Vitrael
Reaper Industries Eternal Rapture
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Posted - 2009.01.17 03:05:00 -
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Originally by: Owin Forsyth Learning skills are not a barrier to entry. It takes very little time to train the primary's to level 3 and that's all one would need in the very beginning.that when I hear 'skill training complete' and determine my next skill to train
Simply not true. There is no amount of learning skills a player "needs", and obviously they are not necessary for anyone to train. However it's obvious that any player will receive the highest return on his invested training time if he has all learning skills maxed, granted he subscribes long enough for the training time to balance out against the gain in training speed (12-24+ months for all learning skills to level 5, depending on implants, base attributes and what sorts of skills are trained).
So of course anyone who can do a cost-benefit analysis and has a basic understanding of character progression can see that learning skills are a "must have", and as such they may spend a month or more training them at the very beginning of their character lives. It's only then that they learn the true crappiness of spending a month not getting any new shiney toys, especially for characters at beginning skill points (800,000) who really aren't that capable in any type of gameplay.
Let's think back to when characters started with 30,000 skillpoints. They were practically useless for an entire month! Maybe viable during the first year or two of Eve, but it in the capital age of RMR it became obvious that new players were having trouble competing. That's why they ramped up entry skillpoints 25 times over, with a lot of emphasis on learning skills.
Personally I think learning skills have survived under the "necessary evil" mode of thinking for too long. It was a large step in the right direction to add more skillpoints on character creation with many in learning skills, but it's not enough. I think entry skillpoints should again be increased (2m sound good to anyone else?) with a sizable portion going to learning skills to ease new players into the fold, while also helping us old schoolers who have 2, 3, or 24 alts to regain out sanity.
"But what about the rest of us who suffered through those darned learning skills up hill both ways in the snow?!? HARUMPH!"
Meh. You did it and so did I (five times). In fact, on the day that CCP imbursed all players with less than 800,000 sp up to that level, I literally had about 802,000 sp. I felt screwed then, but that same change has helped thousands of players enormously. In retrospect, though I consider myself a hardcore Eve player today, while I was training those learning skills I thought about unsubbing and forgetting Eve altogether. I do think that the effort to ease the entry barrier into is a noble one. I say let's ramp up entry learning skills again. It's overdue.
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