take that extra time we removed and dump it all in the level 5 skills, basically let people get in and fly ■■■■ sooner but if they really want to master something and get level 5 then they still need to put in the same amount of time as everyone else has already done.
So same total number of skill points required, just the requirements and distribution is being tweaked to make things more accessible.
One of eve’s best assets is its news stories, sadly its also one of its worst curses, people see these and think its cool only to find out that they will have grand kids before they can be one of those titan pilots.
it sucks. fix it.
Have you explained that bigger =/= better? You have vets that have been playing for years that still fly frigates.
Did you also heard the stories of blobs of alpha frigates just trashing on big ships? Trust me when I say this, if you expect to fly a big ship to roam solo and score kills you have a big chance that the following will happen:
Stick to small ships and learn things the hard way, either by loosing ships with fits and other hulls or researching and reading or watching videos on youtube. As you go along you will learn what makes a ship strong, what makes it weak, where its best suited, this is why we see a guy in a Alpha vexor skillfully take down a T3 destroyer that was baiting duels against new players, now you tell me if having skills helped that destroyer survive or win the fight, of course it didn’t. Having the skills as it is forces a player to make his decision of what to do, if you cannot fly a small ship then what good is a big ship if you do not even understand how they work? Which again falls in the process of learning everything before flying a Titan. Putting it in IRL perspective, you won’t be able to get a driving license C+ without having already B and C under your belt, just like if you want to learn how to make a robot move you have to learn mechanics and programming before actually engaging with the two combined in robotics.
So your complains of “fixing” the skills won’t happen, EvE is a game where you make a story, but not by snapping your fingers unlike you do in WoW to buy a mount.
FIY: if you REALLY want a Titan, it only takes 2 years to get one if you focus on flying it. See if flying it makes you a better man to make stories when in reality it takes a GROUP to win wars.
So you gotta ask yourself this: Why bother with a Titan if when you just start out the game you don’t even have the Isk to get one? If you CAN get the money, surely you can get to buy Skill Injectors, problem solved, now you can foolishly loose it.
Just have fun with the game and dont worry with efficiency in blowing up stuff, the problem with players is they always look for the most effective ways of doing things and they get burned out or bored because its nothing new that they are doing, they are just copy/pasting, in time you will get to fly what you want.
OK first of all I am not a new alpha pilot, I’m not a vet either so what I explained should have been crystal clear, the people I have tried to bring into the game loved what they saw, all collectively bailed for the exact same reason, as I said. training times are far to long.
It’s possibly that if an alpha starts training into a titan today, that the game wont even be around by the time his training finishes, I mean I hope it is I’m enjoying it, but you don’t know, ccp probably don’t know.
Training times are far to long, Im not suggesting we reduce them, I’m simply suggesting that we move the hours around so that people can get in all ships sooner and fly them sooner , and enjoy fleets and pvp with them sooner, BUT!, if they want to master them and get those leve 5’s then they need to dump all that time into them.
Basically let the players fly the damn ships, and let the players who want master them, master them . let the player chose. at the moment its not a choice.
Why do you say it isn’t? All it takes is lvl 3 of the previous ship class to be able to fly the next one, it’s not even that long if you are an Omega with the proper attribute remap and implants lol, I skipped Cruisers in my combat alt and went straight to Battlecruiser, that’s how simple it is to make a choice.
And if you are an Alpha… Gotta make do what you get since it is a restricted f2p model, better than just having a 10 day trial imo, you ain’t getting past Cruisers and its navy variant, so whats the rush? You can get Omega without paying a cent of your wallet as long as you know how to get the isk and till then you still got things to learn lol
Errr…
I zoom in enough to see my ship. I doubleclick in space, rotate the camera, doubleclick, rotate the camera. Nothing fancy. I suggest practise, which will help you with the theory.
I wouldn’t know why i’d need the tactical for that. With experience comes the ability to judge distances. I can see the distance, and once every few seconds verify it by checking the overview. Really, go out there and try it, it will answer most questions all by itself.
People who need to compensate their inadequacies luckily are no reason to change something so fundamentially beneficial for everyone who doesn’t.