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skills = monthly fee, not player abilities in the game..
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My 2 creds.
As a former trial member I experienced somewhat of what EVE had to offer, and the immense depth the game had.
However, I must agree, time=sp and money=time.
Which brings me to another point, your skills still train while you're sleeping, on vacation, or afk. As long as your account is intact, and your skill isn't finished. This whole concept balances out, with level grinding, since few players can play 24/7 grinding (unless they're fanatics).
For me, the concept of training without grinding is more positive than negative. Negatively, there's so much you can train in one hour, day, week, or month until you get to train another skill.
At times it can be a hassle since this limits what you can do, in terms of missions, pvp, and corp activities.
However, at the same time, this opens an opportunity to explore, make money, or do missions, which otherwise could've been allocated to level grinding if it were present.
To be good in EVE also is not a measure of time played necessarily, but your understanding of EVE in general, experience, and planning. With timed skills, you're forced to decide on what skills to focus on and allocate your time/money on them. Sure you can go straight for BS and receive all it's prerequisites. But you might not be an effective miner, or might miss out on several weapons skills. Making you in turn less effective.
Imo, to be successful at EVE at first, you have to specialize somewhat. You can be a "jack of all trades", but it will take far more time and money to do so, and in turn you'll miss out on certain aspects of the game.
As for myself, I chose to specialize in mining. I had a Cormorant and Badger Mark II for both mining ops and the Cormorant was good enough for lvl 1/2 missions. I plan on going Mining Barge from there, and then Cruiser and BS.
i dont see how this concept is unique to EVE. It's the same in any MMo. If you want to beat the best, you have to have gear like the best. Skill does come into play. But you have to have that hawt gear if you want to dominate.
Don't think of it as I have to beat the top 3% of people in the game. Think of how to beat most of the people that are in the 55-70% range and you will still have a good time. Also, as in all MMos, your class skills will make some players easy to beat and other classes really difficult.
The whole point is you DONT need the best gear, or even anything more than the most basic gear to beat anyone in eve!
Fit, for example, an Apoc BS (flyable effectively after 6 weeks or so) with 6 tech1 heavy nosferatu and a weak armor tank, and you can effectively beat any 3 year old player in a 1v1 as they simply wont be expecting it.
Eve is all about loadout, tactics and intelligence.
Most players who regularily PVP in EVE fly with common mods or mid-range named gear. Very few will fly with a ship full of T2 mods or faction modules because no matter how uber your mods may be you WILL lose them when PVP'ing.
I think you're missing the point here. What if WoW had no level cap, or one you wouldn't reach for 14 years. Now you see a guy you aspire to beat in PvP so you work your character up to level 60, yet during that time, they guy you wanted to beat was now level 120.
Another view: I'm playing WoW and see a guy level 20 that I want to beat. I bust my butt take a vaction from work and ignore my family for a month. I make it to level 25 the same time as that level 20 guy. I've caught up to him, you can't do this in EVE. Even if you play 24 hours a day 365 days a year, you CANNOT catch up to people that have been playing longer.
Now I'm not saying this makes EVE a bad game (hell I've only been playing it for 2 days and kind of like it so far), but it is a true statement.
EDIT: Yikes in my hurry to form my response, I didn't realize this had 9 pages to it. Sorry if this has been said, or is now off topic.
I think it's you that miss the point. The thing that makes wow and eve so different is the fact that you don't need to catch up. So you are level 10 and he is 20, in eve you can take him on 1v1 right away and have a large chance of winning. Because what matters are not your avatars skills but yours.
When I attack someone I never bother checkin how old he is, because what will determin the winner is never the number of sp but how each ship are equiped in comparison with eachother (and I am not talking how expensive equipment you have, what's important is that your equipment fit the situation) and how skilled you as a player are in using that equipment.
"Memories are meant to fade. They're designed that way for a reason."
Not entirely true, since your SP's determine what equipment you can use.
Yes and no. You see, it doesn't take all that many skillpoints to be able to use pretty much all of the tech 1 equipment in the game. A properly set-up ship with tech 1 fittings can be very effective in PvP despite the lack of tech II guns. I flew my tempest for quite some time with only tech 1 guns on it, but still managed to rack up quite a few kills using it - it's all about intelligent fittings and, most importantly, intelligent tactics.
