Just pointing this out, but… almost 4pm in Reykjavik, the day after the patch, not a single indicator CCP’s even glancing at this thread. Looks like Slow Mode’s done its job of suppressing community engagement.
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Anyone been to the new PD monument, and if so, how does one:
“Please query the Phase Two Monument’s database for records of those capsuleers who were elite research contributors to Project Discovery’s light curve analysis work”
When there?
Want to see if I am on the list, no idea how to do so.
All of this is in the in-game client. The webpage is simply the portal to buy the thing. There’s nothing wrong with this - you want the person making the decision to have all the information they need to make an informed decision in front of them, and you can’t do that on a webpage. You need to be able to look at your own in-game skills.
That would be duplicating the information.
Are you suggesting that CCP sell fitted ships for cash?
There’s nothing misleading about showing a picture of a ship when you’re selling the skills needed to use the ship. You’re arguing that the DMV can’t show a picture of a car on their website, since they’re not actually selling cars, just licenses to drive them.
There’s no way to tell them exactly how much it’s going to cost because on any given day the amount changes. And you’re also suggesting here that CCP directly sell isk for cash. I have no problems with them including a small amount of plex (which I expect is likely to happen at some point) that can be sold for isk to buy a ship, but directly selling isk for cash is crossing the line in my opinion, as is selling fitted ships (although I know they have done this in the past).
I am really sick and tired of all the armchair lawyering about “consumer protections.” This is nonsense. CCP has a legal department, they review these sales to ensure they comply with the laws in the jurisdictions CCP sells in. I have worked with their legal team, and they are competent. The spirit of every consumer protection law is to stop people from getting scammed by unscrupulous vendors. This is not the case here.
It certainly will hurt less than if he used skill injectors with bought plex and then realizes he hates mining.
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Perhaps I am misunderstanding their role, but isn’t part of the Community Relations team purpose to foster communication between CCP and their player base? Is there another department at CCP responsible for this flow of information instead? Does their sphere of responsibility only include Discord, Twitch, and Reddit?
I didn’t know that Iceland has crickets…
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I wonder if the player base does? I cant imagine a vet with the music still on.
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Don’t you also want the product specifications on the website, so they can be sure they’re buying the right item(s)?
So duplicate the information. Good lord, Brisc, it’s 1s and 0s. A screenshot or copypasta would do it.
I’m suggesting a temporary ship that goes away after the 7d. 
They bill it as ‘try this stuff out’, you know? I’m not talking about issues of consumer protection or anything like that. Just straight up ‘the website said if I pay $3.99, I can try out mining barges. I paid them their money, but I still can’t fly the ship, cuz I don’t have the ship’. It’s the kind of thing that can feel really shady to new players, and make them decide ‘screw this game, I’ll go play World of Spaceships’ (I assume Wargaming’s working on that now, what with the Space Force and all).
Poorly-explained microtransactions that don’t deliver what they promise are more likely to harm, not help, retention, andf they tell experienced players ‘CCP is half-assing this crap again’.
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The folks doing the website are not the folks doing the in-game stuff. I don’t have an issue with putting it on the website, but it’s not critical.
What I have argued for is recommended fittings, but in the end, the new players need to learn how to buy ships from the market, not have ships handed to them from CCP. We need to be reinforcing with new players that ships in EVE are manufactured by other players, not just poofed into being by the company, and this is a good place to start. Get a fit, go to Jita or another trade hub, buy it and fit it out, then go fly.
There’s already complaints about these microtransactions. I don’t want to double those complaints by throwing in selling the ships to players as well.
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Sure, but this is a one-week ‘try before you buy’ test drive, man. That’s why my suggestion includes things like ‘you can’t refit it. You can’t sell it. You can’t insure it. You’re just trying it out and you don’t really have it’. I could just as easily have responded with ‘new players need to learn how to manage their skill queues and be patient while training time passes’, you know?
This is marketed as ‘try it out before you invest time’. Getting the money to buy the ship takes time. Worse, the best way to get that money? Spend a week mining in a Venture. So (as I raise in the article), the best way to be able to afford the barge, so you can try out mining before you spend a ton of time mining… is to spend a ton of time mining. That doesn’t strike you as a problem?
Not when it makes the whole thing useless and self-defeating. It’s like all of the stupid ideas people came up with to fix wardecs that came down to ‘the way to get people who don’t want to pvp to not dock up is to tell them that now, they can PvP!’
If the way to avoid doing the thing you don’t want to do is ‘do the thing you don’t want to do’… why should I bother? Why shouldn’t I just go play something else that lets me, you know, not do the thing I don’t want to do?
Similarly here, if I want to try out mining before having to invest a lot of time (in the newbie perspective) into being able to not suck at it… I want to try it out before I’ve had ti invest a lot of time into being able to not suck at it. If I’m not playing 8-10h a day, it takes just as long to get the barge as it does to train the skills to use the barge.
So what benefit am I really seeing here? Why am I not feeling like I’ve been jerked around by the game company? Why does this make me not want to just go do something else where I don’t feel jerked around?
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You could have, but this runs directly counter to the point of these expert systems in the first place. The issue was not about getting ships, it was about the time it takes to train and try things, and the fear that some new players have that if they decide to invest time into something and don’t like it they’ve hurt their characters permanently. It was designed to stop decision paralysis and give folks an easy, affordable option to try something out.
