Monday 29 November 2010

The Learning Skill Rant


I was gonna make a rant on the impending disappearance of learning skills from Eve, but then I realised I don't care enough to turn it into an actual rant.

Having said that, I do feel a little cheated with this move. Yes, I know skillpoints get reimbursed and all that, but my main gripe is that I chose to invest time into these skills at a point in my character's life when you're eager to get a gazillion other things done, so you can board more awesome ships, etc. I made a choice to invest time then into something that would only save time in the long run. The fact these skills are going to disappear makes me feel robbed of that time.

Maybe I'm just too set in my ways. Or maybe I'm just bummed that Kay is at a point where I don't quite know what to train next so I'm just passing time by training the longest lvl5 skills I can find on my skill list, and these skill points that I get to reinvest are sort of useless to me, right now.

The points will come in handy, at any rate, for my alt who is scrambling to get into stealthbombers.

Still.. in a way, learning skills were a reflection of a certain playstyle which represents Eve, in my mind. They implied this game was not about instant gratification, so much as it was about patience, planning, and being in this for the long haul.

No biggie, I suppose. It certainly doesn't hurt any of my characters - possibly quite the contrary. Go figure players, for still whining ;)

2 comments:

  1. That argument doesn't work.

    You made a choice to invest something that would save you time the moment you finished training it. Sure, the time for you to have a net result that brings you out ahead is way in the future, but the faster training comes almost instantly.

    Now, once you've got the skill points back, it actually means that every second of faster training you had for that skill was faster training above and beyond your cost, because your cost for learning the skill in the first place has just been negated.

    You trained faster than the guy who didn't invest as much as you, and you now don't have a skill point deficit to makeup before you come out ahead.

    I agree with you that it does diminish the playstyle that celebrates long term planning in favour of one that celebrates instant gratification however...

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  2. I see what you mean, and I realise my initial investment started paying off early on, but the fact is that the training speed bonus we get from the added attribute points versus the time it takes to train the corresponding learning skill as opposed to just training any other regular skill, only finishes paying off in the long run.

    By which I mean I could spend about 24h training for an attribute point which would only cut away 2h of training time on one of my other skills. This only pays off in the long run, once we have trained so much stuff that all those seconds and minutes we shaved from base training times come to adds up to the time it took to train the learning skills.

    But what I meant was that this time I invested way back when was far more precious to me at that time than it is now. It's like I invested something when it was valued very highly and CCP is giving that back to me when it has devalued sharply, in a way :)

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