Thank you.
Now that I know that, I can do some figuring for myself and post my thoughts in due time about my views on such a change and what percentage cut of skill training times I would consider to be acceptable, if any.
I dont agree with this. Why?
In mmo’s and especially games working on the sandbox spectrum, the game needs to have a significant amount of cooperation and competition. simply put, the competition of tech 2 ships is just not in line with tech 1. For example, your unlikely to roll a fleet of hacs with a fleet of standard cruisers (it could be done with highly experienced players, but that is the point here, the reduction is to increase cooperation, competition, and over all captivation for new players).
You are welcome.
Im not saying it has to be 30%, but i am saying that if the gains exceed 50% there is really no reason to make the change. The major reason i think the change should happen is specifically because of the impact that level 5 skills have on training to for example a hac, or covert ops ship.
@DeMichael_Crimson
Maybe the increased time could be slightly reduced for tech two ships. So you gain an over all reduction in all ship training (lets say 40-60%) and then the tech 2 reduction is set between 30-40% reduction of current rates.
Away for a few, i need to go do some work on off-screen indicators for my game.
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A lot of assumptions in the thread just aren’t based on actual reality or any sort of data.
From my own experience with new players, virtually no new players sit down, do the math, and think “Wow it will take 20 years to master all the skills in this game! Welp, I’m out!”
Several new players I introduced or mentored were initially impressed that they could gain skills without having to ‘level up’ or even do missions/‘quests’. Several thought it was pretty cool they could continue to learn while offline. Several thought it was interesting they got to choose and control every skill they could learn in what order, rather than pick up only one or two things ‘per level’.
However, only one of these new players is still in the game today. I didn’t get a rundown on why they quit from all of them, but from the ones I talked to, the general idea was “too slow, interface was very clumsy, takes too long to do anything, the things I can do don’t seem to reward very much”.
My personal observation (which none of them expressed, specifically) was that there was too much reward for simply being off-line (setting up your skill queue and waiting for skills to train) or ‘grind-like’ play (running missions for standing, mining for ISK, exploration with it’s random results), and there was too little reward for ‘active’ play (trying FW as a noob, doing combat sites, and running missions for ‘action’ rather than LP and standings).
If ‘slow gain of SP’ is an issue in the game, it would be far better for the game to reward SP for active play rather than passive training time. Reducing caps from 20 years to 10 or even 5 is not a factor in a players daily interaction with a game, it’s only something of concern to bored theory-crafters.
Giving players 3 daily random tasks chosen from a pool, which pay 2,500, 5,000 and 10,000 SP respectively (with according levels of difficulty) would go much farther towards promoting active play than reducing caps or training time would. Making those totals 5k, 10k and 20k for Omega subs would increase subbing. Adding an additional set of PvP tasks that pay double those totals (for Alpha and Omega respectively) would increase PvP as well. And it would all be based on one single system to add to the game. Surely even CCP could get one single system working.
As a side note: any PvP tasks/incentives would have to be based on destroyed value in order to be less abusable. Simple ‘Kill 3 PvP targets’ would lead to players gaming the system. “Gain 10k SP for destroying 25 million worth of PvP targets” would lead to actual PvP.
When I first started playing this game 11 years ago, I stayed in a T1 Frigate for 9 months and max trained every single skill related to that ship. Having those skills trained made it much easier to advance into the larger ships.
Course at that time there were ‘Learning Skills’ in the game which I was also training up along with Cybernetics skills for implants.
it seems unlikely that they would do that (iv had friends coming to eve ask those questions and be shocked by it but they did not quit at that time)
they could definitely think “this takes to long to train skills, and get new stuff, im out”.
Also we have extensive evidence that this has a massive impact on a players retention rates. ITs the entire reason VP Systems (leveling etc) exist today. If you dont know you should do some research into the early history of the industry with HP/VP Systems and the many failed projects involved.
Funny, I’ve heard just the opposite, major complaint was skill training took too long
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I can imagine this is potentially true on the short term, but it’s doubtful that it is true for the extremely long term, honestly after about 50~60 million skill points I didn’t focus on skill training anymore and simply put in a level 5 skill that was objectively relevant.
For instance I have Medium Railgun Specialization and Medium Blaster Specialization V.
For a new player these skills at their 2% damage increase aren’t a priority train.
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TBH, that’s a poor example; hac and covops pilots are already invested in the game, once you start getting in to T2 ships you’re already subscribed.
CCP have already retained those players, the retention problem is with new players not players that can fly hacs.
If CCP wish to increase retention by making changes to how skill points work it would need to be at the level that a new player experiences; if any retention is to be gained by tweaking SP it’s at the T1 cruiser and below level.
