I love the idea of your clone scaling with your ship loss. The hard part is associating the two. You'd almost be replacing the idea of podding by removing it. That's not great.

Really, you need to satisfy three sides:

• Dead pods: Give a reason to kill pods and cause grief. If it's not worth killing people's pods, just remove them from the game.
• Improve PVP: Make it easier for people to pvp, even if they have skill bonus implants (ick, dump them). Hardwiring people are paying for the bonuses, so obviously would lose hardwirings when they die. Mindlinks, I'm torn on, just because they're grossly undersupplied due to how they're currently being distributed, like Level 4 missions need bonuses like this.
• Isk sink: I have no idea how deep this isk sink is, but I would guess someone could pull that number.

A small comment on EVE philosophy from me related to some of the conversation in here:

No one here at CCP wants to reduce consequences in EVE as a whole.

The fact that your actions have real consequences is obviously one of the most central parts of EVE design, and I promise that we don't want to move away from that as an over all design philosophy. The thing we are looking at with clones, is that currently the consequences are attached to something arbitrary (account age) which is potentially causing people to actually engage in less risky behavior overall.

There's a lot of directions the clone system COULD go, and I can't say anything specific about that right now. The important thing here is that we A: don't want to make a style of game-play, which we like, inaccessible via an arbitrary tax, and B: generally, consequences aren't going anywhere, so don't worry.

I have to disagree with CCP Rise that clone cost is arbitrary cost. It is not bound to account age is mistakenly claimed, but to characterGÇÖs XP. Character's XP will directly improve player's combat (and other) capabilities, so it is not inappropriate to charge additional cost for losing more powerful clone, much on the same principle as we charge more for losing more powerful ship.

To be honest reducing clone cost by 30% is hardly a disaster, I don't expect significant metagame shifts because of it alone. What IGÇÖm fearing is slippery slope. If faulty reasoning that is used to justify this change takes root more significant game changes may be introduced that will lead to serious weakening of game design principles that I mentioned in my original post.

Re CCP Rise's statement in https://gate.eveonline.com/Profile/MeBiatch post;

I think Eve would have more interaction if the dps/tank/cap/options disparity between well trained pilots and less well trained pilots were not so great. As it stands clone costs is one of the only things offsetting that difference, it doesn't do a great job of that.

Maybe we also talk about some options for unwinding the power creep bubble that affects all of these games after a certain amount of time. That combined with ideas for consequences that will replace the ISK setback for a clone loss.

The subscription fee idea has the potential to reduce the balancing effect of clone costs the most. Well removing them entirely from the game would be worse I guess.

Much better to make them a player made item. There have been all kinds of cool ideas about how that would work. And body snatchers would be an awesome new profession.

Reducing impact of spending YEARS to train, will dilute the potential feel of more powerful character. Something EvE is already lacking due to tearing. Improvement is limited due to this as two people with a 3M SP chars in Assault frigs, can easily smack the living hell out of some 120M sp BS pilot. and at around 5M sp both pilots have the same advantages at frigate levels. So what are you talking about here? Veterans just have more options not wild power. That's why skills affect tiers of ships and don't collectively stack up. only a hand full of skills affect what you do at any one time.

The neat thing about Eve is that if one door closes you can roll another char up and try again.