EVE Online developer CCP Flatboy posted a blog about some changes happened in
EVE Online which make the game faster and less
stressful to newbie. Check the details blow:
This dev blog was brought to you by CCP Flatboy.
As Fear explained in his last dev blog, we reduced the starting
skillpoints for new characters to reduce the amount of decisions new
players need to make before starting to play the game. I know you have all been
waiting anxiously to see how we'll ensure that new characters are still useful
in their first weeks.
The TLDR version is this: They train skills
faster.
How much faster? We toyed around with all kinds of beautiful graphs for this
speed, based on SP or time, from the formula for the water saturation of a
sponge gourd (tanh * (4 /h) * SQRT(Dr/Dt)), as suggested by Hellmar, to an
elegant 3rd order exponential formula, to a beautiful logarithmic function.
"Simplicity is the final
achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is
simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art." - Frederic
Chopin
Turned out that all these elegant high-order formulas confused people. They
couldn't make heads or tails of what was happening to their skills. All they
knew was that their training speed was gradually dropping. So we simplified.
In Apocrypha, new characters train at double speed until they reach
1.6 Million SkillPoints. That is all.
These values were chosen so that an Apocrypha character catches up with a
current character in about 6 weeks after which they will be equal in power. The
estimation assumes the character has no implants or learning skills, both of
which can decrease this time. This does mean that Apocrypha characters will have
slightly fewer skillpoints for the first weeks but instead they are a lot more
customizable. In a week they are likely to be better in a narrow field than the
old ones due to their increased training speed. When they catch up they will be
superior in a single function.
The main point here is that this will increase a new player's understanding
of his skills. Today it's near impossible to remember all these skills one
starts with and how they work. But if you start with less and get most of the
skills while experimenting to find your own path, learning about your skills
becomes much more enjoyable and you become efficient and useful sooner than
otherwise possible.
More choice, more flexibility, more power!
Related Stories:
EVE Online: Apocrypha Features List Unveiled
EVE Online Retail Box Version To Hit The Shelves
The MMO Report: Thursday, January 29th
The MMO Report: Thursday, January 15th
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