Mr Horizontal
Gallente
KIA Corp
KIA Alliance
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Posted - 2008.10.14 08:40:00 -
[1]
The Good
Good for Elder players
This protects older players being able to have an advantage in the game over younger players.
Cleaner subs
It provides CCP with a cleaner subscription base. Not bigger or smaller, it means that players will justify the number of accounts they have.
The Bad
Bad for Younger players
At 2 years, I'm on the young side of a middle aged player. However, my contemporaries are all double my SP, and I'm having to fly side-by-side with players who are twice as skilled as I.
Now I have achieved a hell of a lot in EVE. I have Capitals, I look after over a trillion ISK of other people's money (EBANK), I make more ISK than I need, and I have never needed to use Ghost Training, since I can justify all 15 characters I use across all my 5 accounts.
What I have done, though, is buy pre-trained characters, who have in all likelihood used Ghost Training to get the character to a saleable level. A lot of people who aren't so good at making money in EVE train characters as a profession. This therefore really hurts both the trainers and buyers.
The necessary alt spam
There are also quite stringent limitations on characters. As I said, I have 15 characters, 5 of which are highly skilled and specialised. All the others are a variety of:
- Trade alts, in different empires to ensure I can sell anywhere in EVE, and be able to check prices across the EVE Galaxy.
- Cyno alts, a really nasty but necessary character to be able to use capitals at all
- R&D and Manufacturing alts. Because of the stringent limitations in manufacturing and research slots you have per character, every single one of my characters has the necessary skills to run 9 R&D jobs and 9 manufacturing jobs. That's 135 slots for each, and you know what? It's still not enough! Skills should be boosted significantly to accomodate more slots per toon.
The Ugly
Research points
No mention has been made whether R&D research points will be halted, but I suspect that you haven't considered this yet. If you do stop RP gains, this becomes a good point, but it's ugly while it's still around. By stopping RP, this will make RP and datacores more valuable, thus rebalancing invention somewhat - a much needed move.
Skill training lengths
You have made a big problem for yourselves CCP with being careless in deciding the skill ranks. I believe any skills in progression that have a difference of 2 or more need to be reconsidered. For example ship classes having a difference of two ranks from Frigate to Cruiser need to only be one. The problem is that players join EVE and spend a year finding the game they want to play. After that year, they specialise more and more in the game they have chosen.
You need to allow players who really play EVE to the fullest be able to match and surpass their contemporaries. Ghost Training allowed this, but now it's not there and all players will always now have a glass ceiling.
Festering bug
Now, I don't like exploits as much as you do CCP, and I agree that Ghost Training isn't something that's particularly good for the game.
However, you've let it fester for so long, that it's part of the game now, and changing it like this really upsets a lot of people's play and fun in EVE. I strongly urge you to reconsider being a little more gentle on this.
What I propose is that you stop skill training 30 days after a character has been deactivated. This would be fair, to stop the people really abusing the exploit, while not penalising absolutely everyone.
If this was a bug, why wasn't it removed at the beginning of the game, like 2004 at the very latest?
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