Total Bull, skillpoints mean nothing. Knowledge and the friends you make is how to succeed in EVE.

I'm willing to bet your friends quit because the combat system is lacking. In half a year you can be flying dessies and T2 frigs highly effectively, or have rushed T1 battlecruisers and flying them at rank V with appropriate weapons skills. Or have rushed BSs and flying them well enough to be doing lv 4 missions solo.

The first thing I'd have to ask is simply...

What goals are you looking at which require 1-2 years of training?

In terms of straightforward goals the only ones I can think of in that range would be the high-end of capital ships - I might suggest these to be end-game content (though end-game is a little bit of a flexible term). You don't want the end-game content immediately, it would be boring.

The journey is important, quiting because you can't get a Titan on day 2 misses the point of that.

SP is a visible measure of what you're capable of, of course, but it's a deceptive one. A pilot with half a million of the right SP and the knowledge and resources to leverage it properly is far better off than one with 100 million of the wrong SP, the wrong ship, the wrong situation...

And there is no lower limit on the number of SP it takes to have fun - I know several pilots who were pirating lowsec, ratting null or engaging in fleet battles with less than a million SPs, in some cases created specifically to minimise their clone costs...

You know the secret to a new player making isk hand over fist? Double wrap a unit of trit, autopilot with it around EVE in a free frigate looking like you're an idiot with a PLEX, then sell the resulting killrights when you get popped for 5 to 10M. Takes like 15 minutes for someone to bite the bait.

To take all 6 of the core certs to standard takes a brand new character (with no skill remaps or implants) less than 2 months (54 days, 5 hours to be precise).

What goal do you have that requires 1-2 years to get started on?

I've been playing roughly 10 months (you can check my employment history if you want), I can fly battlecruisers, cruisers, destroyers and T2 frigates, I can go on lowsec roams, I can do highsec and lowsec exploration if I want, I can make just about anything except T3 cruisers and supercapitals and I have a lot of fun doing all of those things. In a year I'll be better at all of them for sure and probably be doing other things too, but I can do them all now and I've been doing most of them for the last 6 months.

The problem, IMHO isn't needing 2 or more years of skills, it's people who think they need 2 of more years worth of skills to have fun.

Oh look someone mad on the internet.

No, it isn't. It never was. You never made a case and you're just trying to yell louder rather than have an honest conversation based in reality.



What problem? You've described a situation based on personal anecdote and made-up statistics and decided you have a universal, problematic situation. Make a better case for there being a problem and maybe someone will help you figure it out.

Who can I talk to about this to make it apparent?

Not yourself, which is what this thread has been so far. Try engaging with your critics rather than yelling over their heads.



By, I don't know, playing it? Same as we all did.

When I started six years ago I thought I'd never catch up and be able to fly T2 ships like all those nasty pirates out to get me in low sec. But it turns out, there are only five levels of each skill and once you have them, you're maxed out. And I caught up. And so can anyone else.



Maybe it's not the internet that's broken?

Like Zhilia has explained i am not sure that this is a problem in the first place. You can have fun after a couple of weeks and be effective in fleet, lire really useful, after roughly one month.




There is a Features&Ideas discussion on this forum, if you have a specific suggestion in mind go ahead and post there. Apart from that i am not really sure what you are expecting... you are not a game designer, you don't have access to the same data CCP has so you are, like me, totally incompetent to even say that this is "a huge problem".



I think the best course of action for a new player is to join a group of player that will take him on fleets and teach him how to play the game. Eve university is probably a great corporation, several alliances in nullsec are also willing to take newbies and teach them.

What ship? All the skills needed and recommended to fly a frigate to V will not take 2 years. All the skills to fly every single ship in the game, yeah that'll take a while. That's a long term goal that you can work on in time, it's not something you need to do to play.

