Originally by: CCP Greyscale

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This is one facet of the design, yes. It also works to let older players who are feeling a little aimless find new things to train and new avenues of advancement, flags up areas where more work could be done or where a few extra skills could open up a whole new area, lets you see how specialized you are and adds to your general epeen level. It also opens up possibilities in terms of recruitment and recruitment adverts and so on in future, although that's not an area that's currently being implemented in our first iteration.

On the subject of sandboxes and ship setups and so on, when we actually looked at this we found that, while there are obviously a huge variety of setups for any one ship, there's often a core set of skills that you'll almost always want for that ship. For example, the vast majority of Apocalypse setups are going to want to make use of the Large Enery Turrets skill, and similarly the skills for the Interdiction Sphere Launcher are pretty useful if you want to fly Interdictors. That said, nothing we're working on is strongly prescriptive - recommendations are good, additional requirements are bad.

There'll probably be a dev blog on this at some point

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