Raisa Mole
School of Applied Knowledge
Caldari State
3
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Posted - 2012.03.05 00:15:00 -
[1] - Quote
I will attempt to avoid the negativity in the thread, and try to point out why your idea is misguided. The idea at it's core is based on two views that are fundamentally flawed : skills make a huge difference, and bigger is better. These are both woefully wrong, but are, unfortunately, views that are held by most of the players that try starting an Eve character. What separates a successful, happy Eve character from someone who quits early on (and the bittervets) is that successful players have separated themselves from this viewpoint. You obviously have not, which means you are either a new player (as some in this thread are professing), or you are one of the paradoxical old players who for some reason continue to play a game that they fundamentally do not enjoy.
Any new player who jumps into the game with the mentality from other MMOs will fail. There is no "endgame," and there is no grind between you and actually playing the game. I feel this is something that gets ignored a lot. Since I'm tired of typing "other MMOs," I'm just going to say WoW, since it's what everyone's thinking anyway. With a new WoW player with a freshly bought game, you cannot do anything other than be led around from quest to quest, and you cannot play with any friends until you reach max level. The leveling experience is nothing but a grind, you have to pay your dues, so to speak, in order to unlock the real game. For someone who knows the game and knows the most efficient leveling path, that is 5 days of played time. For a new player who doesn't know how things work, that can easily double, but let's pretend it's 5 days played time. For someone who can log in two hours a day (which is probably about average, the basement virgin 12 hours a day dudes are offset by the huge numbers who can only play on weekends), this means 60 days, or two months before you can even play the real game. At this point it is at least another 3 days played time, probably more, before you grind out enough gear to participate in whatever raid or PvP that your friends are doing (well, you can do the PvP, but until you get the gear you will literally die after five steps). That adds about another month, giving us effectively three months before the average player can really do much with his friends. Now, those friends can take pity on the newbie and run him through heroics to farm his gear, effectively carrying him, so let's ignore the gearing up portion and say two months.
Why did I lay that all out? Because it's important. Eve offers new players the unique opportunity to do ALMOST whatever they want within a couple days of playing. Yes, high-end PvE content, such as Incursions, Wormholes, or L4 missions will not be doable, but each of these are only better ways to make isk anyway. As someone earlier pointed out, it takes very, very little time to be a useful member of a PvP gang. Within a few hours of creating your character you could have a frigate fit with point, web, and MWD, making you a tackler. These are always useful members of a fleet. Within no more than 5 days you can have most skills relevant to a PvP frigate to level 3 or 4, giving you a solid frigate that can even contribute a bit of dps while tackling. This is an opportunity UNAVAILABLE in other MMOs, and unfortunately, because new players are so used to how other MMOs work, they don't avail themselves of this opportunity. The assumption amongst new players generally seems to be that if you can't fly a BS you won't be useful, which is patently false, but unless someone explains otherwise that's what you'll keep believing. For the lucky few that figure it out, the universe opens up. You can do whatever you want to do pretty much right from the start, as long as your goals are realistic (much like real life, really).
What's all of this mean? Changing the skill system accomplishes nothing is what it means. As was repeatedly pointed out, the best auto-logout function that CCP could build can be circumvented easily with even a rudimentary understanding of script writing. So, effectively, such a change does nothing to benefit anyone, but will harm players who are unable or unwilling to write (or download) a simple script that keeps their character logged in while they're off at work or asleep. The only change that would actually accomplish anything would be to remake the skill system into a grind-based system that gives you SP for doing tasks (basically an exp system from other MMOs), and I can guarantee you that such a change would murder Eve so quickly that CCP won't even have time to ask what happened. |