Let's see...
Caldari frigate Merlin, all required skills and recommended certificates total at under 5 days.
Minmatar destroyer Thrasher, all required skills and recommended certificates total at just over 6 days
Gallente cruiser Thorax all required skills and recommended certificates total at a little over 10 days
Amarr battlecruiser Prophecy, all required skills and recommended certificates total at 75 days. Getting large, but haven't hit 6 months yet.
Caldari battleship Raven, all required skills and recommended certificates total at about 80 days, though you probably want more skills than that to fly a battleship

Again, what is your goal that you need to wait 1-2 years to *start*? You're avoiding that question.



The worst? Light at the end of the tunnel? What tunnel? I've had fun the whole way through that year.

So I can't fly a battleship perfectly yet, point is, I don't need to, there's nothing that compels me to fly a battleship, nothing where it's 'fly a battleship or log off' (and to be honest I prefer smaller ships at the moment)

What you and probably your friends seem to be missing is that there's no skill requirement for fun. You can play and have fun from the first minute, as long as you don't get stuck in the mentality of 'I have to have 50 million skill points to undock'

No.
Hefty TheFirst]So all I am asking is what is being done about this huge problem EVE faces?
What you're talking about is not a huge problem.


This is the place to talk about it.


By playing the game.

In school, I made a friend that was into gaming, much like myself.
And there was a game that he could literally speak about for hours. EvE Online. He spoke of giant ships, epic battles, modules and heists. He was so enthusiastic and there was just a glow of passion in his eyes whenever he spoke of it.
I had never even heard of this crazy space-game before, so I decided to try it out.

I bought it on my third day of trial.

Within the first month I had decided what I was going to do to fund my playing, and decided a semi-long term goal, that I reached after about 8 months of play and a long term one, that I've still to reach. But oh, the satisfaction of setting a goal, work hard for it, and reach it. It was something I had never felt in a game ever before.
Can't wait for the day that I'm going to reach my second goal (I'm about a fifteen months away)..

It'll be magnificent.



THIS is was maturity is.

WORKING for what you want.
Having PATIENCE and realizing that there are LOADS and LOADS of fun things to do, while you wait for that long-term goal.
The very fact that glorious things take a long time to accomplish means they'll be so much more rewarding!
If CCP were to dumb it down to the level you want it, then those glorious things would mean nothing! It'd not be glorious!

It'd be boring!

It is NOT a huge problem that newbs are newbs when they are new to EvE Online.
If they find something they want to do, and are willing to work for it, there is no problem!
There is only a problem if they find something want to do, but can't be arsed to work for it!
THAT is the problem. NOT the game!
This answers the second and fourth question quoted in this post.

http://eveboard.com/pilot/Peter_Pacis

This pilot (the one you bought) may be two years old but he has only one year of training, i bought myself a much better pilot for a lot less isk. Also wanting to fly both Tengu and a faction BS with only 20mil SP (Mach requires cross training btw) is really ********.

*Looks at less than year old main character*. Nope, not feeling useless today. Didn't feel useless in the first week I played (and yes, I do remember that, it wasn't that long ago), didn't feel useless in the first month either.
A month old character is far from useless unless the player's convinced they can't do anything without a year of training.

And no, go back and read what I wrote, with all your talk of 'character assassinations', you ignored everything but the last sentence.

You bought a character that probably has been specifically designed to be a perfect battleship and Tengu pilot (full T2 fit most likely) and do nothing else, that's what's done on the character bazaar, train and sell characters with very narrow specialisations, that's not how one would typically train or fly for the first 2 years of their main and 2 years are not required to fly a battleship at a good competency level, nor would it be something where you're sitting useless in station until the training's finished.

Train frigates, fly frigates, they're loads of fun (ask the RvB guys). Maybe train destroyers or maybe skip them for cruisers. Fly cruisers, they can also be loads of fun too. Get a battlecruiser, or maybe go straight for T2 frigates, etc, etc.

There is so much wrong in your post. Also please read carefully my posts, i have mentioned that i bought a char on my first post but that doesn't make "all my posts pointless". Again, basic logic.

You have mentioned buying a char, it happens that in the process you displays basic error in your choice. Errors that are linked to understanding what matters in skill training.

