What in heaven’s name are you talking about? How does eliminating pointless basic skill training negatively impact you? How would making it EASIER for new players kill the game? You are essentially arguing that the pointless suffering is the goal, and that removing this will somehow drive new players away.
My question for you and everyone else rejecting this proposal is simple: JUST HOW BIG AN ADVANTAGE DO YOU NEED? I am not proposing this, but if you started every player with all maxed skills, everything at 5, they would still die constantly to anyone who knows what they are doing . What in the hell are you afraid of?
Yeah, looks about right. I have an alpha structure defence praxis that is pretty much good to go with the referral SP and I think three days training - 85k ehp, 850 or so DPS. Works great in an emergency.
This is why these threads are so tedious - they’re created by people without the imagination to try doing things, only following the latest meta; anything that isn’t 100% optimal is automatically trash.
Fine if that’s how you play the game, but most people just wanna fly internet spaceships and have fun, and that does not require sweatyness trained to level 5.
You’re trying hard to create a strawman to tilt against: that somehow existing players are doing their best to hold new players back.
You’re completely missing out on all the replies talking about player motivation, aspirational goals, abuse of “instant start” accounts by vets/alts/bots/farmers. Basically, you’re ignoring all the valid arguments and trying to cherry-pick a few half-sentences that fit your chosen agenda to build a fake argument against.
What activity did you try as a new pilot that you were unable to do without onerous amounts of training time?
What activities is an actual new player demonstrably unable to take part in until they spend long amounts of time training first? Are these things any new player actually does?
Why don’t any other games do what you’re proposing (give new players advanced skills on day 1)?
Why not give every new player a Battleship and all the skills to fly it on day 1, so they can “leap right into the action”? What action would they leap into if you did?
Why are you unable to fit a ship like Altara Zemara’s Gnosis to leap into action with?
In fact, you’ve missed every valid point in order to focus on scarecrows, which just makes it look more and more like you’re saying “I need to use new players as an excuse to start all my alt farms off with skipping the first month or so of training”.
Friend, it’s not the genuinely new players you have to worry about.
The more power you give to new players, the more power you give to some decades-in multiboxer spinning up alt no. 42,069 to come push your stuff in for you.
This isn’t an equation you can win without fundamentally breaking many, many other aspects of the game. Sad to say, but there it is.
I 100% agree with Aiko. We’ve all had to go through noob-ness. It’s a long grind and even 18 months into the game there are still lots of things I don’t know. And that is precisely how it should be. Not only because there are people with a decade more experience than me who would rightly find it unfair if I suddenly caught up…but also because I myself would find it unfair if my own personal evolution over months was made irrelevant by some noob suddenly catching up and not having to learn the ropes.
This skills grind is totally fair. And more to the point…99% of the people here survived it.
I am not proposing removing any of that. Eve is awesome as it is now, but it could use a tune up. I am suggesting they raise the basement by pre-training pointless skills to at least level four across the board, and really why not five on some of them?
Eve is sold as a PvP game. A new player finds himself in a T1 frigate using T1 weapons and modules, and that’s as it should be. But he looks around and sees T2 Frigates and in his mind he has to spend a couple weeks training basic engineering skills to five before he can even start on T2 guns, and then he sees he cant even fit a freaking MWD let alone a T2 version, and what is this “heating your guns” thing he read about… he’s months out from any of it and he doesn’t understand how unimportant it all is. And the ONLY way you can get him to really understand is to get him as quickly as possible into at least a semi competitive ship. Get him into a Rifter or Atron, decently fit, and get him fighting. Shaving even a week or two off that initial nonsense might get him to stay.
So you are just going to ignore everything that I have objected to about your idea, and instead try to paint me as a boogie-man? Nice try to strawman there.
What I am afraid of is your idea does not address any of the reasons why new players leave EvE quickly, and will just cause people to ganked in larger, more expensive ships and become more frustrated before they start to figure EvE out and have fun.
Here is the thing, from your statements I am not convinced that you understand what you are talking about. I started out having tons of fun on my new alpha fw character in a plane jane breacher. My breacher was plenty competitive from the start. I didn’t need 15million free skill points to make my breacher competitive.
What I needed to learn was the soft skills that comes from training and experience. The new bro skilling up and learning how to fit his rifter or altron is an important part of the process. You are going to short-circuit the learning process by just handing the new bro these things and make it easier for new guys to compensate for poor piloting with better modules and better ships.
@OT_Smithers I joined this game and was instantly lost, I didn’t just toss in the towel on day one. People either commit themselves to “learning to play” or they give up and never accomplish anything.
I hit YouTube for some tutorials, I put my main character on a 30 day skill build, while I played an alt. I did career tasks for ISK and free ships, I dedicated myself to learn the game. After a month, I had plenty of ISK, a skilled main character, and made friends in the game.
I am sorry to say, it sounds to me like you want them to hold your hand, while you play the game. You either want to play Eve or you don’t play at all.
By the way, I love how this thread exploded to 110 posts in such a short time.
Never said anything about time restraints. However those SP’s and the time to train them could be better used for training up other skills.
Out of the 14 skills, only 2 of them are at level 4, all the rest are at level 1 to level 3. Alpha account only has 5 mill SP’s of training available.
Having those basic fitting skills already maxed with Character Creation would allow players to put those SP’s towards other skills such as specific ship and career oriented skills, thus giving them a bunch of ‘quick wins’ right from the start.
Be mindful that PVP doesn’t necessarily mean pew pew…
I don’t have the time to go back to see your definition of “useless” skills, but the current starter skill mix is almost perfect to get a new player’s feet wet and try out multiple ways of play.
Once a new player decides what path to take, then they have the freedom to specialise.
I note that I said a ‘near perfect’ mix of skills, and the ones that I would see started a bit higher (like trade skills) would be abused by NON-new players.
Give the nublets a month free only, with every skill they can train injected and enough SP to fill them up in any way they please.
At the end of the month you wipe everything. They are left with the experience they got trying out different playstyles and nothing else. A completely empty character sheet with nothing injected.
Then hand them fifty million ISkies and ten million unallocated SP to get started now that they have a little understanding of the game and what career they would like to pursue.
Explain this upfront instead of pretending EVE is something it’s not and I bet the retention rate skyrockets from what it is now. Maybe hire some GMs to float in game and help where they can. Also make forum mods a paid position of people with no EVE gametime on their resume. That should help the newbs stick around in here instead of being slapped around and driven away by a bunch of bored NPC’s.
There’s a big difference between free Alpha alts that cannot be multiboxed and cannot train any of the useful multi-account veteran skills (cyno, cloak, barges, pi) for the reason that veterans would abuse them, versus unlimited free one-month omega characters with ‘enough SP to fill them up in any way’.
Alphas have many restrictions mainly because veterans would otherwise abuse it.
Your suggestion allows veterans to abuse it.
Multiboxing a fleet of throwaway catalysts? A free fleet of multiboxed mining barge pilots?
All I want for Saturnalia is a Navy Catalyst… and some more isk to fit it… oh, and some isk to buy the skill book.
I have plenty of antimatter rounds now. Those things go at the speed of light! All I need are big guns now!
Hail Saturn!
My apologies for taking the bait. Setting you off on one of your famous strawman diatribes.
Here’s the thing.
My post was about making an NPE that will actually retain new players. Once we get that sorted, you are welcome to create a special committee to protect the game from those bad veterans. Until that time, go sit in a corner fuming that I’m not going to enable your Epeen Derangement Syndrome by engaging in your off topic rage.
Anything you’d like to contribute on how this thought exercise of mine might help or hinder as an NPE? Or are you just looking to own Mr Epeen for the first time?
