I’ve been playing Albion Online for a couple of months now, instead of playing Eve. Albion is a grind to level up, but it is a fun grind, because it’s full of agency. You have to play to level up; in Eve you level up (training) even when you’re not online, with very limited agency (an Alpha clone would only need to log in once a year to update their training queue). This is a good thing, Albion could take note, but agency in levelling up is also a good thing. So, I suggest that we get experience points for killing rats and players and completing missions etc that can be converted to skill points. This way, you still have your passive training, which is a great thing about eve, but you can play to speed it up. What do you reckon?
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EVE would not be EVE without passive training. It is a core feature that comprises the very identity of EVE, that makes it distinct from other MMORPGs. Changing this feature is to change the very nature of EVE itself to the point that EVE is no longer EVE.
Also, you might want to rephrase your post as the way you use the word “agency” conflicts with what “Agency” means in EVE.
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I guess Skill Injectors does this, but no well imo. You play to earn the isk to buy skill injectors, but with so many other things you need to spend you isk on (ships, mods and ammo etc), it’s not a very efficient way of doing it.
Why?
This seems incredibly easy to abuse. I used to run several alt accounts, all doing nothing but killing NPCs for hours upon hours each day, for several months straight. I could also have used my alts and farmed them for “pvp” if I wanted.
I don’t see why we need to introduce a mechanic just because another game has it, especially if it can be so easily abused and gamed in EVE Online without providing and significant benefit.
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by agency, I mean the player having to do something in the game, as opposed to it happening passively.
I know what you meant, but when I saw the headline for this post I was misled, and it took me a few rereads of your post to realize you were using it in a misleading context from what Agency means in EVE
I don’t see how it can be abused. and there is no reason to introduce a mechanic just because another game has it, but if it makes the game more fun and encourages players to log in and play, providing game play for other players, then wouldn’t that be a good thing?
If you get SP for killing rats, I just told you how it can be abused. By having multiple alts that do nothing but constantly farm rats day in and day out. Now you’ve got a glut of excess SP.
Agency is a term in gaming to mean player initiated actions
it doesn’t have to be a lot of sp, just enough to advance your training queue a bit each day or month.
Any amount is too much.
Agency is also a term in this game to mean the tool that tracks and summarises play opportunities that are available to you, individually … like exploration, mining, combat.
Separately, there already is an Activity Tracker that does the first part of your suggestion …. it tracks what you do and levels your activities up, from 1 - 5, based on subsequent experience. At the moment, those levels are not linked to outcomes, but CCP did indicate when the tracker was first launched that they were open to investigating this option at a later date.
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That would be an Omega clone and only if they have some very long skills otherwise there is an amount of skills cap in the training queue as well like 50 skills or something but no time limit. On the other hand Alpha clones are limited to one day of training time, though if the last skill goes beyond that is okay so your claim of alphas can only check their queue once a year is completely false, and if someone uses daily alpha injectors then even more so “required” to log in every day. Just wanted to point that out.
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There is an entire subsection for Player Suggestions.
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What about players who don’t kill rats… The miners, transporters, manufacturers, mercs, wardekers, explorers, PI’ers…
I guess these people get shafted for exp with your suggestion.
- With Eve’s skill training, it’s a balanced playing field… that way more casual players are fairly balanced when compared to those who play 8h a day. The bonus for more active players is more ISK earning, so no need to give them more SP too.
I like the idea, with some fine tuning.
The closet P2W types, those who want to maintain a relative advantage forever and ever because they have been paying and training longer than other people, will reject this, of course.
Passive training should not go away, but I think EVE would gain a lot of activity from advancing skills by using them. It’s been in my top-secret list of ‘things I will do once I infiltrate and take over PA and steal EVE from the corp hangar’ cunning plan.
It could be implemented in a number of ways:
- Complete a mission/agency objective? Get some unallocated SP. (Kinda boring, maybe abusable)
- Use a skill to gain a ‘bonus SP’ counter, which would be like an accelerator for that skill. Use missiles? Gain a certain amount of +25% Missile Skill training points.
- Gain Mastery levels in a ship type to gain some sort of SP bonus; unallocated, faster training, points towards that ship class or the next class, whatever. Promotes broader training and developing ship lines.
I would prefer to see it objective-based, so that it encourages people to go out and do specific things / try different game features, rather than a generic “get extra SP for farming rats” process - which would be boring and farmable/bottable/exploitable.
There are a couple more, closely related ideas in my cunning plan… but just like this one, they’re all top secret.
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I like the idea of getting a bit of a boost to your skill points for playing the game. EVE is one of the only MMOs where you can’t level up actively (besides buying skill injectors which is a relatively new thing).
EVE does have an Activity Tracker but, as Lily pointed out, it doesn’t do much besides show statistics. It wouldn’t be difficult to make it so the Activity Tracker provides a skill point reward for a certain amount of activity.
For the argument that this will be abused by bots, so is basically everything in the game. If we were to remove features that benefit bots there wouldn’t be enough stuff left to call it a game.
… one possible solution would be to avoid a character’s top activity when awarding points. If you look at the Activity Tracker at the lowest level, then maybe avoid the top two activities.
So, if you are a bot doing ratting then neither “npc kills” or “bounties” would count. But everything else would. The idea being to encourage players to at least try other activities from time to time. Similarly, if you are a mining bot, then neither “ore” or “moon ore” would count. Or, something along those lines?
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This idea has been implemented in the early days of EVE ONLINE.
I don’t know why it wasn’t obvious to CCP,
or why it isn’t obvious to you,
but the first thing that is going to happen,
is that people will figure out ways to get their skills up while afk.
Some, probably many due to the massively increased incentive, will be turning to bots.
Back in the early days of EVE ONLINE CCP had this implemented. It ended up with people orbitting rocks to gain skillpoints for afterburners, for hours, afk, instead of playing the game. People stopped playing to gain skillpoints.
The story is out there, somewhere.
This kind of thread comes up every few months.
There’s always someone who points this out.
This time it’s me.
It will not ever be any different, no matter what CCP would do.
The fact that people are even discussing this is just sad.
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That’s a neat idea too. Though EVE does seem to have this idea of specialization where characters are good at one thing only. The idea behind that is to encourage players who specialize in one activity to help out characters who specialize in another (ex. Haulers helping move cargo for other players). Rewarding being more “well rounded” might go against that.
At least a little bonus for new players to try out everything in EVE is nice though.
We had the daily kill a rat in get SP for a few weeks. No one liked having to kill a rat everyday.