To iterate somewhat on cApAc aMaRu's comment:

While ships within ship-classes have to be balanced against each other, ship-classes have to be balanced against other ship-classes. You can achieve perfect balance within a ship-class, with the ship-class itself still being utterly out of whack with the rest of the game.

And if you then take into consideration how long it took to get Assault Ships balanced, or the Destroyer buff, you have an idea what it means to screw with the entire system, start to finish. By the time they're done "re-balancing" the last ship-class, they can (read: have to) start re-re-balancing the entire thing, because the ship-classes they re-balanced first had no valid reference points.

Instead of having racial variants for all hull classes how about racial variants for Spaceship Command?
If you know how to fly a Caldari Battleship it shouldn't take too long to learn just how much duct tape is needed to hold the top wingy bit on a Minmatar Battleship.

Many people, including me, have used MUCH time and money to head on one way or another. To make all my feelings show on this post against this renewal and hatred, is nearly impossible.

Just make the tech tree go as it should be. Level 5's for every next ship on specific race. Cr 5 allows you to learn BC, BC 5 allows you to go BS... etc. Now if this new plan is going to happen like that, Im going to look forward really carefully and rethink about how all the spent time is going to be worth for me. Maybe shutting down all my 3 accounts might be an ansver for that. No reason to play the game anymore.

As it is now, no cruiser skills are required to train battle cruisers (to fly them sure, but not to train the book)

What would happen to people who have BC V and no cruiser skills at all?

easily solvable with a grace period during which the old skill will work and which give you time to train the new ones to level 4, after which the original skill is terminated and SP reimbursed to be used wherever you want

No one is saying you have to retrain them. Our principle for the reimbursement here will be "if you could fly it yesterday, you can still fly it today".

Since the cruisers are required for the battlecruisers skill only, not actually required for the ship, you'll be fine.

As long as you meet the top-level prereqs, even if they change the inner ones, it won't matter.

I understand that part, but how would they reassign the skills, like for example would I get BCV for all 4 races? even though currently I can't sit in any battle cruiser as I have no cruiser skills trained at all, just BCV. they make mention of if you could use it now then you will be able to use it after, but as i can't use them now, do i just lose the skill?

Cruisers makes sense because it fits there "if you can fly it now you can fly it after" policy. I don't believe they have an opprotunity cost policy and these changes sound specifically like they are altering the opprotunity cost to get in various vessels. So, if your long term plan doesn't let you get into them, and you're unwilling to train un-optomized for a couple of days, then you probably need to accept that it will be more expensive later. Not sure this is something CCP should be concerned about as real life often does this so people should be used to it now.

I trained Heavy assault ship to IV (Which is a class of ship i never wanted to fly) only to get to the command ships.


Will there be a refund or something for the "now useless" intermediary skills along the line for some ships?

If u think about it, i now have 257k SP totally "wasted" when the change will it us...

For some ppl it may be nothing, but for character with less than 20M SP its still some SP u might not want... at least for now.

Sidenote: Saw nothing about t2 ship skill refunds... if i was simply blind, point me in the right direction?

Hmm I'd really liek to know what came of these plans. No furtehr information, nothing in Patch notes no news or announcements...

I believe that BS IV for carriers is a good move on CCPs....

We'll find a suitable reimbursement that makes everyone happy. I'm not terribly fussed about giving away a little extra if it moves we move the ship progression system into a better place.

I'm just wondering why the ship progression system is so important that it's worth having to reimburse skillpoints over in the first place?

There seems to be this track of uniformity going on over at CCP. We are getting uniform item names. We are getting uniformity between faction warfare and null-sec in the naming conventions for sovereignty. We are getting a single window unified inventory. Now you want to make all ship progression uniformly identical.

Are you not worried that you're reducing the complexity of the game, the variety that makes it interesting and the learning curve that appeals to many of your more serious players? I certainly fear that if you continue down this track, EVE could lose some of its depth, character and complexity to the point where it becomes another bland MMO in the pile.

Also, please consider that while you would like to draw in more new players, most of your older player base have several characters. For every old bittervet that quits the game, you have to draw in several new players to turn the same profit. A quest to eliminate the learning curve and simplify EVE might backfire economically.