I just get annoyed when people confuse "useful" and "present". I am on board with the idea that you and your corp-mate were having a good time, but at 3 days old you're going to be doing roughly the DPS of a single light drone. if you had gone AFK unannounced, it's entirely likely they would only have noticed because the banter stopped. In any other game this activity would have been referred to as power-leveling.

Which isn't to say you were completely motionless. A career starting off as ninja-salvaging or just corp mission cleanup isn't nothing. I just judge the point of "useful" at the point where somebody is going to seek you out for what you can contribute, not what you can contribute later or to have you do the gruntwork nobody else wants.

Almost...
It started off with me clarifying a point, like calling out that setting up a skill queue and taking a nap isn't "hard work". Waiting however is most certainly involved. Gratification depends on your... state of mind.

Personally, I think the ISK/manufacturing/territory claim parts of EvE provide enough of a driver that the "skill queues online" part of EvE could be dropped. I don't have any expectation CCP will actually do that, but if we can at least get newbros into the bittervet position of "I don't know what your problem is, I've got XX Mil SP so I just did a dozen other things while waiting for my next ship/fit/industry/whatever." then we'll see a lot less need for Goonswarm to lie to people about how important suicide tackle is.

The newbies don't like to die either.

Tackle itself is important, but in the same manner that a 3 day old toon can't help with L4s a FC would never choose a handful of week old tackle Atrons over a pair of Interceptors or Interdictors. Hero/Suicide/All-you-can-do tackle is a demeaning "you'll get to play EvE one day" job, that only gets pushed because it's hard to find other things for newbros to do.

The discussion is about Meta 4 vs T2 because they have a similar effectiveness. There's a reply line. This isn't a circus attraction or In and Out. Please keep posts relevant.

Is it really that successful?

Getting friends in the game, with sustain, is better than gameplay. "It is better to give than to receive." Maybe the (frankly, unfounded) negatives of this discussion could benefit from that idea. There can always be more gameplay with more subs and options and initiative and value. There can't always be less with fewer.

That's not content.

I'm not sure "differ" really covers it. The part of the game you enjoy, the deal-breaker in fact, is that EVE prevents you from doing the things you want for ever increasing periods of time.

I'm trying to apply this mentality to any other game, and this is what comes out:

"People like that chess game, but I don't get it. They just give you all the pieces right up front. Where's the strategy? Where's the payoff for a long term commitment to Bishops? Not the game for me."

I'm trying to wrap my head around the concept a dedicated EVE-chess playerbase that numbers in the hundreds of thousands, all perfectly happy knowing that it will take decades of waiting before they'll be allowed to play a game with all 16 pieces.

I've got my own history of high school D&D as well. And the person who thought "growing their character" was getting a new combat feat was the min-maxer that nobody wanted to play with.

Large Projectile Turret V isn't character growth. It's mindless busywork. It's an arbitrary time-sink. It's Progress Quest.

And the flood of minerals wouldn't be offset by the sudden uptick in demand for the products needed to harvest them? By the explosion in T2 gear purchases? By the increase in more expensive things being exploded?

And it doesn't mean there cannot be personalization, or module diversity. Right now Meta 1-4 are held back by the fact they are intended to be the stepping stone for people who haven't skilled V for whatever it is. Getting rid of SP means that you can rebalance those to be specializations of T2 gear, instead of inferior versions of it. The current market of Meta 4 often being worth several times T2 would go away, but that's not a death knell to dropped mods as a whole.

You can also have character difference without enforcing a time gated power mechanic. Other competitive games have been doing this for decades, in offering ways to specialize a character in certain areas at the expense of others. You could still have the ability to specialize in manufacturing if you like, and have that tied to something like a remap mechanic instead of a time waster offline skill bar.

And the flood of minerals wouldn't be offset by the sudden uptick in demand for the products needed to harvest them? By the explosion in T2 gear purchases? By the increase in more expensive things being exploded?

And it doesn't mean there cannot be personalization, or module diversity. Right now Meta 1-4 are held back by the fact they are intended to be the stepping stone for people who haven't skilled V for whatever it is. Getting rid of SP means that you can rebalance those to be specializations of T2 gear, instead of inferior versions of it. The current market of Meta 4 often being worth several times T2 would go away, but that's not a death knell to dropped mods as a whole.

You can also have character difference without enforcing a time gated power mechanic. Other competitive games have been doing this for decades, in offering ways to specialize a character in certain areas at the expense of others. You could still have the ability to specialize in manufacturing if you like, and have that tied to something like a remap mechanic instead of a time waster offline skill bar.

Why can't you train skills the more you use something instead?

Damn you...beating me to the punch.

I wish I knew. I hate this game. I hate how it hates me back. I hate when the players hate each other. Mostly I hate that I can't stop playing it.

12 years proves it's a bad design. Most games last 18 months. 18 is clearly greater than 12... so math and stuff.

I tried to provide a graph, but I couldn't decide on what either axis should be for graphing 18 > 12. Can someone link a site that explains how to pick relevant axii for a graph that only has 1 dimension. http://xkcd.com/41/

Cutting out the quote that replies to this very idea? Here. That's no "substantial amount of PLEX" at all. The original statement is that 1.5B is insignificant. Are you making a point?