The "Nothing I do affects me" Fallacy

Lallante

A lot of people (/children) who play the evetrial and then quit, do so because they cant handle the time-based skill progression.

They often make the claim "nothing I actually do makes a difference to how good I am".

This is essentially bullshit.

While skillpoints are aquired over time, they CANNOT be considered analogous to "experience" in other games. A charchter with 2x the experience will NOT be 2x as good as another, in fact its very possible they will be worse.

The things that affect how "good" you are at a specific task, in order of importance are;

1. Your actual, Real life talent at the task.
- If you are very good at organising your mining BMs and cans, fitting ships, managing NPCs, etc you will be far more productive at mining. In PvP and PvE this comes down to tactics (range picking and maintainance, tracking issues, tackling, laying traps, cloaking etc. Both of these are more important than anything else with regards to how well you do.

2. ISK - Ingame currency, which determines;
2a. Your choice of ships
- Every ship has a weakness. Every ship has specialities. Learning and exploiting these is incredible important.
2b. Your ability to fit ships well.
- A well fitted ship in the hands of a pilot with moderate skillpoints will annihilate a poorly fitted ship flown by the longest playing Veteran

3. Your skillpoints.
- Once you have the minimum sps to use the modules and fly the ships, the extra 5% per level is useful but will rarely counteract the first 3 advantages. A skilled frigate pilot with 3mill skillpoints, properly fitted (its actually not hard) can take down or at least pin any 30mill skillpoint BS pilot.

Furthermore, the emphasis on specialisation means that a 5m skillpoint player can actually have BETTER skills than a 30m player, because he specialised more thoroughly.

Finally, Implants play a huge role. A new, well specced charachter who does very well at the game and quickly buys a set of +5 implants will gain skillpoints up to twice as fast as a poorly specced veteran with no implants, and therefore can catch up and overtake them.

Do not be fooled. Time-based progression does not mean you can never compete. Once you have all the basic skills (1 - 2 months in) its more or less a level playing field.