Pros:
Its great your giving old time players new content to try their hand at, and lots of choice level wise, for the long time players of Eve.
Cons:
New players of eve have little to no choice, the community has pretty much very quickly discovered which ship that can do these sites, however without the correct mastery of this Amarrian ship, you are pretty much screwed in doing any high level site.
Time to finish these sites is very restricting so if your not a high level mastery of your ship your get blown up so again this is great for long time players not so much for us newer players.
For Training time for that ship is 456 days of training if I drop every other skill I have training right now and only train for that one ship.
Iām not suggesting you make these sites easier, a challenge is great.
However what does need a major overhaul is the skill training times, they are so out of date, they might have been ok back in 2004 where you didnāt have a lot of competition game wise but these days they take way to long for any player to get anywhere, with so many other great games out there that donāt need years and years of training to accomplish anything, (this is why most people drop out of the game I canāt see why you dont see this CCP)
For me personally I went Omega 4-6 months ago only have around 11 mill skill points, totally new to the game didnāt realise you need multiple accounts and 1 toon per account and train to fly just 1 ship to start offā¦ and specialise in one thing,
I would guess that Iām not alone in this and a lot of people put skills everywhere until they learn that the skill training time is so outdated that it takes an eternity to train anything to the max which is clearly whatās needed for this new content to do top level sites.
CCP please update the Training times, get rid of redundant skills like the ones that restrict people in the number of people allowed in their group āallianceā etc, condense the training skills that duplicate each other and a lot do overlap these days and cut the training times down to something a bit more reasonable to reflect the modern times we now live in, and stop living in 2004.
Iām sure this post will get flak for the āold timersā in the game that have a gazillion skill points but they have to realise games evolve and change and get updated this game clearly needs to update its skill training time as well.
An Alpha can run Tier 1 and 2 in a properly-fit Gila or VNI with like 1-2 months of training.
Which on Earth 456 days you are talking about?
To add insult to injury, āmastery levelā times are not entirely correct because they do not count the base skills required to fly the ship. F.e. Mastery Level V for a T2 HAC doesnāt include time required to train Cruisers to level V and Heave Assault Cruisers to level V
Please check with the dictionary what top level does mean. Abyss provides content for all - from a 2-week old newbie to 5-6 years bittervets.
There is no ship in the game that takes 456 days of training to fly well, outside of perhaps a supercarrier or titan. Certainly, a Heavy Assault Cruiser is a bit of a slog to train from nothing to competence for a new player, but it is on order of months not years. If you are assuming you need to have all level 5ās to fly something, you are making a mistake. Level 4 in most skills are enough to get flying - you get 80% of the benefit in only 20% of the time to train perfect skills.
There are somewhere over 20 years worth of skills in this game to train so no-one, outside of those with deep pockets and a taste for Skill Injectors, have even a large fraction of them of them trained to level 5. I get that the training system feels like you are behind other or locked out of content, and to a minor degree that can be true especially really early on, but itās not really as bad as you might think, unless you insist on have perfect skills before you undock or something.
Itād help if you named the ship/fit you want to run. āThis amarrian shipā (Itās Amarr btw, not Amarrian) is incredibly vague. And Iām not aware of an Amarr ship thatās considered the be all end all of abyssal space. If you are omega, it seems quite unlikely that it would take 456 days to fly it decently to enter abyssal space given that you donāt even need a HAC to get into T1 and T2 (and the gila can go even further).
As for the rest of your rant, looks like you want it all even if youāre new. Wellā¦ tough. EVE is for the long haul player. The good news is you can pick a ship and get mastery 4 (and lvl 4 ship skills) for it pretty quickly and be almost as good as a veteran for a fraction of the time invested.
Thereās a reason the filament tiers represent higher levels of difficulty. For Alphas, I wouldnāt venture beyond F2 filaments (with possibly some exceptions). Thereās just too much unpredictability.
If there was a frigate or destroyer level of the Abyssal pockets, I think it would be cool if you had to run them as a group as opposed to solo, ie: 2-3 players.