What has to be considered is that any changes at that level affects new characters, it wouldn’t be exclusive to new players. If it’s easily achievable by new players, it’s even easier for experienced players when rolling a new character for a role.
CCP have to balance that too.
Yes, in fact, several of the people I started did state they felt skill training took too long, especially when they got past the easy ranks 1-3 and started looking at rank 4 and 5 skills. That’s what I meant when I said “if slow gain of SP is an issue” - which it is. It is also passive gain of SP, which is bad for a game that needs to be played more actively.
However the thread topic is on skill point caps, not rate of SP gain; and also on new player retention. In my experience, neither of these were an issue for players in the first 30 days or so of play.
Ive known a large number of players that look at something like the skills for a ship they want mixed with base skill and decide its not even worth undocking and playing for a number of months since they feel the need to have those base skills maxed before being able to do anything
(looks at own skill line of 672 days) if it wasnt for training goal for training all my lvl 5s left i dont know what else id be doing, maybe injector farming
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not according to metrics. The metrics say that people leave up to 180 days after, which means they are half a year in. This is definitely over the alpha cap. This means ccp is losing people while they are subscribed.
Lets say the following conditions are true.
- Retention rates have dropped to 30%-40% (industry standard) with the purposed skill reduction changes
- Players are proving to be active in the game and staying in it because of the faster progression rates and the frequent ship unlock aspects.
Imagine that this prove mechanic which kept them interested suddenly disappeared, or become massively slower.
now the questions
how do you think that would impact the rates then? and if the change is proving to keep people, why would to negate away from it?
The only thing i can see happening here is that they pick up some other aspect of the game that can captivate them more while they are in that “prime experience” phase, but the sad truth is eve really does not have that to offer. No content is so good in this game that it really screams that level of captivation in players.
The truth is eve is largely just here because it has no real competitors, there really is nothing super special about it, and what is potentially there is left in a fully free to play mmo sandbox that ccp will not enable (please note, i do not consider grinding isk for plex to be “Free to play” i consider it to be “conditional payment systems”).
If anything was to exist in eve that would potentially captivate people at that level, it’d probably be corporate progression (ie accomplishing things like building massive stations) or incursions. I find these forms of content offer the most potential for this. PvP in null could reach that spot again if its frequency rates could be improved, but as long as the super donuts exist, and homer is sleeping, we have no chance of captivation there.
Skill points (the cap) being reduced or training time being i̶n̶c̶r̶e̶a̶s̶e̶d̶ decreased, it’s basically the same thing.
Disregarding the fitting / support ship skills, I only trained level 5 when it was required to start another skill. It wasn’t until I was at 100 to 150 mill SP’s that I started training up lv 5 on all the other skills.
EDIT:
Made a mistake - meant to say training time being decreased.
lol, I’m like at that stage too. I keep looking at my skill sheet and thinking I’m running out of sub-cap skills to train.
Oh and the same with me, seen players set skills to train and then log out until those skills were trained
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becareful, while you think that might be the same, it might not. Subtle differences like this have historically caused problems.
I will give an example as evidence.
In wows early days “experience” use to have “negative” experience. basically they spinned it that if you did not log off in an inn for some time, you’d have to work off some experience before you’d gain a bonus increase.
This caused an ourcry of anger, did you know what blizzard did? they flipped it around. They made the “bonus” exp previously the normal rate have a cap, based on how long you were logged off in the inn, and kept people at the normal, previous negative rate by default.
The subtle switch was only a gui related change, on how it was being called and displayed on a bar, and went from being anger to being a massive positive in players books.
Thus, the statement above is dangerous.
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I won’t comment on the metric itself, I haven’t looked at it. I’ll consider it to be representative, because it looks entirely feasible.
Is there any data available that shows related information that should be considered alongside this metric? Were they subscribed accounts or alpha accounts that now lay unused?
For example data about SP levels on leaving characters, player activities, whether the player was engaging in fleet or solo activities etc, would allow a deeper insight into the metric
Lets say the following conditions are true.
- Retention rates have dropped to 30%-40% (industry standard) with the purposed skill reduction changes
- Players are proving to be active in the game and staying in it because of the faster progression rates and the frequent ship unlock aspects.
Imagine that this prove mechanic which kept them interested suddenly disappeared, or become massively slower.
-
Are we talking new player retention or the retention of players over the 180 day mark here, because CCP wish they had 30-40% new player retention.
