f13.net

Learnign skills nuked from orbit (http://www.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=824).

Good news for pretty much everyone who hasn't just dropped 20m isk to inject a full set of learning skill books. You'll get a refund of the SPs you currently have in all Learning skills, you'll get reimbursed for any books you haven't injected yet and you'll have a permanent bonus of +12 to each stat.

A good move. My alt is currently hard at work on her learning skills while the 100% bonus is there. Though that will quickly become tricky for new players given the books are no longer available.

BUT...BUT... THE X MONTHS OF LEARNING LEANING SKILLS WHILE DOING ANYTHING IS REALLY NECESSARY TO BRING OUT THE TRUE SKILLED PLAYERS AS OPPOSED TO THE CLUELESS NOOOBS!

Bizarrely enough that exact argument has emerged with different flavours of outrage and poor spelling on the Eve-O thread discussing this.

They are "Monitoring feedback for any serious concerns" on this? Only an image macro I got from politics is appropriate.

(http://dl.dropbox.com/u/146741/PARTY%20TIME.gif)

This should have done oh, 3 years ago.

The only thing that worries me is that one of my characters is an old school, never remapped character, with only 3 points in charisma. I wonder if they are going to fuck up his point distributions.

I was certain it would. I guess I know the eve playerbase too well.

Damn, a little over 2mil skill points to redistribute as I want on 5-6 characters....best Christmas present ever.

That almost makes me want to resub my character, almost.  :oh_i_see:



I love the learning skills from a "well, it seemed like a good idea at the time!" failure perspective. Where they actually ended up doing the exact opposite of their intended goal.

No, he will just get +12 to each of his stats so his Charisma will now be 15 instead of 3 but you won't lose any of the points in other stats.

Well, if a player is scared off by learning skills they certainly don't have the stomach for the thrill that is The Gatecamps, The POS-bashes, The Docking-Games, The Crash-A-Node Lagfests that is Eve PVP.

That's not to say Eve-elitist don't like fun. That's why one plays World of Tanks Beta during downtime.

Cala

Minor correction  :why_so_serious:

Oh joy, CCP just send me another "5 days free!!!!" email telling me all about this in their "PLEASE COME BAAAACK!" messege.  :uhrr:

In all seriousness if they want to ac tually retain people ditching all the frigging useless time sink skills is the way to go. Advanced spaceship command fucking 5 for example, the most useless skill on the planet, its only function is add another 3 months to the time it takes to fly capital ships in a vain attempt to reduce the people flying them. Another on my list would be engineering and electronics. Those are effectively time sink skills. Yeah they give more fitting ability really its the same amount of power every ship should have anyway, it just adds another 2 weeks to the training to no real benefit. Its stuff you have to have before you actually start specializing in the direction you want to go.

What does this translate to, 22 per stat?

17 per stat is the new minimum.

Damn, my alt has max learning skills and my main has Max -1

I cant remember now, but I think my main is max -1... Can't remember now, and don't feel like dling for the 5 free days to check it out.

I have all the Learning skills to 4 and my guesstimate is a little over 900,000 SP to redistribute.   My sub ran out on the 23rd so I'm waiting for the "re-sub deal" email to come.

I'm a trifle annoyed they aren't reimbursing used skills books, for a new character those are a substantial sum of money. 

Reimbursing injected books adds a huge additional layer of complication to the process which is already tight for QA deadlines. Also the reimbursement would add a huge amount of cash into the Eve economy which their numbers guy told them was a bad thing. For very, very new guys who have paid for their own advanced learning books it's bad. For those who were given them or for anyone who's been playing more than a month it's not such a big deal.

Well, then give a bonus amount in SP then.  Because right now they took something of value from some of the players, then gave it away free to all of the players.  This "solution" lacks basic fairness.

Fairness? In my Eve?  :oh_i_see:

2 weeks after the solution no-one will care about fairness.

