Now my clone costs less than my interceptor. YAYYYYYYYYYY.

Economical balance. See Dr. Ejyo's presentation from 2012.

TLDR : New players want to get into fights and blow stuff up. They currently do pretty poorly partly because of power creep. Lowering clone costs compounds creep which will eventually lead to disengagement with the game.

Fleet tactics should not rely on a material disparity. A well organized, competently lead team needs to win sometimes even if they are outgunned on a SP or ISK level. The reward of Eve should be in working together and engaging.

You should be arguing for cheaper clones then. Lower SP players would do better if higher SP players are in smaller more fragile cheap ships surely, at the moment I may as well go for bigger/shinier ship because hell i'm already risking 30+m isk before I pick a ship.

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.

I love the idea of your clone scaling with your ship loss...

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'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.

Player made clones? Some PI thing on temperate planets. Top end clone should run about 1 mil ISK.

If you want to keep clone costs in the game, fine. Just add in clone "levels," whereby when I purchase the next level of clone, then I get that clone in perpetuity upon podding until I pass the next sp benchmark and buy the upgrade. But it still wouldn't be compelling; it'd just be an isk sink.

If you want to keep clone costs in the game, fine. Just add in clone "levels," whereby when I purchase the next level of clone, then I get that clone in perpetuity upon podding until I pass the next sp benchmark and buy the upgrade. But it still wouldn't be compelling; it'd just be an isk sink.

Its a start i guess.

Your position assumes that the combat event has no meaning or consequences beyond the engagement itself. High skill point characters will certainly be more aggressive if their cost for doing so is lowered. Of course aggression without risk will win, this is the danger of all unfettered opportunism, it works well for those on top but ultimately destroys the environment below.

No, I would prefer that you bring the bling, better KM for me and greater loss for you. Clone costs should be tripled and SP should transfer from high chars to low ones in the event of pod kill.

It's true that high skill point characters will be more aggressive, but their effective SP caps out at a certain point. If I am flying a Slasher, my missile skills, battleship skills, cruiser skills, t2 lasers, and leadership skills are all completely irrelevant to the fight. Of my ~22m SP, only 7,329,454 would help me fly a slasher, and that's being generous. On the other hand, I haven't specialized for flying slashers at all.

Given my admittedly inferior piloting skills when it comes to solo PvP, a newer slasher pilot than I would likely be able to take me in a 1v1. In a similar ship class fight, knowing your ship's strengths and weaknesses more than your opponent does counts for a lot. My aggressiveness and my willingness to take on risk mean that that newer pilot will have more targets to fight, and if they're at the same ship class and lose, the pilot can't blame my horrifically superior setup. The dudes in frigates and dessies who trashed my early solo frigate attempts taught me a lot about the value of a well-flown, well-fitted frigate, and I learned a lot from those encounters despite never winning a single one.

Not to mention that while I was learning to FC, my fellow pilots' clone costs were bringing down the sizes of my fleets. "Let's all go welp some ships" sounds a lot less attractive when you're gonna welp your pod as well, so there's less incentive to give someone who might not be as competent a chance to learn.

No one that I have seen is advocating free ships,

...they are after freedom to choose the amount of ISK they risk when they undock .....The only plus point for high clone costs is that it gives some consequence to the pod express and power projection, apart from that I see none,

The argument is the same. We want more pvp so reduce the consequences.

Jump cloning up for PvP generates at least two possible losses. An ISK loss if the PvP clone itself is podded and the training loss when you jump out of your super expensive learning clone for at least 24 hours.

A PvP clone loss is not a big deal if your space rich but I find the mandatory 24 hours of suboptimal training very annoying since it means a PvP roam will not only slow down my improvement but also requires me to make a log in appoint 24 hours hence to jump back into the training clone. PvP shouldnGÇÖt inhibit oneGÇÖs training. Some way around the current 24 hour inhibition that doesnGÇÖt break the game would be appreciated.

(IGÇÖm aware I can PvP in my super expensive training clone and while implants can be replaced the humiliation at losing such a clone lasts forever.)

So tell me how much SP gain you lose when spending 24 hours in a clone with +3s or +4s instead +5s?

The best way to make the clone mechanic compelling is to make it so SP is lost upon pod death. This is how I would implement it.

1. Upon a pod death character loses x% of total skill points from the skill with the most SP invested.
2. Character gets a certain "tax" free amount (for instance the first 10 million SP) to which no SP loss can occur.
3. Pods are immune to all forms of non targeted warp disruption.

So this would work in a similar way to how T3 cruiser SP loss occurs. This change would simultaneously also fix a number of issues and add to better gameplay on a number of levels.

1. Bounty hunting profession could be tied to a pod kill, and achieving a pod kill would have a tangible in game affect on your opponent.
2. The ever increasing SP grind could be slowed slightly by total SP pool of characters in general being lowered.

I don't think the SP penalty should be too harsh, particularly not for a newer player who is still below 50 million SP for example, but harsh enough to make a pod death more meaningful as I feel was originally intended for the game.

Why don't we just remove jump clones completely and allow everyone to freely teleport any where on the map. I mean, it kind of annoys me that I cant do 2 specialised ops in a day and be back home in time for tea. *sarcasm mode off*

I fully agree with you. On demand teleport is game breaking. What annoys me is the fact that current mechanics well-nigh require PvP pilots to literally choose to be comparatively stupid; especially if they want to PvP a lot. IGÇÖd like to see a fix to that very particular perverse incentive.