If you have any feedback related to the clone system (especially in terms of how it affects your play-style) we would love to hear from you.

And it's natural for most people to be inclined to less risky behavior. Good luck with your 30% experiment, but as long as you can see from the comments here - they always find some new excuse to stay docked: implants for example.

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.

while it makes completly sense to reduce or even remove clone costs, there is one thing you should keep in mind.

without any clone cost, what keeps me from instantly porting a 200 man fleet across eve without any time or isk cost?

oh in venal is a tower under atack, everyone pod express yourself to our venal office, take fleet doctrin x ships and go. and after that is done we wanted to finish that sov fight in delve. everyone podexpress to our corp office in 319 and pick the ships you have there.
oh and after that we podexpress to pure blind and harass goons a bit. and that all within 1 hour.

i thought everyone in the csm/ccp and most of the players agreed that force projection and risk free instant travel (jumpbridges, titan bridges, jumpfreighter, or podexpress for no cost) is the root of all 0.0 problems.

especially pilots and groups of pilots with advanced skillpoints and organisation would gain even more power from free podexpress.

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.

If only they made some effort to reduce the disparity between the ships newer players can fly and those the super-veterans can... Something like a ship rebalancing effort...

I fail to see how you think clone cost affects the dps/tank/cap/options disparity. Total SP makes the disparity, clone costs just affects the willingness to engage and the consequence of losing.

For now, but if that makes a lot of people happy as a first step, it may cost much less in the not too distant future.

I'm with you. We talked about it a lot here, and we all would rather make this system better than strip it out completely. I know this is a careful first step, but trust me, we want to do more with it and this is a way for us to act in a more informed way when we are able to more, and in the mean time it eases the pain a bit for you guys.

Something CCP is becoming more serious about (with Fozzie as one of the major champions) is making 'good' changes NOW even if there's some 'perfect' solution somewhere down the line that might take quite awhile to actually happen.

...edited for space...

And this is in TEST which is probably where the greatest integration of new and old players happens. Most players in null simply to everything possible to minimise risk entirely or we see veteran pvpers move to low sec to keep their Slave sets safe.

I just saw (thanks Reddit) that the clone cost adjustment for Odyssey went to Singularity with the latest update. I didn't realize this would happen so quickly and I didn't have a post ready so I'm throwing this up in the middle of the night!

Basically, for Odyssey we are lowering the cost of clone upgrades across the board by 30%. This is meant as the first increment on a more thorough iteration on the clone system. Our hope is that through this first step we will be able to establish what (if any) effect clone prices have on player behavior. If you have any feedback related to the clone system (especially in terms of how it affects your play-style) we would love to hear from you.

I'm sure image links are usually not ideal for dev posts, but it is the middle of the night, so here is a screen shot of the new clone prices proposed for Odyssey: CLONES

Yours,
CCP Rise

Good.


I fall into a subset of players that ccp doesn't really seem to acknowledge (which i don't have a problem with, we're not spending much nor adding much through participation), who only play for a month at a time every now and again to keep in touch with people and be nosy.

... the next time i get podded it's likely to be a choice between pve or just leaving the game again. (hint: i get a few hours spare 'gaming' time a week, i'm certainly not spending it pve'ing).

Solution needs to be an implementation that combines the current system with the idea of a monthly fee.

....edit for space.... cost more up front, but would pay them selves off in the long run for players who get podded a lot.

Having both system like this would not only benefit those who PVP, but would also keep those who don't get podded a lot from having issues with paying for subscriptions.

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.

I dont think that removing/reducing one of the main isk sinks in the game is gonna be good in the long run.

If you want to pvp in a frigate in 0,0 space and have over 150M sp train an alt.

And even if you train to fly every sub-capital ship in the game perfectly (including training useless things like medium railgun specialization 5) you will probably have less than 92M sp when you finish. 20M for a clone of that grade is right on the spot. This will be bad for the economy in the long run and the only ppl that will profit are players that cram every skill they get in their main dont even thinking if they are gonna need it.

I dont think that removing/reducing one of the main isk sinks in the game is gonna be good in the long run.

If you want to pvp in a frigate in 0,0 space and have over 150M sp train an alt.

And even if you train to fly every sub-capital ship in the game perfectly (including training useless things like medium railgun specialization 5) you will probably have less than 92M sp when you finish. 20M for a clone of that grade is right on the spot. This will be bad for the economy in the long run and the only ppl that will profit are players that cram every skill they get in their main dont even thinking if they are gonna need it.

As opposed to the clever few (incl. you I presume) who stop skilling entirely when they can't think of a necessary skill? Wait what?

[...]
Clone SP TIED to a ship and modules fitted at the time pod exploded.

It would go i.e. like this:

- Jump into t1 frigate.
- Fit t1 frig.
- Undock.
!!!!! EVE calculates what skills are needed for this ship and for the modules I have.

!!!!! EVE calculates number of SP I have in skills needed to fly that ship and modules (not just needed level of skills but my lvl of skills, so if i fly galente frig and have skill at 5 my clone would have to cover more sp than if I would have skill at 4).

!!!!! EVE assigns above mentioned SP amount to the clone.

- If character gets his ship destroyed and than podded, the clone costs are not for total SP char has, but for amount that game calculated as explained above.
[...]

You keep referencing this non-existent "balancing effect" of the current system; paying more when your clone dies doesn't make you worse at pvp, it only makes you pvp less frequently, which is bad for the game.