Merouk Baas
The Scope
Gallente Federation
0
   |
Posted - 2012.11.17 00:16:00 -
[1] - Quote
From a newbie's point of view, the skill system offers two things:
1. Access to new ships. Ships in EVE grant different roles, and progressing in the ship lineups is what advancing your character is all about, for newbies. This is what's exciting.
2. Access to modules, and increased performance for the ships via bonuses. This, if you think about it, is similar to the Talent Trees in other MMO's - oh now you can spec for ECM, or you can remote repair, or you can go faster, tank more, shoot better. While this is the meat of the game, in terms of how to get the best performance out of your ship and win fights, training for these minutiae is what bores and frustrates a new player.
There are a million support skills, for every little tiny thing, and honestly you need ALL of them. Who doesn't train all of Navigation, all of the armor or shield skills, all of the weapons support skills for their weapon, and so on? There are so many skills, it's confusing, and it takes forever.
What to do?
Suggestions (some of these may already be implemented; I haven't played in a while):
1. Adjust the global SP/minute rate to keep it proportional to tech level progression and/or ship rebalances, so that EVE is closer to other MMO's where it takes 4-6, 9 months tops to get to the ships that the majority of the playerbase considers "average" (battleships? T2 cruisers? whatever).
2a. Adjust the ranks of skills so that support takes less time to train and the ship skills are the only things that limit a newbie's progression in terms of time.
2b. Or, have ships offer bonuses to specific support skills training time: if you're flying around in an ECM frigate then you get double training speed for electronic warfare skills, navigation skills, small turret skills, what have you. That way the newbie is enticed to try various ships to see how they work, while training faster for the support skills for them. And if they train Caldari Cruiser and buy a Caracal, then discover that they don't have the support skills to fit it worth a damn, well, the training bonuses will help them rectify that issue, while also educating them about what skills they should get.
3. Set up a system so newbies can buy and train skillpacks. For example, we should be able to advise a newbie to "go buy the probing package and train it" or "go buy and train the small projectiles package" and each package should deliver all the necessary skills for being able to probe people or to use small autocannons with good support skills for said autocannons. You already have certifications, this would be similar, but focused on roles rather than the current skill groupings.
4. Let people respec their skills (perhaps limited to the support skills). I would be willing to take a 10% loss of total skillpoints to reallocate; it's like a few uncloned deaths, not a huge deal for newbies. But if they make a mistake, an advisor can tell them to respec and tell them how, and they won't have to start over (which is a huge frustration).
5. Create support for charity escrows, where veterans can donate ISK and true newbies can take out ISK in the small quantities that they need 10mil 50mil whatever. We have no way of detecting alts vs. really newbies, but CCP you have automated ways of checking the accounts; tie that into a charity system.
6. People love story arcs, as evidenced by the plethora of recent, extremely popular, story RPG's (single player, multiplayer) released in the last few years. CCP should hire some writers and code themselves a mission generator tool. They don't even have to change the NPCs or ratting mechanics - if there's a reason why Lai Dai recruits initially to do a mission, and then the story progresses and there's betrayal and whatnot, and there's a story arc associated with that particular corporation as you progress from agent to agent, and the player defeats increasingly evil and increasingly powerful enemies for a reason, PVE'ers will eat that stuff up like it's icecream. Not even voice-acted, text in the mission journal and at the gates is sufficient. It would be, IMO, a good improvement to PVE to attract many new players. Give titles as rewards, medals, ranks, exotic dancers, etc, and it would be pretty good.
7. Consider doing module tiericide when you're done with the ship tiericide. We have have how many meta levels? And how many are useless, or too close in performance to lower levels? A few, IMO. People use T2 modules as soon as they can; I'm not sure if there's need for so many T1 meta levels. |