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Posted - 2009.07.05 16:56:00 -
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To all the people who say: "In which other mmo can you skill your toon while not being subscribed?" I ask: In which other mmo can you skill your toon while being offline? So should skilling system be changed so that skills can be trained only while player is in-game? Because thats how it is in all other mmo's. Honestly, arguments 'In which other mmo...' are the most ******ed of all, cause they sort of imply that all mmo's should look like WoW.
To all the people who say: "Ghosttraining was free, its only logical it was removed." I say: I'm not aware there ever was any link or button which you could click to receive your free ghosttraining. In fact, the only way you could receive ghosttraining was TO PAY FOR IT. It was part of the package, you payed to play and that enabled you to shoot rats, mine roids... and ghosttrain. It was free as much as t2 bpo lottery was free, but removal of t2 bpo lottery was clearly to make game better, while with removal of ghosttraining its not clear is it to make game better or only to make CCP richer.
These are two most important questions related to removal of ghosttraining: 1. Does it make game better, and 2. does it make CCP richer.
I can only speculate on the answer to second question, though I believe that removal of ghosttraining was major design change which should have clear impact on CCP's earnings. Positive (more money) change is a result of all the accounts who would have used ghosttraining but since they couldn't opted to prolong their subscription whenever it expired. Negative (less money) change probably had immediate, short term (3 months) effect, when players were reducing the number of their multiple accounts, and long term effect (another 9 months might be sufficient to recognise and measure it) which includes more old players quitting (they would have come back after ghosttraining a long skill but now they dont) and less new players sticking with the game. So, I guess soon CCP should positively know did this change increase or decrease their earnings. If it's the later, then we might get ghosttraining back, they obviously wont do it just because a lot of players want it sufficiently to create a 200+ pages thread.
Did removal of ghosttraining make Eve a better game? The only sensible game-related reason I heard why it was removed was that it allowed for character farming which was hurting the game. I dont know anything about that so I cant comment. Also never had more then one account so cant say anything about that. But I can say something about how I think it affects new players. If there wasn't ghosttraining I'd never play eve one day past free trial. Ghosttraining provided a degree of long-term playability, a way to go around all those long skills. Now that's gone, I believe that influx of new players will be substantially reduced.
To those who say "Give us longer skilling queue" I say: What for? One day is sufficient.
To those who say "Let us skill three toons on one account" I say: Dream on. If CCP got stingy about fraction of training time which was ghosttraining, there's no way they'll suddenly triple it.
Here's my idea/suggestion on how to reduce the pain of ghosttraining removal and make Eve a better game: Introduce hybrid skilling. Make it so that players can collect experience which can be turned into skilling points. A system of diminishing returns can prevent the situation in which older players can collect much more experience then new players. For example: killing one npc frigate can be one exp point, destroyer two, cruiser and t2 frigate 3, bc and t2 cruiser 4, bs 5, etc. Killing player ships should bring a bit more experience then killing npc ships. Mining, production and invention should also bring experience. It can provide for a small amount of skilling, lets say killing npc battleships whole day could bring only half an hour of skilling time, so influence does not have to be big, but it would help a lot with Eve's biggest problem: long skills. As it is that part of game is the most boring and frustrating, the oposite of fun, and with ghosttraining removed you cant get around it.
Introduce eleventh implant slot for experience collection and limit it to 10.000 experience (by default, greater amounts allowed with new kinds of implants). Allow collected experience to be turned into any skill eligible for training and modify it with relevant attributes. Introduce implants for new slot which can store experience and allow it to be traded on market. If whole characters can be traded, why not skillpoints? It would be a valuable and expensive commodity, its impact on the game might be quite limited while at the same time it would provide more diversity and a way to reduce terrible boredom which are long skills.
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