tbh, a 20 year long realtime ingame skill queue is what is “insane”. That concept might have been somewhat acceptable in the very beginning of the game when you could in forseeable time of like 2-3 years max out on your character. But today it’s just bullocks with all the stuff added over the years.
The greatest SciFi Space games I ever played were:
X-Wing / Tie Fighter
Wing Commander Saga
Privateer / Privateer II
Freelancer
…as examples. Did you need year-long skillplans to unlock stuff? No. You had some kind of progress-system like a storyline or training parcours or simply “costs” of equipment or places you had to go to to get access to some stuff and than that was it. You could - even as a casual player - in theory use all the stuff you could afford and begin playing around with the veterans - on their level, without having artificial disadvantages. And after that point it wasn’t about “how long do you play” any more but came down to personal skill and knowledge. Rewarding and motivating good players.
I really don’t see why this can’t be in EVE, why holding back new players for years or force them to an endless PvE grind to fund skill injectors and all that crap? Offer them a Tutorial, a Storyline or training missions to unlock equipment step by step and who is a good player is done after a few weeks or maybe months if you want to cover all professions.. and can begin to “fully dive in” as an “equal”. But sure, most existing veterans don’t like that, because “wait, but WE HAD TO!!1111111”. Bullocks.
You don’t need one character to have perfect skills in everything. You can get good enough at any given task in a couple months, as long as that task isn’t something like piloting titans.
Does absolutey not matter if you skill Commandships V and Marauders V on the same char or two different chars. Yes, on two separate chars you could use Skill Injectors more efficient, but also had to skill all the supportskills twice. Won’t make that much difference at the end.
But thats really hair-splitting. The elephant in the room is: Why should I force years of grind and waiting time on a new casual player that just wants to try out eve and put him on an artificial disadvantage for years (on top of knowing less, having no relations, having no money, having no alts…) as a pure game mechanic. Is that absolutely nessessary for the game to work? I don’t think so.
First step they could remove the Magic14 and just increase base stats of all ships to the previous “All V” level. And see what happens. I doubt anything bad will happen at all.
Wouldn’t be your problem. Even the current generation is absolutely able to solve a problem if they really want to and you can bet they will find out how to unlock the ships and modules they want to use pretty quickly. And then just lets see how they do. Didn’t know that anyone would force you to read rookie-chat all day long and deal with stupid questions. Just go play the game and stop caring so much what other players can use and how long they are already playing.
As I said: We can very easily test it - remove the Magic 14 as a first step and just look what happens. I bet any amount nobody will be able to measure even the slightest disadvantage for the gameplay experience coming from that change.
This was already brought up back when they removed the Learning skills (2010 IIRC, I was relatively new to the game myself at the time), and they opted not to do so.
I am quite a lot less against outright removing skills than I am against adding grinding for things. EVE distinguishes itself from other games in that pulling an all-nighter isn’t going to bring you much benefit other than making some extra ISK, and since most players aren’t ISK-constrained that makes EVE a lot less grindy than other MMOs. The passive skill gain mechanic is a bit weird, like the easiest way to get an alt into a new activity is to start the skill queue and go back to whatever content your other alts are already skilled for to make some ISK in the meantime, but I at least think it’s a lot better than the alternative. I’ve seen people play OSRS, it doesn’t look like much fun. At least in EVE I can log out and go watch some anime for a week, and come back to some progress in whatever skill I’ve chosen to train. Progress and fun at the same time, fancy that!
The EVE skill progression has always been this, where training time is a logarithmic function of the x and y axes. Veterans spend years getting to the bottom right square. I see no reason why noobs should fast track that curve simply because they’d rather not wait.
I like the idea of a game where it is even easier to just fully max out your character and be equal after a few weeks. However…
The main issue I see with characters without any meaningful investment in skill points is that it undermines EVE’s idea that reputation matters.
If characters have no meaningful value but can be ‘maxed’ in a couple of weeks of skills, there is no meaningful cost to rerolling a new set of AWOX alts or cyno hunters every few weeks.
It means bad reputations won’t matter anymore.
In EVE reputations are meant to matter, which means characters are required to be an investment. This is not possible when new characters can be maxed in a few weeks or months at most.
You are right with this one. I will have to think about how this point could be adressed without putting newer players at a mechanical disadvantage for too long. As said, I think the concept was okay for the first few years of EVE, but we have reached a time where it begins to become absurd to expect someone to skill for 10 years straight to get where I am. Or grind endlessly to make ISK for skill boosters.
That isn’t a concept that will hold for the future, because lets just go extreme: In 20 more years if EVE still exist then, should new players skill for their entire real life duration to have a chance to catch up with the skills I have? Or mine/PvE 8 hours a day for years over years to somehow “catch up”? We should be able to agree that this system is impossible to maintain for all eternity, out of pure logic.
Besides that CCP is adding more and more skills that require more SP, CCP is also handing out more and more SP in all sorts of situations. We’ve got log-in events now, AIR career events, daily challenges and monthly tracks that all add extra SP.
If CCP keeps adding more SP and thus keeps making SP worth ‘less’ over those years as compensation for that they also add more skills over those years I can see how the system is sustainable.
Also skills in EVE generally are side-grades rather than upgrades. They unlock new ships, they don’t make existing ships stronger. Making the game broader gives newer players more and more options and increases the time to train it all, but doesn’t make it harder to get competitive. To get competitive you just need to train one of those options well.
Long story short, a “catch up” mechanic already exists. It’s called skill injectors. It still won’t allow you to compete with veterans though. Only time can do that, and apparently that’s something some of you aren’t willing to invest…