Know the strengths and weaknesses of your setup, and only attack in situations that maximize your strengths and minimize your weaknesses. Attack targets that aren't fitted to deal with the type/setup of ship you're flying. Attack from surprise. Avoid confrontations you're not set up for. Only engage when outnumbered if you think you've got a good chance of winning despite the odds.
I have taken down a 23 million skillpoint character while only having 9 million skillpoints. I regularly take down 30 million skillpoint characters and rarely get taken down in return, despite the fact that I only have 19 million skillpoints. Back when I only had 3 million skillpoints, I took down a character that had 15 million skillpoints. Again, it's all about intelligent fittings and tactics, and knowing what your ship's capabilities and its limits (and, if your current ship isn't up to the task, dock it and switch to one that is).
-Wrayeth
"Look, pa! I just contributed absolutely nothing to this thread!"
And all of that may be absolutely true, you may not have to catch up to them, but the fact remains that the way the game is set up you CANNOT catch them. That's the point I think the OP is making. Even if I have 19 mil and my opponent has 30mil Skillpoints, even if I beat that opponent 1,000 times in a row, it does not change the fact that no matter how much I play or how little he playes (within reason) he will ALWAYS have more SP and as a result more options.
Don't get me wrong, I don't agree with the OP that it makes this game horrible, I'm kind of intrigued by the possibilites. Sure it's exciting when you're level 60 and take out another level 60, but how much more exciting when you're level 30 and take out a level 60, to continue the WoW anaogy.
Actually, that's not entirely true. It's quite possible to acquire the same skillpoints in one particular area as an older player through specialization. Say you specialize in flying Gallente battelships - with enough time, you'll be able to fly Gallente battleships just as well as that older player, though your Gallente HAC, AF, and Recon skills will be nonexistant.
Past a certain point, the main thing that older players have over newer players is the advantage of more generalized skills (well, that and also more experience actually playing the game, which converts into knowledge of tactics and strategy in some instances).
-Wrayeth
"Look, pa! I just contributed absolutely nothing to this thread!"
Heh. You sound like carebears.
Oh boo hoo I can't catch up.
Catch up to do what.
Just gain SP for the sake of having SP?
Anything anybody else can do, you can eventually do the same thing.
Heh. Who cares. If you see a 40 mil SP player chances are he's scared of his own shadow, doesn't want to lose his precious implants. Meanwhile the low sp players are out there in roving gangs killing everything in sight.
Exactly, and there is nothing wrong with that either. People who have invested 3 years in into the game SHOULD have the advantage of more options, they've earned it. It also means that all characters are virtually unlimited in their ability to grow. My character is sitting at near 25 million sp after playing 3 years but they are spread all over the place. I can still only fly Gallente ships mostly but I can fly them to their best ability.
when I started eve when it launched, I trained alot of skills, currently im at 27 million skill points I know about guys with over 45 million skill points that have probably been playing the same amount of time as I have. This suggest that I did not plan my skill training as efficiently as the uber players yet I am a pilot of great skill and I can fly numerous ship classes with great ability.
Yet there are millions of skill points I never use on a daily basis, I have mining skills upp the whazoo as that was the ONLY way to earn isk when the game started, I have drone skills for about 1.8 million skill points that ive not used in over a year I have 3 racial battleships skills at lvl 5 and yet only combat skills to support one type of racial B-ships.
I know im not the only player with alot of bullshit skillpoints that we never use.
Currently my favourite ships are the interceptor and the Assault frigate, ship types that suplement each other greatly skill wise. A friend started playing 8 months ago and he surpasses me in skills regarding those two ship types, sure I can use a battleship, but two assault frigates can hump a battleship with ease.
The point im trying to make here is that with planning and specialization players can easily become very good at what they do as EVE today has alot more skills that can help a player choose a focused skill training path than it had almost 3 years ago when the game launched.
Besides that there are characters for sale that you can pay for with ingame ISK, semi advanced to very advanced characters, sure they cost a lot of ISK but nothing a person that wants to gain a good characater cant muster in a few months time. And this is all legal within the game as long as you use ingame currency to do this.
People have been coming with your argument since the early Beta of EVE, but EVE has still grown to 100k subscribed users with 23k people online at peak hours. This suggest that all the people with the prediction "eve will die because of time training" were wrong so far, and given the fact that eve has grown more in the past three months than ever before suggests that the death is a long time coming.
On another note, I have three characters within EvE all at different age levels. My favourite character is a 4 month old minmatar pilot that I love to fly and play, sure I spent the first month getting my learning skills in order but Im still having a blast and ive even downed a player battleship with him, not alone mind you, but I played an important role. While it's possible to fly and have fun with new characters it will be a successfull game.
