ShahFluffers
Ice Fire Warriors Late Night Alliance
1088
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Posted - 2012.11.08 09:26:00 -
[1] - Quote
Maximus Andendare wrote:I started playing Eve recently, and I'm curious if there's ever been any discussion to make Eve more new player friendly. The biggest problem I'm finding is that many corps look for players with 10-15 mil sp, and for a new player, that's about a year or so. This is a "scare tactic" to keep the general rabble away.
If you talk to a recruiter and show that you are willing to learn, are competent, and generally a chill person... they will most likely accept you.
Maximus Andendare wrote:But, there should be some mechanism to get newer players up to snuff faster. There is simply too great a divide between all the older, so-called "bittervet" players, and the new ones. This is a common complaint. One that can be easily dismissed with both a history lesson and a run down of what the skill system actually does.
History lesson first. Back when EVE was brand new it WAS possible to "grind" up your skills the way you could in "traditional" MMOs. Simply que up a skill, perform an activity related to that skill, and the skill would time down faster.
However, players quickly found ways to exploit this. For example... say you want to increase your skill level(s) in tanking and weapon systems. Easy. Simply get a friend (or alt character), fit up both of your ships so they can shoot and tank indefinitely, warp off to an isolated point in space, aggress each other, and then begin shooting and tanking each other. Go AFK. CCP promptly removed this mechanic.
With regard to the how the skill system works...
- All skills cap at level 5. No matter how many years you have played the game, you cannot exceed that limit. And lower level skills (ex. [Racial] Frigate) are very quick to train relative to more advanced skills.
- Only a limited number of skills affect any one ship, module, weapon system, and specialty at any given time. Ex1: Someone you are facing has about 20 million SP, but how much of that overall SP is actually combat related? He/she could be a HUGE industrial player with limited combat skills. Ex2: A veteran player has just trained up the skill Large Hybrid Turret to level 5. That skill in no way affects the skill Small Hybrid Turret and thus the veteran will be no better or worse than before at the frigate level.
- Getting a skill from level 4 to level 5 only adds on an extra 2% here, 5% there (exceptions apply). If you simply train up all the skills within a specialty to level 4, you will find yourself flying at about 80 to 90% of the effectiveness of a multi-year veteran with those same skills in that specific specialty at level 5.
- Getting a skill to level 5 is supposed to be a painful train. Many players (yes, even veteran ones) opt to avoid doing it and instead train up other skills to level 4 (because it's faster).
- Ships and weapons have been balanced against one another. Ex: A battleship can potentially instapop a frigate... but the frigate can fly very fast, making it difficult for the battleship's weapons to track, especially at very close range... then again, the battleship can deploy drones to deal with the frigate... and the frigate can shoot the drones down... however the battleship might have a Large Energy Neutralizer fitted to nuke the frigate's capacitor every 24 second... in which case the frigate could use a Small Nosferatu that sucks out capacitor every 3 seconds... etc. etc.
tl;dr... - the point of the skill system is to force you to learn the game's mechanics and nuances in cheaper equipment and ships... that way when you DO gain access to more expensive equipment and ships, you know HOW to use them properly.
- High tech equipment (ex. T2, Faction, Officer, etc) will not give a player "I WIN" abilities. It simply gives a player a greater edge at an exponentially higher cost. Ex: A group of three T1-fit frigates that cost about 500 to 800 thousand ISK CAN kill a faction frigate work about 50 million ISK... provided they are using the right mods in the right configuration and know what they are doing.
- more SP is not indicative of a pilot's ability. It just means that the pilot has more options in what he/she can do.
- no one ship is superior to everything in the game. Even Titans, the largest ship in the game, has its Achilles heel; smaller ships.
Maximus Andendare wrote:If there's no talk of a new-player skill system, I'd either propose 1) give new players 2x or even 3x skill point gains in the first 60-, 90- or 120- days, up to and maybe even 180 days. I'm sure many new players wouldn't mind if there was a plex cost associated with this, There was a time when new players started out with 2x training speed. But that was removed for a variety of reasons... one or which was that CCP didn't want older player created brand new alts and hyper-specializing them in short time frames.
You'll also find that a good many players in this game (both young and old) are opposed to the idea of "PLEX for SP"... or any variation thereof.
Maximus Andendare wrote:I've read about the "it's ok, you can be new and be competitive with bittervets by specializing." That's a great argument, but it fails. It mainly fails by newer players not even knowing what he or she would like to specialize in. ...(snip)... when any older player reading this thinks back, you knew *for sure* what you wanted to do and thus specialized out of the gate? No. I didn't know what to specialize in. I played around with different roles... toyed with the skill system... asked around... and eventually gained direction. You're right in that the skill system is VERY complicated... but that is something CCP is addressing (hint: they are "streamlining" the skill system to make specialization easier). Beyond that, it's up to the player to experiment.
And no... there is no such thing as "wasted SP." Change isn't bad, but it isn't always good. Sometimes, the oldest and most simple of things can be the most elegant and effective. |