Tasko Pal
Heron Corporation
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Posted - 2008.01.29 16:16:00 -
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I was puzzling over the things that one probably should have in a game where tech levels progress past "tech 2". At some point, I think that your old skils won't help you fly that shiny new ship. Should the old navigation skill help you fly a tech 3 just as much as a tech 1 frigate? Electronic warfare help just as much with tech 3 EW modules?
I see obsoleting skills for which modules or ships don't generally require new skills. New t2 ships have a new skill associated with them. I imagine this would continue with t3 ships. But a t2 warp scrambler or t2 cloaking device does not. They just require higher levels of the same skills as the respective t1 devices. Nor do the tech 2 ships require better navigation, gunnery, or drone skills or the t2 mining barges require better mining or astrogeology skills.
Assuming that we should obselete skills, how would one go about doing it? One way is to require a completely new skill with relatively low requirements that on purpose skips the old skill. Say "electronic warfare II" which has electronics V as its requirement rather than some level of "electronics warfare".
One could go even further and just make version "II" of most skills that modules depend on (just about everything in drone, electronics, engineering, gunnery, etc). However, you then run into the problem of high sp characters who end up retraining everything from scratch. My idea here is to make the version II cost the same to train from scratch as the old skill (and have the exact same requirements as the old version skill but with version II skills). I'd even remove the old skill once the new skill reach that level or higher. The idea is that navigation II is a complete replacement for navigation.
If the player already has level 5 in the older version, then they get say a 90% skill point discount (they buy a cheaper "upgrade" of the skill). Or maybe the skill trains 10 times as fast until the number of skill points in the version II skill exceed the points in the old version I. Finally, I think make the version II skills act as the version I skills with respect to requirements. If there is a version II of evasive maneuvering, then having a level 5 in that should be sufficient for the interceptors skill (which in my scheme wouldn't have a version II).
Finally, there is the matter of whether obselete skills can help or not. Should navigation I help you any in flying a t3 ship (that is, give some sort of velocity boost)? Here, I don't know. I wouldn't mind some reduced benefit.
This would have some undesirable effects. Having to retrain a considerable portion of your pvp skills every time Eve advances a tech level or two. It also reduces the advantage of having lots of skill points (ie, playing the game for a while).
To summarize, I'm advocating some degree of skill obsolescence. The reason is because that's what we see in modern technology advancement. The old buggy manufacturers wouldn't have a clue how to make a car. Driving a horse-drawn carriage isn't going to help you drive a car. And a blacksmith might know some useful skills, but they'd be pretty lost in a modern machine shop. Old knowledge gets less useful over time.
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