This is a smidge over 20 million in total.

Run a sanctum.

Yes, for an established player with a net worth North of 1 Billion, 20 million is an almost insignificant amount.  But for a starting player they might have spent the better part of a month earning that money.  All I'm asking for is they be compensated in some way.  They could give refunds based on net worth, got 100 mil or less you get a refund, if not, sorry charlie.

Besides I'm not buying the argument the economy of Eve would be greatly affected by giving back 20 mil to a good chunk of the players.  Once the SP get redistributed there will be a run on ships as players suddenly qualify for new ship types.  Ship prices for the good stuff will spike for a while, all the extra money will be sucked up like a sponge.

The argument is you've already gotten use out of them.

On the positive side the 6 advanced memory books I bought immediately after the news are selling for 3x value now. Probably should have bought more but didn't really think people would be that keen and the window was so small.

CCP quite likes things being expensive (see implants), it just encourages you to buy PLEX.

Ah, thanks for bringing that up.  The REAL reason they didn't want extra money in the economy.  I should have figured that out on my own.

If you post your eve name I will send you 25mil isk when I get home from work if it gets you to quit crying about it in this thread.

:-)

From your posting I'd be guessing you haven't done the newbie thing in several years. The changes they have made have put way more money in the hands of new players. The newbie arc missions pay out huge amounts of isk compared to a normal L1 mission and can be done in mostly up to a frigate, with minimal skills. I ran a new char up on a second account last year without having my main subscribed and didn't need to skrimp or save at all when I hit the advanced learning skills.

That's not my experience. Without handouts you'll need to grind or be gifted money for the full set of advanced learning skill books plus the books you need to get better mission boats (and the ships themselves) and the low level missions aren't terribly rewarding. And I did the tutorial 4 times over.

I ended up PLEX'ing for implants, the rest of the books and my first battlecruiser and would probably do so again if I was starting fresh.

So ask a corpmate to run a sanctum.

Problem solved. I am a problem solver you see.

Were you in our corporation when that happened, Kageru?  Because if you were, you really should have said something and we would have given you the skillbook isk.

Brolan you realize you're getting a bunch of extra skill points for free out of this deal, right? That is unless your noob self has managed to sink over 5m SP into learning already. Consider the skillbook cost a fair trade for the extra 5-20 SP you'll likely be getting. Quit bitching about a good thing.

I started playing while Goonwaffe was in a recruitment freeze.

I'm guessing you mean the Swarm here. AFAIK  Waffle doesn't do freezes.

I would do Phreeze though.

Getting rid of Learning skills makes Eve, mainly the newbie experience a lot more fun. This trumps any argument existing players can come up with. "oh dear we have to edit our wiki".

Indeed, it sucks helping out someone new to EVE and telling them, "Ok, for your first month or so you either aim to have fun now and be behind later, or to do a boring grind from day one and be better later."  Did anything hint at when the learning changes will go live?

14th December as long as all the QA hurdles are cleared.

Just a heads up in case some of you haven't worked this out yet: you probably should be training a learning skill right now.

This is because you can learn at a very fast rate if you're optimised for the learning skill and then re-assign those points into something you would learn slowly.

For example one of my characters is mapped for PER/WIL. I've got him learning Clarity 5, a PER/WIL skill. He probably won't actually finish learning the skill, I'm just doing it to rack up points to re-assign. When the learning skill is removed I'll dump these points in something he won't learn optimally. As he's PER/WIL and will go INT/MEM next remap some CHA based skills would be a good place to spend my points. So I'm getting 2475 skill points per hour learning Clarity which I will spend on Social skills. If I learned the Social skills now I'd get 1650 skill points per hour.

There are a few int/mem skills but only one per/wil, Clarity.  Would take about 10 days to get it to 5, and I'd gain some 500k points from it. 