From The Original Poster:
"would take someone a physical 14 year subscription to accomplish all skills currently available". and there lies the problem."
Ouch, are you certain?
SobaKai.com
There are two types of people in this world - people that suck... and me.
Why 4 Years? There are so many skills that take months to max.
Why 4 Years? There are so many skills that take months to max.
There are skills that take that long, but there aren't that many. In a game with hundreds of skills. There's really only 10 maybe 15 skills that will take longer than a month or longer to train.
But, why that is a concern, I don't know. It'd be stupid to try and train every single skill in Eve, and every player will most likely equip a set of good implants PLUS 11 of Eve's skills are there simply to help you train every other skill faster. Both my perception and my intelligence on my character are above 20. I'm very hard pressed to find a skill that takes longer than 28 days to train... that doesn't mean they aren't out there... I just don't concern myself with training them until I absolutely can go no further in-game without it.
Oh, and the longest training time I've ever seen was 45 days which is only a month and a half. Have yet to see a skill that takes months to train.
SobaKai.com
There are two types of people in this world - people that suck... and me.
Why 4 Years? There are so many skills that take months to max.
There are skills that take that long, but there aren't that many. In a game with hundreds of skills. There's really only 10 maybe 15 skills that will take longer than a month or longer to train.
But, why that is a concern, I don't know. It'd be stupid to try and train every single skill in Eve, and every player will most likely equip a set of good implants PLUS 11 of Eve's skills are there simply to help you train every other skill faster. Both my perception and my intelligence on my character are above 20. I'm very hard pressed to find a skill that takes longer than 28 days to train... that doesn't mean they aren't out there... I just don't concern myself with training them until I absolutely can go no further in-game without it.
Oh, and the longest training time I've ever seen was 45 days which is only a month and a half. Have yet to see a skill that takes months to train.
Wow, good to see your communication skills have increased so high ever since yesterday, honestly tho, nice answer. I have had skills that needed 4-6+ months to train by the way.
Why 4 Years? There are so many skills that take months to max.
There are skills that take that long, but there aren't that many. In a game with hundreds of skills. There's really only 10 maybe 15 skills that will take longer than a month or longer to train.
But, why that is a concern, I don't know. It'd be stupid to try and train every single skill in Eve, and every player will most likely equip a set of good implants PLUS 11 of Eve's skills are there simply to help you train every other skill faster. Both my perception and my intelligence on my character are above 20. I'm very hard pressed to find a skill that takes longer than 28 days to train... that doesn't mean they aren't out there... I just don't concern myself with training them until I absolutely can go no further in-game without it.
Oh, and the longest training time I've ever seen was 45 days which is only a month and a half. Have yet to see a skill that takes months to train.
Wow, good to see your communication skills have increased so high ever since yesterday, honestly tho, nice answer. I have had skills that needed 4-6+ months to train by the way.
Mind telling me what they were?
SobaKai.com
There are two types of people in this world - people that suck... and me.
Uh...no...Industrial level 5 takes 60 days if you have a perception and will of like 10. Unless months on the planet you come from are only 10 days long, then you've got a point.
Do you realize how stupid it makes you look when you just spout garbage like this, it's quite funny really.
The longest skill to train are Outpost Construction. With avg attributs around 20 which someone who has trained their learning skills should have (more with implants) it would take 115 days to take it from 0 to level 5.
The statement that it would 10+ years to train ALL skills to level 5 is accurate but this isn't really a problem. You don't need all skills at level 5. For example I have no need at all for the outpost construction skill. Should I ever feel the need for an outpost I will just buy it from someone else who has trained that skill instead of the combat skills I focused on.
"Memories are meant to fade. They're designed that way for a reason."
I love EVE more today than I did a month ago.
I love EVE more that second month than I did the first month.
That first month though was the pits.
I have to say that I don't agree with this original poster's rendition of the situation in EVE. In fact, I'd have to say that the true paradox is not Time = Skill. Its actually much more insidious than that.
The, shall we say, "slimy thing" about how this game is designed is:
Time Subscribed = Skills Obtained = Playtime Enjoyed
I have to agree with the old EVE guard here, and say that the game relies on far more things than mere skill levels to enjoy it. It relies on the ability to maintain a positive cash flow. It relies on others who will help you. It relies on ships, fittings, ore, and BPOs. It relies on good standings with NPC organizations. It relies on instant warp bookmarks, a knowledge of galactic markets, and a knowledge of the regions. It relies on experience in PvP and PvE.