But this is still EVE, and just because you’re getting a temporary reprieve on the time it takes to train a skill, you still gotta buy the ships and I don’t think it’s a good idea to mess with the economy at that level, especially now. For every new player who wants to go out and mine or rat, there’s a new player who wants to try his hand at industry and these are the low level things they can find, build and sell. I don’t want to see that market undercut.
You get the benefit of not having to decide to train a skill until you know that gameplay is fun. The ship you can sell if you don’t like it, but the skills you’re stuck with until you hit 5 mil and can extract them, and that’s a lot of time.
I understand what you’re saying, but I just don’t and can’t support selling fitted ships. I think that crosses a line when it comes to monetization. I know they already sell destroyer starter packs and the like and I’ve opposed those as well, and I don’t want to see any expansions of it.
I’ll pitch your temporary ship that evaporates after the 7 days idea, but I think that’s going to be too much work for them to do, honestly.
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Dude, ship hulls—especially a medium-sized hull—are not something new players should be trying to build, and you know it. Let’s set aside ‘how much does the blueprint cost?’, and the time involved in researching the blueprint. A perfect ME/TE production run on T1 hulls is still a razor-thin profit margin. So let’s avoidl the ‘oh, it’ll screw up newbie industrialists’, because it won’t.
Except the rigs. And, you know, not if it blows up because the gankers found me—and we all know they will, they already focus on barges near (not in) starter systems and trade hubs, and that’s where these newbies will be. So now I’m 2d into my ES and have to spend another 5-10d mining to afford a second barge.
And ask yourself this: I’m a newbie on a 7d pass to use the barge. Am I using the tanky barge, or am I using the barge that lets me mine absolutely as much as I can, so I can make the most of those seven days? Do I even know the difference?
As indicated in the linked article: piggy-back it on the ‘board my corvette’ system. CCP already gives out free ships that can’t be sold. Just make pre-fitted versions of the barges that only get given out or boarded if you’ve got the ES active—it’s not like the performance will vary with skill levels, the skill levels are predetermined. So they’d have fixed stats, strip miners and a shield booster that all don’t come off, and poof, there you go.
But thanks for passing it along.
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I was thinking more the modules, to be honest.
This is something these new players need to get used to. It’s inevitable, and shielding them from it by handing them fake ships is just prolonging the inevitable.
You know it’s not this simple, bro. Come on.
So is skill training, which takes care of itself while you’re asleep, and while you’re out buying food, and while you’re off doing your day job. If the goal is to let new players try a playstyle without a massive investment of their limited playing time, skills aren’t the bottleneck.
No, I really don’t. All of the parts of that system are already in-game, from Boosters that expire and become useless after X days, to ships like the Echelon and Zephyr, which always assemble into the same fitting, automatically, and can only accept the modules they start with—modules that can’t be sold or reprocessed—and which have a fixed performance level, to the ‘board my corvette’ button. It’s all there already. Even the ‘do you have the thing active that lets you board this ship?’ is there.
All of the pieces are there. They’d just have to be put together.
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So, this Gallente Grand Prix Interceptor Expert System gives you Racial Frigs V and Interceptors IV but doesn’t give you Evasive Maneuvering V.
So you can’t even fly an Interceptor unless you already have already trained Evasive V.
Doesn’t anybody double check anything, think anything through or perform even basic Quality Assurance?
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Me.
While sometimes I turn the ingame music off to listen to other music, I have the ingame music turned on by default. It’s pretty good.
That’s not correct. To fly the interceptor, you need Interceptors I. To train Interceptors, you need Evasive Maneuvering V. The Expert System sidesteps this and gives you Interceptors IV and Racial Frigate V, which are the only two skills the hull actually requires.
This is similar (as I mentioned earlier) to what happens when CCP changes skill requirements. When they split Battlecruisers into [Racial] Battlecruiser skills, and changed the requirements for [Racial] Battleship to include [Racial] Battlecruiser III (rather than [Racial] Cruiser III being sufficient), nobody lost the ability to fly battleships. Only the top-level skills are required. The others are the skills you need to get those skills, which this circumvents.
can you fix the booster duration bonus on abyssal siege rolls? this needs to be fixed
The expert system that you gave out yesterday for interceptors is broken.
It claims to unlock all the interceptors for a character, but unless that character already has Evasive Maneuvering trained to level 5 for another reason then they’re not going to be able to fly the ships, since all the interceptor hull requirements include Evasive Maneuvering 5. So for all my characters who couldn’t already fly an interceptor, this Expert System helps none of them because as new, or at least specialised characters they only need that skill to 5 when I need them to have an interceptor anyway. I can’t imagine the new players this is aimed at any differently.
It looks like you tested this feature from memory, or on characters that weren’t new enough to be your target audience, either way I think for the launch of a new, and possibly fairly important product you could and should have done better.
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I assume, you actually tried to board one? If not, at least try before starting rant.
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This is not how it works.
This is old training logic, from the days when you trained skills over time and needed the pre-reqs to learn the needed skills (and also needed to be Omega).
Expert Systems BYPASS all of that.
You don’t need pre-reqs. You don’t need Omega.
Logic dictates that if you somehow have Interceptor I or higher, which the ES gives you, then you can fly an Interceptor.
ES is a leapfrog system. An instant ‘you have access to’ system.
CCP are not that stupid.
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