It's a matter of delaying your current skill by 10 days (it's hard if it's a prerequisite for flying a new ship class) in order to get bonus points for some Charisma skill (eh, screw Leadership / fleet bonuses, you guys don't need those as badly as I need my new ship).

I'm using MEM/INT for using up my alts noobie training bonus. The learning skills are MEM/INT, give more MEM/INT and getting the advanced upto 5 will absorb the bonus.

Someone should get a "where did I spend my learning points" thread going like our extended downtime training threads. :oh_i_see: (I'm posting from my phone browser at work or id do it)

Oh man, today's patch is awesome.  The Echelon sucks, but the SP refund/boost and free respec are awesome.

And........suddenly I'm a level  V logistic pilot  :grin:

2.2mil dumped into Fleet Command and still not V.  :ye_gods:

It didn't go nearly as far as I'd hoped... but I guess being able to actually fly a covert ops and assault frigate is nice. Still insane numbers of support skills needed for them to be practical though.

I cannot see the point of the Echelon, this ship has no tank, how is that going to be useful? 

Regarding the skill points, I can now use artillery, T2 large in about 10 days which is really good

Kira got full T2 A-HAC skills plus Acceleration Control V - I almost swapped AC V for Gallente Cruiser V but realised how pointless that would be (she has the other 3 races' cruisers at V).

My pure Minnie PvE pilot got AWU V and Drone Interfacing V - mostly because I'd put them off for so long that I felt bad about not doing them now while I had a chance.

The  Caldari PvE pilot got Medium  and Large energy Turrets V plus an early finish on Cruise missiles V.

Kira's SB alt Elena got Evasive maneuvering V - but she had stuff all learning skills trained.

Apart from that the 2 miners got more ancillery skills and my JF/Orca pilot scored Frigate V and Cruiser V to tidy up her skills.

One thing I wish CCP would let us do is remove/refund skills ourselves - I have things I wish I'd never trained and would love to move the points elsewhere.

The point of the ship is that empire players like getting free shit with a new model even if it has no point, and it can't be useful if they go around undercutting the hugely complex industrial systems in eve by giving out free shit.

They can always do the noctis thing and relaunch it on a real ship in a few months.

If you get bored ships like that are good suicide gank targets, they pop easily and people tend to get really worked up over losing them.

*flex*

Ass frigs 5. Cause when you have like 25 mil in spaceship command, why not?

And I don't even know what I would put them into!

FC V and Armour Warfare Spec V - Saved about 85 days of training.

Spec Mezz into perfect Corporation Management, because why not?

Most of the skills for T2 mael on tgr (except I failed and put BS5 above large artillery spec :downs:), and zim further towards capswarm.

I've still only spent the skills on Teratoma Smith, to move him from Minmatar fast ships (like 18m in Spaceship Command) and gunnery-focussed to near-perfect Scorpion pilot.  I simply cannot decide on the rest.  I'm tempted to spend my supercarrier pilot on towards titans rather than fighter-bomber V, but I've had fuck all chance to use it yet so even that seems dubious.

They are doing yet another free 5 fay reactivation offer for unsubscribed accounts because of this. My stupid character names finally paid off from it too!


:oh_i_see:

Christ, I apparently have 2,004,503 points to spend if I sign back up.


What could that get me!  :awesome_for_real:

Best theoretical use would be Leadership skills, as those are Charisma-based and nobody re-specs to Charisma or bothers with implants.  But, shrug, I'm currently keeping my 900k points, until they iron out all the little bugs regarding SPs (with the API not showing them for example).

Fleet fit Scimitar pilot here  :woot:

Ok so I'm using the 5 free days to check stuff out and see if I feel like coming back to EVE.

I log in and I'm docked at C6Y.  :grin:

Ok, no big deal I'll just sell my shit and load a few things into my covops and see if I can sneak out.  Whoops! I'm an idiot and clicked undock.  :uhrr:

So I'm stuck playing cat and mouse in a ratting Myrmidon (hooray! I still have safe spots!)  and actually manage to get to a neutral Blood Raider station.  So if I wanted to get rid of the rest my crap, can I just go pod myself and I'll pop back at C6Y? Or is it just a lost cause?

