"Specialization" is a lack of range.

CCP has declared "thou shall train level 5 for T2 ships". There is only one exception, because CCP didn't want to hand out such a huge amount of skill points: jump freighters.

I have a habit of ending disagreements with a smug or trite remark. I should be clear about my conclusion to avoid doing that in a thread I started.

I appreciate the participation in this thread. Unfortunately,"because specialization" still strikes me as a thought-terminating clich+¬, and a mantra. My curiosity regarding why skills are arranged a particular way remains unsatisfied, but sometimes it's just time to move on.

I am grateful for what this thread has done to help me form a new opinion of the state of things: EVE is flawed with an imbalance not so different from WoW. The ease of cross-class skilling is back-loaded (high SP), rather than front-loaded (low SP). While long requirements represent a time commitment initially, secondary skills apply to most (if not all) ships, and after obtaining them, training into a new ship is easier for high SP characters. This advantage increases with SP.

Example: for a 50 million SP character with a fully-skilled T2 cruiser, cross-training into another fully-capable T2 cruiser is a single Rank 6 skill (1.536 Million SP), compared to a rookie who wants to train into a T2 cruiser and is faced with core skills (basically the old Core Competency: Elite cert).

EVE also has invisible level caps, if a player decides to pick between subcapitals (approximately 125 Million SP) and capitals (approximately 175 Million SP). After reaching those levels, it is possible to 'hop in' any ship with full skills in every module and role.

The result is stagnation that worsens with SP. At this point I strongly agree that general/broad skills are the root of EVE's SP status quo.

If the intent of T2 skill requirements is a concentration in a specific area, T2 ship skills don't go far enough; non-racial T2 ship skills are broad. A racial T2 split is very different from the alternative I imagined when I started this discussion, but after becoming more aware of the status quo, the advantage of high SP characters, and gaining a better sense of what players (and perhaps the devs) accept as the definition of specialization... a racial T2 split is, in my opinion, needed.

The artificial level cap and stagnation experienced by high SP characters would merely be extended, rather than remedied, but racial T2 skills would be a stronger form of "because specialization" than we currently have.

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edit: this is a scary thought, considering the skill splits and the bloated SP and clone costs, but... race-specific core skills... (e.g. Amarr CPU Management, Gallente Power Grid Management, etc) would be a flat and fair implementation of "meaningful" and "consequence" that EVE players claim to like. Call it crazy, call me crazy, that's fine. It's pretty far from what EVE is like right now, and would take years to implement slow enough to avoid an uproar, but hey, 10-year outlook.

it would seem this is a stealth 'reduce medical clone costs' thread.

doesn't that qualify as "too fast" and "too easy"? that's the stagnation, and the problem I'm talking about. You don't like the idea of rookies having fast access to T2 ships, and call it a WoW thing, but that's exactly what is happening with higher SP characters.

what you're questioning is the essence of stagnation: the problem a player encounters after hitting a certain SP threshold, which gets worse over time.

o/

As for Ronnie's idea I find the Mastery system very "inaccurate" if you want to see a direct impact to the performance. Not saying its a bad idea, just saying if CCP were to go that route I would pray for an overhaul of the Mastery system.

I'm at work at the moment so I don't have many tools or time but I'm curious what the performance to time spent training ratio would be under both systems, current and mastery. I get the feeling even new players would prefer to train the racial ship skill to 5 rather than everything under the Mastery list to get the full bonus. Even getting to Mastery III would take much longer I'm sure.

Again..not against the idea, just think the Mastery system would need an overhaul.