Something like the ship rebalancing for skills would be perfect. they could tone down the advantages for skill levels by 50% across the board or something and remove a few areas that multiply a bit too sharply.

Yes total SP makes the disparity, increasing clone costs act as a limit on high SP characters as those characters are a little more hesitant to engage due to the consequences of losing.

Its not perfect but combined with inflationary reduction in the real cost of clones over time it does act as a sort of equalizer.

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.

I think he's just trolling us. Either that or he is just that dumb and shouldn't be taken seriously.

It's probably best to just ignore him either way, quoting him just gives his stupid ideas some level of validity and promotes further bad-posting.

I'm not trolling anyone Edward; I have an interest in games and game theory, and so I enjoy talking about them. And the great thing about forums is that you don't actually need to respond to me to make your position known.

As for Daedra's point of "Reducing impact of spending YEARS to train, will dilute the potential feel of more powerful character."

Grinding levels, Gold, ISK, or Skills in order to "feel" powerful is a theme park idea. It has no place in the head to head competition of Eve.

Sorry to burst your bubble but eve is a sandbox, not a head to head competition. Especially not a FAIR head to head competition. Much like CCP Soundwave pointed out that although people organize tournaments, there is no real place for them in EvE, because there is no safe place in EvE to guarantee Fairness, because Fairness is not one of EvE's principles.

If you had any notions about design principles, it is mandatory that a improvement feels like an improvement to drive progression otherwise nobody would bother training 36 days for 1% more. Better needs to feel better. Investment of time and effort has to translate into a proportionally improvement. Also last time i checked "Grinding levels, Gold, ISK, or Skills in order to "feel" powerful is a theme park idea" was the whole point of an MMO, an MMO is a theme park for entertainment.

I'm really curios what is EvE to you? Cause EvE is many things to many people, but your view of it is pretty weird. I don;t know if you deliberately choose not to see some sides of EvE or you don;t really know EvE enough.

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

Make clones free and no SP loss ever.

Players pay their sub and then also have to click on some silly button to protect what they paid for is a pretty poor way to treat customers. It's not PVP risk, it's GUI risk.

This is a nice first step. I look forward to even further improvements in the clone mechanics.

I am sure that I'm not the only one who would love to see the following things;
1. Reduced/eliminated cool-down when switching between jump clones (could look into cost per JC activation as I saw another poster mention).

2. Ability to jump clone within the same station without destroying a jump clone if one is already present (see above - could be a cost to jump into a clone in the same station, something along the lines of "Scotty the Engineer needs to free up a clone vat capsule" or something).

3. Ability to jump clone into and out of w-space. Either from a POS Clone Vat bay or a Rorq clone vat bay. These things must be the most underused POS mods and capital mods in the game.(This has been requested numerous times over the years - but wh combat gang compositions change rapidly depending on who you might be fighting or expecting to fight or what effects the wh you're planning a fight in has - jumping out to some empire location, to the JC, possibly on the other side of the universe from the location you found then slow boating back means that JCs aren't used to their full potential by worm-holers).

These next few are not necessarily tied to clones per se.
4. Ability to alter the implants plugged in both to jump clones and the existing "active clone." This could be accomplished through the use of a skill (similar to reverse engineering) granting a % chance to succeed at removal of the implant in a functional state. This same skill could be leveraged to harvest implants from corpses.

5. Clone implant harvesting (see #4).

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

This is a nice first step. I look forward to even further improvements in the clone mechanics.

I am sure that I'm not the only one who would love to see the following things;
1. Reduced/eliminated cool-down when switching between jump clones (could look into cost per JC activation as I saw another poster mention).

2. Ability to jump clone within the same station without destroying a jump clone if one is already present (see above - could be a cost to jump into a clone in the same station, something along the lines of "Scotty the Engineer needs to free up a clone vat capsule" or something).

3. Ability to jump clone into and out of w-space. Either from a POS Clone Vat bay or a Rorq clone vat bay. These things must be the most underused POS mods and capital mods in the game.(This has been requested numerous times over the years - but wh combat gang compositions change rapidly depending on who you might be fighting or expecting to fight or what effects the wh you're planning a fight in has - jumping out to some empire location, to the JC, possibly on the other side of the universe from the location you found then slow boating back means that JCs aren't used to their full potential by worm-holers).

These next few are not necessarily tied to clones per se.
4. Ability to alter the implants plugged in both to jump clones and the existing "active clone." This could be accomplished through the use of a skill (similar to reverse engineering) granting a % chance to succeed at removal of the implant in a functional state. This same skill could be leveraged to harvest implants from corpses.

5. Clone implant harvesting (see #4).

YESSSS!!! Only 45 mil clones for sabre'' ing instead of 80 mils!! Go go CCP!!!

2. Ability to jump clone within the same station without destroying a jump clone if one is already present

Id personally rather see insurance that pony's up to the cost of t1 and t2 (especially) ships and their modules.

Spending hundreds of hours grinding rats or missions just so you can buy a fancy t2 and get 10% of your investment back when it gets blown up dont make sense.

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've suggested this before, and I'll suggest it again now: Just give us clone insurance. Problem solved.

You can keep the price for clone insurance the same as the current price for clones, or raise it, or lower it, whatever. But the difference would be that with clone insurance you just pay one insurance premium to cover the entire term of 90 days, or whatever the term is set to be, and then you pay no other cost no matter how many times you get podded during the term of your insurance.

That way higher SP players still have a bigger ISK sink to fill, but that cost does not discourage them from doing what they want to do just because it might involve getting podded. You still stand to lose SP if you undock without clone insurance, which means people still will need to pay it, so it's still there as an ISK sink. But the difference is it imposes an ISK sink without distoring player behavior. As long as you're insured, you can do what you want and it's all the same.

Clone insurance also would be a more reliable, scalable, and probably deeper ISK sink, since it requires people to pay every time the term expires, as long as they are flying the clone. With clone costs as they are now, the ISK sink seems like a big deal on paper, but in practice it is largely impotent, since people with very high SP actually just avoid doing things that could result in clone loss, meaning they may go years or forever without ever buying a clone.

With respect to the above posting. CCP - Plesae consider making it so that the Corp itself can take out a monthly Insurance for it's pilots - that can come off the Corp Billing system.

This could be easy for us to use - could make Player Corps more attractive than NPC corps - and wouldn't hurt us that much as we make tons of money - and it would enable us to offer our people a better incentive.

Following on from Mag's Post - yes - a flat rate fee would be good too - scaled with membership?

Just remove them completely and move the ISK sink somewhere else related to the cost of ships. That way it scales on the ship risked in combat instead of how long the player has been subscribed to the game.

I wrote an article on why clone costs need to be removed completely HERE. Of course ignore the idea of the insurance removal in it.