You like to use that phrase a lot, don't you?


Not only did you accidentally find a WH, you also found 2 mag sites with no sleepers! On your 2nd day no less!

I'd like to learn more! Please continue.

You can buy SP in form of a toon from bazaar but you cannot buy game knowledge and experience. And you are clear proof of that.

Everyone of us started lost and without SP needed to fly shinies and do cool stuff.

Chill da frakk down, keep playing or GTFO. Why would anybody play the game he hates? That's just like most st00pid thing you can do with your time and money.

Maybe the OP is dumb but he raises a couple of good point, one being that a new player cannot do much in the first couple of months. You cannot realistically pvp all day long and as you mentioned most of the large entities that accept day 1 toon are community-based.

So they have to fill their day with pve and pve in EVE is horrible, lvl1 missions are really easy but some lvl2s missions will be tricky/impossible to run with poor skills in a cruiser, even with a good fit. I ended up after my first week wondering what i could do... Yes new players can mine and it's even easier now with the venture but that's a very specific gameplay, i would define it as "boring as f*ck". An active new player, that don't like mindless grinding and wants to play Eve maybe 1-2 hours per day just won't have much to do.

Over time the problem solves itself, players are able to do pvp with being podded in the first few seconds, and to run missions/rats/explore effectively. Myself i just went all-in with trading while learning about the community and the game but then again trading is a very specific type of gameplay.


I am not saying that this is a "huge problem" nor do i want newbies to be effective in high-end ships quickly but i think there is room for content here and CCP should work on that. Ofc you can find a charitable carebear that will let you salvage and loot some wrecks in lvl4s... that's not really fun either and you are left with the impression to clean the dishes. And a game that relies on vets'kindness to provide content to newbies... isn't that a flawed design ?

Needs more expletives.

On topic, Games like WoW have an entry barrier for there end game content, which is "gear", "gear" takes alot of time to gather & is a grind, before players are exposed to the end game content (raids) You don't just join WoW as a noob & do endgame content straight away, you have spend time "leveling" & "gear grinding. Fanatical players will rush & spend countless days grinding fast to acheive "geared". for instance my first WoW character took me 2 months to level, and about 3-4 months to gear. to be ready for end-game. there's fanatics that do it in a week.

You can't do that in EVE, the faster you grind isk/mine/LP by missions or w/e, has no correlation between isk & skillqueue.

And that's the key issue, players come from fast paced games where "grind" means "skill" & expect eve to be the same, well it isn't.

OP, I'm having more fun in this 1.5m SP character than I have ever had in my PvE mains. In fact, I think of Zaps as my main now since my high SP characters just seem stale in comparison.

One of the most important things you can learn about EVE is that the skill point journey is very enjoyable. Sure, a four year old thinks you need to 'get a bigger ship so I can get the baddies' but I realise that small ship PvP is fantastic:

1. Cheap (let's you learn by lots of mistakes)
2. Very fun
3. Arguably harder than large ship PvP due to the short time frame

Remember that skill points does not equate to skill. I can guarantee that a noob who buys a high SP character will die in lots of expensive explosions.

I can comprehend the issue with the "skillpoint wall" for you.
But that sight only causes the inexperience you still "stuck" in.

Of course it-¦s a "makes me game-quitting"-problem if the goal of your 4 pals and you is to mine togehter in maxed out hulks with maxed out orca-support. EvE is a sandbox, the way is goal. You never realy reach the finish line (and none realy will make 1st place).

My first thought after reading the inital post was "not that one again" (topic).
2nd thought was "Buy a time-machine and go back to 2003 and start paying your sub like some of us did".

On more serious thought the grass in 2003 wasnt more green then EvE is today.
Out of my experience EvE was by a LOT more inconvinient to play then nowadays.
Autopilot? Something you can dream about. Mining barges? Earning isk with mining? A balance between shipclasses (splash damage on torpedos was enough to pop frigs!). Anyone remember the "Bring your own minerals"-deals?
A rifter, throw-away-good of today, was like 1m a hull. My first thorax cost 12m.