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Faster progression rates and frequent unlocks are indeed a popular mechanic, nobody is saying otherwise. It works well in other games because it satisfies the needs of a certain demographic. Eve as it is also satisfies the needs of a certain demographic, it’s more akin to an RTS than it is WoW.
how do you think that would impact the rates then? and if the change is proving to keep people, why would to negate away from it?
My suggestion of looking at how SP progression affects new players or yours that affects players 6 months in?
The new player turnover is absolutely horrendous, part of that is the nature of the game I can accept that it is what it is. But, by far the biggest problem for new players is that the NPE is misleading.
For example it teaches new players to use a mechanic that has a good chance of getting them killed.
It utterly fails to introduce new players to interacting with other players, for both conflict and cooperation purposes; one of the most important things in Eve, and the NPE doesn’t promote it.
It doesn’t give new players any clue where to find further information or answers to questions they may have.
For the purposes of this thread I’m including the introduction sequence, career agents and the SoE arc within the NPE.
I know that CCP struggle with new players and retention, the NPE could be a lot better. Older players often run it with new characters, as experienced players we look at it with an experienced eye, we can see the shortcomings, we can see where improvement can be made. Sometimes our solutions are terrible, but for the most part there are a good number of places where the NPE could be improved with a few tweaks here and there.
the sad truth is eve really does not have that to offer. No content is so good in this game that it really screams that level of captivation in players.
If you’re referring to the content provided by CCP you’re right, the captivation is what we can do with the stuff CCP provide us.
The truth is eve is largely just here because it has no real competitors, there really is nothing super special about it.
It has few competitors because it’s addressing a market sector with few competitors. What makes Eve special is not the game itself, it’s the people who play it, and how they interact with the game and each other.
An MMO in its purest form is a social framework for human interaction; Eve does that fairly well IMHO, allowing the full gamut of human behaviour within a simple rule set.
Potentially in the video, i did not watch it though. I had personally estimated their loss rates around 60-70%. Seems i underestimated how bad the retention is (being that its at almost 90%). I truly feel back for ccp and desperately want to help them fix this.
This is a very good question. I’d like to know more myself. As far as i know the only real data we have on player retention metrics comes from the events, and some suggestive data on the api related server statistics.
Im sure ccp has this information.
Aint that the truth.
And that demographic is vastly larger then the one advocated for here on the forums.
Im not so sure i agree with this. RTS have extremely high APM rates, eve’s designed in a way that has extremely low RTS Rates. I think it’d compare it more to dreadnaught.
Where aspect specifically do you think is an issue? NPE’s tend to be vary ambiguously defined, and rare.
I really think the problem of corporations is very easy to solve, and i think what makes it so easy is stations. I think we should be approaching stations more like clan cities, then we are more like the inn in your town of choice (using wow spread of inns as a point of reference; basically all over).
I think that at the same time making stations large, hard to accomplish tasks both serve as a form to reduce the spam, help provide ways to validate capitals and super capitals for a specific role in the game (potentially allowing removal or downsizing of super farming machines and omg win ships) as well as providing an immense amount of recognition and community effort and accomplishment a corp can have.
Actually, I think its more of the narrative aspects of players. lets face it a lot of people in this game are… umm… special potatoes?.. Yes thats it… and some other potatoes get mashed a lot.
Its interesting you say this, because socially we depend on family units. When they degrade, the upbringing of the people degrade, and when they degrade the society starts to erode itself, ultimately bringing destruction to the entire entity (country, nation etc)
In many ways eve’s homes (corporations) are sick, and providing this effect.
With a game that relies on social interaction as much as the provided content.
It utterly fails to introduce new players to interacting with other players, for both conflict and cooperation purposes; one of the most important things in Eve, and the NPE doesn’t promote it.
Eve is a social game, social interaction is a key part of the experience. The NPE needs to stress this and introduce ways of achieving it.
It doesn’t give new players any clue where to find further information or answers to questions they may have.
Also a key point that isn’t addressed. The point of an NPE is to introduce people to the absolute basics, I get that. However it should also encourage those who want to look further into the things that it introduces, it doesn’t do that and I think it’s a missed opportunity.
For example it teaches new players to use a mechanic that has a good chance of getting them killed.
One word; Autopilot.
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AFAIK autopilot has never warped you to zero, the convenience of autopilot is offset by the risk it opens you up to when you drop warp 15km off the gate.
AP is not really totally an NPE
Yet it’s a mechanic introduced and encouraged during the NPE, the use of it is an inferior choice; I would like to see the encouragement of its use in the NPE removed all together.
~edited to reflect the recent pruning
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108 Off topic Posts have been removed. Topic Reopened.
Stay on topic. Thats all we Ask.
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Of course they don’t, don’t be an idiot.