ShahFluffers
Ice Fire Warriors
Late Night Alliance
4677
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Posted - 2014.01.11 07:51:00 -
[1] - Quote
Front wrote:One of the biggest complaints I hear from people who don't play EVE involves the fact that a new player will never, ever be able to catch up with an older player in skill points assuming that the old player never stops paying on their subscription.
Copy pasting my standard Skillpoint rant:
- All skills cap at level 5. No matter how many years you have played the game, you cannot exceed that limit. And lower level skills (ex. [Racial] Frigate) are very quick to train relative to more advanced skills.
- (*this is the important one*) Only a limited number of skills affect any one ship, module, weapon system, and specialty at any given time.
Ex1: You are a newbie facing someone with about 20 million SP... but how much of that overall SP is actually combat related? He/she could be a HUGE industrial player with limited combat skills.
Ex2: A veteran player has just trained up the skill Large Hybrid Turret to level 5. That skill in no way affects the skill Small Hybrid Turret and thus the veteran will be no better or worse than before at the frigate level.
- Getting a skill from level 4 to level 5 only adds on an extra 2% here, 5% there (exceptions apply). If you simply train up all the skills within a specialty to level 4 (which takes a fraction of the amount of time it takes to get those skills to level 5), you will find yourself flying at about 80 to 90% of the effectiveness of a multi-year veteran with those same skills in that specific specialty at level 5.
- Getting a skill to level 5 is supposed to be a painful train. Many players (yes, even veteran ones) opt to avoid doing it and instead train up other skills to level 4 (again, because it's faster).
- Ships and weapons have been balanced against one another.
Ex: A battleship can potentially instapop a frigate... but the frigate can fly very fast, making it difficult for the battleship's weapons to track, especially at very close range... then again, the battleship can deploy drones to deal with the frigate... and the frigate can shoot the drones down... however the battleship might have a Large Energy Neutralizer fitted to nuke the frigate's capacitor power every 24 seconds... in which case the frigate could use a Small Nosferatu that sucks out capacitor from the battleship every 3 seconds... etc. etc.
- High tech equipment (ex. T2, Faction, Officer, etc) will not give a player "I WIN" abilities. It simply gives a player a linear edge at an exponentially higher cost.
Ex: A group of two or three T1-fit frigates that cost about 500 thousand to 1 million ISK CAN kill a faction frigate worth about 50 to 100 million ISK... provided they are using the right mods in the right configuration and know what they are doing.
tl;dr...
- the point of the skill system is to force you to learn the game's mechanics and nuances in cheaper equipment and ships... that way when you DO gain access to more expensive equipment and ships, you know HOW to use them properly (and won't cry as much when they die).
- you DO NOT NEED to have level 5 in any specific skill to be "competitive." Having level 5 in a skill is simply an edge (exception: when it is required for something else).
- more SP is not indicative of a pilot's ability. It just means that the pilot has more options in what he/she can do.
- no one ship is superior to everything in the game. Even Titans, the largest ship in the game, has an Achilles heel; smaller ships.
- Having more skillpoints is not the "end all, be all" point of the game and there is more to PvP than just "enter battle, F1- F9." With good player skills (not character skills) even a Velator can kill a Battlecruiser. Skillpoints can't teach/give you this.
(NOTE: granted, the Velator was piloted by a veteran player... but the Tornado pilot wasn't a [complete] scrub either. The fact that THIS is possible means that a newbie with enough experience (player-wise... not SP-wise) can pull off something amazing (the guy pulled off the same thing against an Oracle later on)).
- once you have your "universal" core and support skills near or at maximum (which takes about 3 or 4 months of focused training) the gap between you and an older player begins to narrow quite significantly.
Front wrote:In short, what if when you podded someone, you gained some skillpoints, kind of in the same way that you get skillpoints at the end of a match in Dust? This would be in addition to the skill training system that EVE already has in effect.
Exploit found: have a friend pod you over and over again to gain skillpoints.
Change isn't bad, but it isn't always good. Sometimes, the oldest and most simple of things can be the most elegant and effective. |