Edit: I think I know the answer already. Looks like my clone got kicked to empire.  *sigh* so long, loots.

Yeah, dumped into Leadership stuff.  Armored combat 5/spec 4 and siege combat 5/spec 4.  There are enough people with better leadership stats out there to make it unlikely that I'll be needed for boosting in a major fleet, but for smaller gangs it could come in handy.  And it seemed wasteful to be heading for capitals without being able to fit gang boosters, given that equipping them is one of the features of capital stuff.

Thinking about it, I'd probably boost the skill that lets you install the modules that let you fit more gang boos modules. The potential of using carriers as de facto command ships has not been really explored.

After that, who knows.

On my PvP character I put everything into the one category I've been ignoring for a long while - Navigation. Yesterday our fleet was hotdropped by titans and other supercapitals while moving between jump bridges and the only thing left to do was to burn into the control tower shields as titans were getting ready to one-shot us. Overheated my MWD and flew inside the POS shields in armor.

Token Armageddon lives yet again.

If I played, my maxed out navigation skills would be nice. It's something that helps all your ships, so its good.

You can contract your stuff from anywhere in Eve to sell the valuable stuff.

As you found out, the clone contracts for everyone were yanked when the station was taken. This means that if you have a JC there you can still jump to it but your medical clone contract will have been relocated to a NPC station.

If you want to sell the stuff, train the Marketing skill (level 1 will do if you don't mind having to be in the same system, level 3 will let you do it from pretty much anywhere in Delve) and fly back there in a covops. Cloak up at a safespot in any system in range and sell the stuff remotely.

Last time I went through Delve it was pretty deserted so you shouldn't have any issues getting a fast cloaky ship across there.

The problem you will have isn't so much listing your crap on the market, the problem will be that IT don't seem to use the Delve market (or play EVE) so you won't have many buyers.

They will buy high grade stuff like fighters and whatnot but otherwise its junk

I know some people in IT if you're willing to sell it cheaply.

The way things are going just hold on for a few months and see if the new management is more amenable.

Much as it would be really cool, I don't see kenny being kicked out of delve. They are struggling to project power and defend pets on multiple fronts. But defending your home region is a whole other thing.

Delve is empty because IT have the a skill point obsession, and vets don't rat . IT are still logging on for CTAs, but they can't be everywhere at once. They are going to have choose which pets to keep - which will weaken them but not fatally, for now that's probably all.

Besides, Delve is strategically irrelevant. The other regions next to empire have huge swathes of space they are a gateway to. Delve basically nestles next to an out of the way part of empire 15 to 20 jumps from anywhere and that's it. Its rich in moons when you include Aradia which has 10 times the high end moons of any other area of space, but its now horrifically expensive to hold. Personally I'd drive IT to the edge of Fountain and then laugh at Mollie, give him the finger and wander off. That's the best way to hurt him, though his pride, showing that he is totally irrelevant and not worth the effort of destroying anymore.

Thanks for the replies.  I have a JC still nearby that might be in range.  I'm always poor so what's there might be significant dough to me is probably a drop in the bucket for others.  The upside to that is it's not that hard to make the money back.  I'm just going to leave it there for now and see if anything changes.

Yeah Delve was pretty desolate and sneaking out wasn't too hard.  Then I promptly lost my Myrm in a L2 mission because I'm stupid.  Never a big loss since all I do is cram my hulls full of rat droppings.

I heard you can soon contract damage modules c/d?

I remember when I snuck a clone out of Delve. I undocked in a newb ship and there was an IT destroyer outside. The destroyer warped off in a panic!  :grin:

I rolled my machariel out last night, half the ships in system ran off before I cleared the gate. No one even targeted me.