The corp management skills are a joke; please rework or delete them

Communications Center Skill Discussion
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There was probably a time where corporation management skills made sense. I don’t know what that time was, or why they made sense, but it may have existed. A time where forcing players to train in order to group up with other players… I guess that was part of EVE’s history.

Yet even during that time, these skills seemed like a weird idea. Not only does the CEO have to train these otherwise pointless skills up just to add more people, but he/she must also “update” the corp to match his/her skill level. As with the jump clone restriction bypassing of old, this means you could have an alt or friend with high skills become CEO, change the upper limit, then leave the position. So what is the point of these skills?

It’s even worse today. Today, you can simply inject yourself the SP necessary for the size corp you want, update the corp info, then extract all the SP. Your corp will still have its upper limit. What a joke!
Can anyone actually argue for why these skills should exist, especially in a post-injector age? They don’t promote gameplay. In fact, they can only hinder it, by slowing the growth of corporations. But even then, they don’t do that: you can just inject up to what you need, or have a friend set up a corp for you. The skills don’t accomplish their own supposed goal!

I think it’s time to scrap these skills. Let anyone make a corporation of the max size. If you are concerned about newbies ruining corps somehow, create a HEAVY isk payment system instead on growing your corp. This will add an ISK sink to the game and gate out a day-1 newbie from creating a huge alliance without realizing it.

Alternatively, leave the skills but give them some other, more meaningful perk. Every level trained gives your corp +100 corp bookmarks… pretty please?

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Valid question!

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I can’t think of a valid reason why these skills exist.

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Agree completely. Wrote about this myself over a year ago on reddit:


They are the most pointless skills currently in EVE, time to remove them.

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These skill do feel very anachronistic and make social interaction between players harder.

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I kinda agree with the op. Although you could get some kind of sense from the idea that someone needs to skill a bit to manage a very big organisation, they are very far from senseful in the current state of the game.
I would rather go with a model where skills don’t limit the size (or at least not for reasonable numbers) of a corp, but rather “special abilities”. Like the corporation contracts amount, the number of offices you could rent, citadels/structures you could place or stuff like that. You could also split that into several corp-positions if needed, like having a structure manager (who is the one who required to skill up for structures) etc.

And of course, as already mentioned, the “update button” is way outdated. The skill should rather be checked everytime it is used. So if you accept an invitation and join the corp - you can’t if the CEO has not enough skills - or the same with contracts/structures etc.

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A heavy ISK toll is no different to a skill barrier in the age of injectors.

If you can pay ISK to buy injectors and use them, you can pay ISK to cover an ISK toll to establish a Corp. It’s 1 Billion ISK to establish an Alliance, so either that has to also be adjusted, or a higher ISK cost for a Corp is pretty easily covered.

Probably not a way CCP will head, but I’d personally prefer to see certain skills not injectable at all. Capital skills, many of the more advanced skills for industry, trading etc. Leave all the core and lower level skills injectable and let people just train the others once they meet the prerequisites.

I’d put corp management skills into that, but totally agree with you that even if they weren’t injectable, Corp creation services would again pop up and offer max size Corps as a service.

I don’t personally see Corp management skills as being a barrier to socialization. You don’t need any skills to join a Corp and training level I Corp Management is only a few minutes. So, it’s easy to start small.

However, I totally agree that the current structure is of little value.

I think there should still be skills for running Corps, but perhaps they should be aimed as affecting the things that Corps provide.

For example, remove the skill to create Corporations and instead replace it with one that opens up the ability to set taxes (and until it is trained, the Corp would have an Empire tax).

That’s probably a poor example, but the general principle is more allow all players to create Corps, but add in skills that provide more benefit to the Corp based on the CEO’s skills.

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Maybe we should let people create a corp of any size with no skill BUT every now and then the RNG gods will take 1% of the cash in the corporate wallet because the CEO has no management skill. Each level of corp management could reduce this by 20% to 0 at level 5.

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Hooray, glad to see the skill discussion forum going. Was missing it on the first day of the new forums and had to make my first topic about that very thing. ;D

That’s an interesting idea if the skills have to stay, yeah.

They do seem like a strange, old, unneeded afterthought of a skill group. Like a vestigial tail… or the appendix!

That said, back last November when off-grid boosters came on-grid and Leadership/Wing Command/Fleet Command skills were no longer needed for passing passive (and active) boosts down to up to 10 people, up to 51 people, and up to 256 people… they just changed it to boost range increases. So… we’ll see. Removing and refunding SP sure would be less messy in these cases, IMO. But CCP is reluctant to remove skills.

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The appendix actually serves as a backup for your gut flora in case a serious illness wipes out your main tract’s population, whatever is secured in the appendix can slowly repopulate your GI tract after you recover so you can continue to digest normally.

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Would be better to just scrap the skills completely and just let players increase the limit, as well as bookmark limit by purchasing ‘upgrades’ from CONCORD to act as an ISK sink or something.

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Thats not a bad idea, much like real corp corps where one you cross a certain employee threshold you move up a tax bracket, this would be a decent idea for eve. Want to gain over 50 members? Pay a tax to be certified as a medium corp, then large corp, then mega corp. each has a tax increase of a 1 time fee.

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And agreed in kind… looks like I both upvoted and had the top upvoted comment in that thread last year!

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I would rather them make the barrier of entry to creating a corp a bit harder, and remove the loophole of having someone have the skills then leave also.

A skill barrier of entry to creating/running corps implies that player skills are also needed.

Now in saying that I would like them to make the numbers much larger initially (First skill be the 1000 per rank) and then use the rest of those skills for other things. But I don’t want them to remove a barrier of entry to creating corps as I think it helps EVE.

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This. Then WarDecs would be an even bigger ISK sink cuz everytime a corp folds and reforms, ISK is sunk.

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Agree 100% with the OP. Replace with tax system of some kind, and skill up to avoid bureaucracy costs or something.

The only reason to leave this as a skill set is to boost sales of injectors. Come on CCP. Seriously.

H. Lee

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The sad reality of the post-skill extractor/injector version of EVE we have now where the aim is to make everything accessible on day 1 if you have the money to pay for it.

In the absence of skill injectors, keeping skills provides play for vets that others can’t access immediately and builds a relationship between the player and their character. That’s disappearing.

I’m sure the hope is that entertaining play would replace it and keep people around long term. I’m not sure that is actually happening (but that’s just based on feels, not actual data). The skills as an idea are fine. Just not when they can be allocated to instead of trained.

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I was always looking at them as something that add lore or roleplay to this game, and as such I would like them to stay. But at the same point I have to agree that they are useless - they always were useless since everyone could simply ‘update’ corp with they maxed skills.

I like the idea of skilling Corporation brench in order to remove some of corporation limitations, like:

It would be cool if those skills vere responsible for things like(this is just an idea):

  • operateing POCO, planetary interacition,
  • how many players may have ‘some’ roles in corporation,
  • how many tabs corporation hangar have,
  • how many wallet tabs corp have,
  • how many corporation hangars, corporation may have,
  • etc. etc. :slight_smile:
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Corp management needs a complete redo, I presumed ccp was working on a rebalance of the skill. its not totally worthless, the most worthless skills left in this game are the absolutely stupid science skills you need to build storyline items.
that right there is an epic waste of time.