..How do you explain a potential EvE player that it will take 6 months of training just to sort the BASICS (engineering/armor/shield/electronics/navigation/drone/probing skills), AND STILL HAVE HIM INTERESTED in playing the game (decent levels, not perfect)....

You don't because this is rubbish. I started just over 2.5 years ago and was running level IV missions alongside a corpie on my 3rd day in my incursus (great fun too). I was mining in a barge inside a month, building control towers from PI inside 3 months, running any level mission I wanted during that time and learning the basics of exploration.

That covers 4 of the main career paths and made me enough ISK to continually PLEX. It takes a player willing to think and learn to play EvE, not an instant gratification 'Give me a Battleship from the start' type of player (incidentally I only flew a BS once, didn't like it and sent it back to the shop :D ).

Your 6 months benchmark is just utterly wrong.

How would EVE break if we removed skills altogether?

I started just over 2.5 years ago and was running level IV missions alongside a corpie on my 3rd day in my incursus (great fun too).

The skill system is actually one of EVE's best features in my opinion, and is incredibly casual friendly. Progression, unlike most MMOs, is not solely determined by playtime

Yeah that's a great story and perfectly doable if you're playing 24/7 which is not the case with most people.

My 6 months benchmark is completely true. Go and make a training plan in Evemon for just basic stuff that I mentioned above, you will get a plan OVER 6 months long without even doing any spaceship command training.

The only rubbish thing here is you flapping your mouth without anything to back it up.

Let's be fair here. It would be far more accurate to say you tagged along and watched your corpie do L4s, while struggling to salvage the wrecks they couldn't be bothered with.

...

Incorrect, I took out the frigs and destroyers before moving on to cruisers and adding my feeble dps to the BS kills at the end. I did my job in the frigate as I would in a roam to protect the battleship and sped up his isk/hr speed by a non-trivial amount due to him not having to task his sentries onto pesky little things. I also assisted in gathering the loot much more rapidly by zipping around and bringing it in to a central spot.

Sorry, I thought you were doing a ghetto-Noctis impression.

Apparently it was an MTU.

The point is that new players can be useful in all sort of circumstances.

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.

Here's an example: suddenly skills are removed and everyone can do everything. Now loads of pilots go and run my favourite sleeper caches and the entire market for the loot from those disintegrates (except for the fixed price blue loot). The same would happen in every area. 100's of perfect inventors flooding the tech 2 market, perfect miners and refiners flooding the ore and minerals market etc etc.

It would literally destroy the heart of the game as it stands as chooces and planning would have very little meaning anymore.

Yes, they were. They were attacking me, not addressing the statement I made. Which is typical of the OP, I might add.

Why isn't everyone over 60M SP already doing all those things?

Everyone is always looking for more hero tackle.

Incorrect, I took out the frigs and destroyers before moving on to cruisers and adding my feeble dps to the BS kills at the end. I did my job in the frigate as I would in a roam to protect the battleship and sped up his isk/hr speed by a non-trivial amount due to him not having to task his sentries onto pesky little things. I also assisted in gathering the loot much more rapidly by zipping around and bringing it in to a central spot.

He was grateful for the assistance and it gave me some nice isk whilst having fun. By discounting what a low SP player can do to help in such situations you are doing them a dis-service and *that* is what would put players off more than anything else.

See, for some reason that is known only to you, you keep deluding yourself - YOU DID NOT HELP HIM, that guy was helping YOU, you were nothing more than a drain on his profits, especially if he was using sentries (sentries blap mission frigates very, very well).

The entire profit you two made was split evenly while he was in a battleship, doing all the heavy lifting with range and dps, while you were flying around pretending to be useful. Being a partner to a combat pilot who is making money through either missions or anomalies or whatever is when you have a proper ship to bring in to help out, when your dps and damage application are at least similar, not when you're in a t1 frigate.

His friend was being nice letting him tag along. He was obviously helping Corraidhin make more isk than he could on his own. More damage in a site is more damage no matter how you look at it so it was speeding him up kind of. Some people let maximizing their profits go out the window every now and then to help a new player or friend. I am guessing you are not one of those types of people.

EVE as a whole would be a lot better off with more players like his friend there to meet new players.

A lot more than these ideas of removing skills/implants or allowing for reallocation of SP. EVE is a social game, yet most of the people left are so anti-social we just scare off any new players telling them they're not good enough or will never be as good as a vet when that's not at all true.

To perfectly fly any particular sub-cap does not take more than a couple months. Vets will never get any better than 5s, nor will the rookie player. And in small gang/solo roams that 2% difference between 4 and 5 is made up for simply by who shoots who first.

His friend was being nice letting him tag along. He was obviously helping Corraidhin make more isk than he could on his own. More damage in a site is more damage no matter how you look at it so it was speeding him up kind of. Some people let maximizing their profits go out the window every now and then to help a new player or friend. I am guessing you are not one of those types of people.

EVE as a whole would be a lot better off with more players like his friend there to meet new players. A lot more than these ideas of removing skills/implants or allowing for reallocation of SP. EVE is a social game, yet most of the people left are so anti-social we just scare off any new players telling them they're not good enough or will never be as good as a vet when that's not at all true.

To perfectly fly any particular sub-cap does not take more than a couple months. Vets will never get any better than 5s, nor will the rookie player. And in small gang/solo roams that 2% difference between 4 and 5 is made up for simply by who shoots who first.

The key isn't to remove skills, give more SP or give more money. They key to this game is social interaction and that is where player *and* CCP focus should be to draw in and retain new players.

His friend was being nice letting him tag along.

It's not an RPG anymore without skills, if everyone can fly and do everything from day 1.

Coming from a different angle, I am an industrialist. This attitude would have me telling new industrialists that the only way to mine is in a Mack, and that you must have a slew of level 5 indy skills before you install your first BP.

The true purpose of SP is to force players to earn real gameplay experience before they commit all their resources to a set task and lose it all.

Well, it's pretty much accepted that you need PE5 before attempting to manufacture stuff, for example.

Well, I would suggest it works the other way around: you have to commit to a particular aspect of gameplay (by training SP aka spending time) before you get to learn the "real gameplay experience."

Exactly this. Did he need me there? Of course not, but I didn't take anyof the LP or mission reward because I didn't feel I'd earnt it but every now and then split the reward. I did indeed speed up his missions as I took out frigates etc whilst he kept his heavy guns on task with no need to swap out drones. He was surprised himself about how useful it was to have someone along (and the banter did help a lot too, social interaction in an MMO? Who'd have thought it!)

He benefited greatly by fitting one to two more missions in each session. I benefitted from better meta crap to fit on my ship whilst I trained up and also learnt about my ships and skills in a significantly more dangerous environment for a noob than level 1 missions would provide.

I got lucky with my first corp mates. Because of them I learnt how my ships and skills worked. Because of them I advanced much more rapidly than I would have expected. I was building control towers after 8-10 weeks, how is that not having a useful impact in the game no matter how small?

The key isn't to remove skills, give more SP or give more money. They key to this game is social interaction and that is where player *and* CCP focus should be to draw in and retain new players.