Kolmogorow
Freedom Resources
90
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Posted - 2016.06.19 17:12:31 -
[1] - Quote
Satchel Darkmatter wrote:Anything that makes this game better for new players will NEVER be a bad thing even if the old timers think it will.
As a veteran player this is disturbing to me. I do not think that the SP distance between older and newer players should be kept - and I don't believe, most other veterans do. I would easily agree that new players should get a free 20% bonus (no matter if they are online or not) on skill training (maybe a decreasing bonus over time) to close the gap between new and old players a bit and allow new players to catch up in skill faster.
But the daily opportunities neither solve this problem (because they are accessible to everyone, new and old players, just keeping the distance in SP the same) nor is it their purpose to help new players more than old players. Their purpose is to encourage or force players to login daily. But what kind of encouragement is that? Logging in, hop into a ship, fly to a belt, shoot a 3k ISK frig and logoff? The game is supposed to provide content so that players login because they want to play and have fun. And also to not login because they have a bad day or just no time. Now they are punished if they don't or feel forced to do so although they don't want to play today. This can be more annoying to new players because they really want to get the basic skills up and feel particularly bad when they can't login a day or two.
I doubt that the current system of accumulating skill is friendlier to new players: Advanced players know better how to make ISK and have more resources to earn ISK to possibly buy skill injectors and get even more ahead in skill or get ahead in trained alts. They have the ISK to buy +5 implants, they are more often training long running skills to level 5, allowing them to stay longer in the optimal attribute pair before they can remap their attributes and they might even have old bonus remaps.
I would have prefered if skill training had been made even more passive as it was before skill injectors: Remove attribute implants, remove neural attributes on skills and character entirely, remove neural remaps, raise skill training speed generally (to, for example, the level of having optimal attributes and +4 implants) and give new players a general passive - not a "you must shoot a frig" - skill training speed bonus that decreases over time.
With skill injectors and dailies, imo, they have touched the holy grail, that skill was the only thing that ISK - and therefore skill itself which favors actually advanced players over newbies - cannot buy. It allowed players to login to actually play the game and not to login to do something they possibly don't want to do (running utterly mechanical dailies or make ISK for skill injectors) just to be able to play the game at some point later. It's like the return of the hated learning skills in new clothes, something you just have to do to be competitive but with no value on its own. Being able to simply ignore skill training (aside from choosing which skill you want to train), because it always runs automatically and there is no way to make it faster or slower, had the big benefit that you could care about the game content you like or be absent a few days without feeling forced, cheated or punished.
Looking into various ingame channels I have subscribed to I see a whole lot of discussion about skill injectors, things like "I have to run 50 missions this week...", "I have to run 30 hours incursions this week...", "I must make 3 bil this week...", etc., etc. "...to bring my alt number 7 to logi 5", etc., etc. It just feeds the alteritis and advantage of old players more than it helps new players.
Of course, there is still a conflict between new and old players that doesn't go away. For new players skills matter a lot and they welcome everything that speeds skill training up because skills open access to the various contents and features of the game they don't know or haven't explored yet. Over time the value of skills decreases, you know most features and what is most interesting and exciting is the addition of new content - things like a new Apocrypha expansion or whatever adds real content to the game, not development time wasted into weird shoot-a-frig-for-skillpoints-"opportunities".
I know, that's all no big problem for the very regular players who are online every day and focus on PVE anyway. They earn the 10000 SP basically for free. For occasional and less addicted players who are nonetheless paying the same money or PLEXes it is just annoying to fall behind in skill points compared to others and especially to those who do the craziness of login-shoot-logoff. That's very different to the advance a regular player has because he gains more experience by daily play and which can easily be accepted by an occasional player.
TLDR: I'm not against skill point boni for new players. But either give them out for free or not at all. Skills are a means of playing and I don't like much that they partially have been turned into a purpose.
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