Life in eve was hard. So it-¦s today - but it-¦s different. Low skillpoints but you know what to do and how to do it? There are plenty corps out there who accept new players with open arms. You can join a mining corp and participate in large mining gangs, for pvp there are plenty of options (from "clean" RvB-perma-war in highsec over lowsec piracy (or faction warfare) to nullsec entities) and wormhole-corps (there are a few corps out there who run the low-class-holes with drake-gangs).

No matter how many skillpoints you have, there will always be that "why didn-¦t i skill this one"-moments.

Keep your personal fun up.

As you don-¦t answer the question on what exactly you want to train for (1-1.5 years) before you can start to actually playing the game here a last note refering to pvp experience.

You want to fly a deimos in pvp? Buy a thorax, fit it like you would fit your deimos. Now buy the thorax and the modules 10 times. Fit them, use them, lose them. After you lost your 10th ship remember how much fun it was to lose those ships (and actually getting experience for the same price). A good thorax pilot anhilates a bad deimos-pilot every day.

TL;DR: HTFU

That's absurd. Precisely because it's THE OTHER WAY ROUND.

In WoW and similar games, someone at a lower "lower" level has nothing to do against "max level" characters.

In EvE, a 30 days player can consistently DESTROY a veteran player at EVERYTHING. Be it business success, commanding other players or simply 1vs1 PvP.

In EvE, your success is determined by your numbers, talent and preparation, and MUCH LESS BY TIME SPENT SUBSCRIBED than in ANY other games out there.

I agree that the SP system is broken!
But I don't recognize what Hefty describes. I have been around for some time now, and every now and then some noob (less then 4 years) comes by and shoots me down .

How is this possible? I mean I most likely have more SP then him, I think it would only be fair if, whenever someone initiate combat a SP check was made. The person with lower SP should get a x% miss chance depending on how big the difference in SP is...

It's only fair to us old timers!

This statement is completely untrue, but it is definitely the case that this perception exists.

That's a marketing problem more than a game mechanics problem, though. They definitely should do more to address the erroneous belief that you need 1.5 years of training to be slightly effective.

I am curious: What is it that you/your friends were interested in doing that simply could not be done without 1.5 years of training? Someone else asked you this on the first page, and you didn't really furnish a response.

This isn't the game for you.

There are two sides to this problem - like people have already hinted at. The first aspect is goal and the second is the journey.

If people see the goal as amassing skill points to get into the big ships without there being anything worth doing in between then yes, that's a huge problem. Some people might even see that there is fun stuff to do before they get the skill points to do the 'big' stuff. The character bazaar is the solution for those people. Yes, it's costly and as such not the 'best' solution. Is there a different and better solution to allow new people quickly get to that point? Maybe, by removing the prerequisite skills so that you could train titan (or whatever) right from the start. Well, they could but it'd just be compromising the 'feel' of a skill system. You know how to fly a titan but not a frigate ... what's wrong with you?

So the answer to this question:
- There is value to taking the time to train ... represented by skill points
- There is stuff you can do for fun while you attain your skill point goals, the character bazaar is an alternative for those that don't want to wait.


Forums, run for CSM. CCP does listen to the community. If you have an alternative solution and support that's the best route to success.



Yes - like I said before. No, you will never get a new character into the skill point heights of the older characters. But the skill point system also levels out. Put my character in an assault frigate against a 10m skill point character and there could be no discernible difference in the number of EFFECTIVE skill points. Sure, I could jump into a t3 cruiser, carrier, or something and have a lot more effective skill points. I'm just saying - once you pick a ship to fly you are leaving a LOT of skill points behind.

The only difference between a new player and an old player are options. You say that it takes too long to acquire some options and you might be absolutely correct. But I say there is also value in having those kinds of options. I've gone through the phase where there isn't anything really the 'need' for anything new to train. This, in my opinion is worse than having long term skill training options.

There is no problem but there is things being done to help new guys like tiericide so t1 ships are nearly as good as t2



CSM



Specialization dont try to do everything. Join a new player friendly corp.