Hence the importance of skills. With skills, you can fly better ships, for better agents, on better missions, which net you better ISK payouts. This allows you to spend less time running missions over and over to earn ISK, and more time doing pleasurable things.
With skills, you can fit better mining equipment. With that better mining equipment, you can mine more ore, in less time, so you can do the things that are much more pleasurable.
With skills, you can join better corps, have more to offer other players, and earn more respect, fear, or awe than you would without them; and more importantly, skills allow you to be more of a hero to others, because it will allow you to deal out more justice to those that cause them harm. This allows you the ability to spend less time doing things for yourself, and more time having others help you to do things for you. In effect, affording you more leisure to do things that are more pleasurable.
With skills, you are better able to do all the things you have to do to survive (like earn ISK), so you have more time to devote toward mapping out instas, and exploring the galaxy. Skills will allow you the ability to protect yourself in those areas where other players can shoot at will. And once one knows of the areas, and map them out, then the time you used to spend travelling from gate to gate will become moot, freeing up your time to do other, more pleasurable things.
But make no mistake. There is no room for "player ability" here making much of a difference. Time makes you more "able" as a player, simply for no other reason than it makes those miserable things we do get done more quickly, and opens up more time to do important and honorable things like PvP, leading, being an important part of a corporation, and so on.
Time is valuable in EVE not only because it nets you higher skills. Time is valuable in EVE because there are certain things players must accomplish in their career, so they don't have to "reinvent the wheel" each time they play.
It is for those reasons why this game can be likened to a pyramid scheme, and why this game values months subscribed over all other virtues a player brings to the game. The thing that is rewarded more than anything you do in the game, is simply the number of months you subscribe. You can be the worst player in the world, and yet still have more enjoyable playtime than the best player who is one month earlier than you. But its not because of the skills. Its because the skills allow you to spend less time doing miserable and wasteful things, and more time doing interesting, productive, famous, and community-oriented things.
Aristotle once said that the poor desire wealth, and the rich desire honor. The reason the rich desire honor is because it was considered something that couldn't be bought or sold with money, or production, or consumption.
The interesting, or scary thing about EVE is that it allows you to, in a sense, "buy" honor. You buy it by buying months, and in exchange for these months, they slant the game in all ways to make the player appear more honorable, important--or in the case of pirates and griefers--powerful, wrathful, and feared. I would argue that in fact it is so carefully engineered to make it seem like the player is being rewarded for his or her virtues, that it actually starts to convince those who pay more that have earned the right through their own ambition to be superior over others.
But I maintain that it was never the actions that made the superior players the movers and shakers of Tranquility. It was the fees that made the superior players superior. The skill training is just one of the more blatant mannifestations of this condition, but its not the only one. T2, the upcomming T3, no server to retreat to when an "old time alliance" wants you out of the game, all of these things have been engineered by CCP to reward the faithful, at the expense of any sort of balance, parity, or playability.
Time in EVE is not important because it gives you skills. Rather, skills are important to CCP, because it motivates players to put in more time, and more dollars, into making their second month's time more fun than the first month.
With all of this being the case, its no wonder why so many long time players go out of their way to defend this game. When new players and outsiders question the legitimacy of the game, they question the legitimacy of the players; especially the "best" players. It is as if they are insulting our manhood, or honor.
I'd be sickened by it too, but in a certain sense, its rather comforting to know that there are some players who are worse off than me, poorer than me, less popular than me, and always will be. Its rather seductive to know that I'll be able to have more fun next month than this month. That I'll be more free to do the things I want to do next month, and be successful. There is something to this system in EVE. If you pay enough, and jump through the same miserable hoops that those who came before had to jump through, you won't have to jump through them again.
Because you know, that first month was the most horrible, dehumanizing month I had ever had in an MMO.
The next month, it got better.
This month was the best month I had so far.
And next month will be even better, so I'd better send them my check.
__________________________
"Its sad when people use religion to feel superior, its even worse to see people using a video game to do it."
--Arcken
"...when it comes to pimping EVE I have little restraints."
--Hellmar, CEO of CCP.
"It's like they took a gun, put it to their nugget sack and pulled the trigger over and over again, each time telling us how great it was that they were shooting themselves in the balls."
--Exar_Kun on SWG's NGE