I build characters to sell and aslong as you dont try to do everyting with one character you dont have to train to long. janna pw 123 thats a 6 months tengu i did.


evemon plans download


freighter 32 days
tengu 111 days
cap 6months
manifacture/research 60 days
P.I. 45days

The cap character is the basic you need but the rest are solid. My 3m sp alt karma kills hulks fine kills . My trader alt only has 3m sp and my pve alt that i was using only had 10m sp and i made loads of isk running ded sites.

OP, go back to WoW.

This game is not for you, it is only for MATURE players :P

As a matter of fact, concerning pvp, you don't want to have too many skill points. Makes for more expensive clones and the "need" to fly more expensive shi(t)ps.

My PvP alt stopped training at 15m SP, and he doesn't even have perfect skills in anything. That's roughly 7 months of training though.

I've been playing for just over a month now, and I have to admit, the skill system is still a bit boggling and arcane to me. I can investigate simple questions such as "What does it take to fit T2 guns on my boat?" and get an answer and follow it, only to find out when I get there, I still can't fit T2 guns on my boat because I don't have enough cpu/power/smurfberries/etc. Trying to figure out what skills I need to do various things typically ends in me finding a guide someone wrote, and hoping it's somewhat accurate. It doesn't feel as if there's enough information presented to new players in the game as to what direction they should go in sometimes.

Well, that's sort of the thing - there really isn't a direction they "should" go. It's entirely dependent on what you want to do.

Also, I think a lot of people get hung up on flying a given ship or ship class as being something they want to do. New players will frequently say something like, "I want to fly a battleship," instead of, "I want to run level 4 missions," whereas older players generally recognize that ships are frequently-interchangeable tools for accomplishing whatever it is you actually want to do, and not, themselves, the thing that you do.

There is no "SP wall".

OP is just unexperienced player.

I started playing 3 months ago and I don't feel that there is any "SP wall"

I have fun, can do almost anything and I haven't even joined corp yet. (Will do soon)

I didn't miss it. What I'm asserting is that it's poppycock, and that, with respect to Eve and the many nuances of its interconnected systems, you are incompetent to the point that you lack even the vaguest notion of the depths of that incompetence.

This leads you to believe that you hold the solutions to what you, in your incompetence, have perceived to be problems.

As an example: You clearly have yet to grasp the fact that the opportunity cost inherent in the skill system is a major driving force behind the functionality of the Eve economy.

Hasn't even come REMOTELY close to dawning on you, yet, that homogeneity in skill training - which is really what you're promoting here - would, by definition, kill off a huge portion of economic incentive. When everyone can do everything, nobody needs anyone else to do anything. If it's trivial for me train a combat-miner-industrial pilot, why the **** wouldn't I do that? And once I've done that, why would I ever buy minerals on the market? Or ships for that matter? I can mine on my own. I can build on my own. I can fight on my own. What do I need an economy for, now?

The "problem" you are complaining about is a feature upon which the ENTIRE rest of the game is completely reliant. It is, literally, a requirement that not everyone gets to participate in every role on a whim. It was built that way, ON PURPOSE, and you - some arrogant, know-nothing scrub with a bought character - are sitting here trying to tell us that, for the good of the game, it must be changed to suit you and your impatient friends, without even a moment's consideration for why it was built that way, or what impact such a change would have outside of the tiny, insignificant portion of the game you're familiar with.

And for the love of god, please spare us any more of this insipid nonsense about new player retention. The game is currently enjoying the highest PCU numbers it has seen since the Great Monocle Debacle, so that argument is a non-starter.

Earlier, I was humoring you. I'm quite certain that, short of hopping in a capital ship, whatever the **** your friends wanted to do, it would not have taken them "years" of training to do it. Had you furnished an actual reply to the question (instead of copy-pasting the same ignorant, uninformed drivel over and over and over again), I probably could have given you realistic time estimates, as well as a host of intermediate activities for fun and profit to be done along the way.