The Ancient Gaming Noob

One Hundred and Twenty Million Skill Points April 7, 2014

Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, EVE Online.
Tags: Meaningless Milestones, Skill Points
2 comments

Months pass, seasons change, and suddenly I am at another round number with my main character in EVE Online.  You can see the timeline of round numbers so far:

• Ten million – November 2007
• Twenty million – June 2008
• Thirty million – January 2009
• Forty million – August 2009
• Fifty million – March 2010
• Sixty million – November 2010
• Seventy million – August 2011
• Eighty million – June 2012
• Ninety million – December 2012
• One Hundred and Ten million – September 2013

At this point, coming up on 8 years of playing EVE Online… with a few breaks… and hitting a big number like 120 million, you might well feel like asking, “Are you through yet?”

Heh.  Ha ha ha!  HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

Oh my, no.  As far as I can tell, nobody has trained everything yet and there are people who at least claim to have been subscribed and training continuously since day one back in 2003.  By way of illustration, I am going to borrow a chart from Jester and his post about alts in EVE Online.

Those divisions are rough cuts, not exact counts.  You will note, for example, that I have 9 million SP in drones, 1.5 million more than the 7.5 million on the chart.  I have yet to train fighters or fighter bombers, which would count towards capital ships, and I still have a large amount I could train, at least for specializations.

But as a quick view of where skill points can be trained, and how many there are, the chart is a sufficient illustration.  It shows 270 million skill points possible, so I am not even half way towards being done.

Not that I would ever want to be done.  In capital ships especially, there are a lot of skills I wouldn’t bother with.  Why would I, as an example, ever train all four racial titan skills up to V?

Well, to be a completionist yet… but otherwise that seems like a silly (and expensive) venture.

Instead, as Jester put forth in another post, people tend to train into roles.  And that drives people to have second accounts, because if you want to perform two roles… especially early on… it is much easier and much quicker to divide your efforts and specialize.  I started off my second character that way, pushing him into industrial roles while my main trained subcap combat skills.

However, over time, they two characters have grown more similar.  When I got my alt out again about a year ago, I put him on the path to duplicate the combat skills of my main so that I could have two characters capable of flying fleet doctrine ships.  This was motivated by the fact that we now have staging points in four corners of the galaxy and I had been caught a couple of times with a fleet going up where I was not while my jump clone was still on cool down.  So now I have two characters that are becoming more and more focused on combat sub caps.

Anyway, 120 million skill points buys me a big chunk of that chart, but not all of it by any means.

Here is where my skills stand.  The numbers in parentheses represent the number of skills in that category, while the asterisk indicates if the point total for a category changed since the last round up post.

Spaceship Cmd   34,410,952 (41 of 67)*
Gunnery         12,753,934 (30 of 39)
Missiles        10,278,191 (20 of 24)
Navigation       9,323,289 (12 of 13)*
Drones           9,053,104 (16 of 20)
Armor            6,345,000 (14 of 14)*
Engineering      5,747,620 (11 of 14)*
Shields          5,643,314 (11 of 12)*
Resc Processing  4,569,908 (22 of 28)*
Science          4,408,426 (21 of 39)
Trade            3,271,765 (9 of 13)
Electronic Sys   2,458,519 (6 of 15)
Leadership       2,447,530 (9 of 14)
Subsystems       1,320,000 (10 of 20)
Scanning         1,301,230 (7 of 7)
Targeting        1,223,765 (4 of 8)*
Production       1,157,986 (5 of 12)
Neural Enhance.  1,162,510 (5 of 8)*
Corp Mgmt        1,108,784 (4 of 7)
Social             943,765 (5 of 9)
Planet Mgmt        769,335 (5 of 5)
Rigging            326,509 (6 of 10)*

Total         ~120,000,000 (260 of 398)

The category seeing the biggest change is probably armor.  This is because our fleet doctrines have moved from shield tanked ships… Caldari and Minmatar… to armor tanks ships… some Amarr, but mostly Gallente.  I realized that while I had the minimum skills for such ships, I had a long way to go towards being proficient, so a lot of training time has been spent filling in that gap.  Last time around I had rounded out gunnery.  Not sure where the big point increase will come next time.

The other boosts have largely been around capital ships.  I have a carrier that I needed some more skills for and I am now capable of flying a Naglfar dreadnought, though I haven’t actually purchased one yet.  I have a few more skills to train up in order to be able to join in cap fleet operations… plus I haven’t actually had my carrier out of the hangar since I bought it, so I am not inclined to invest heavily in another hangar queen.

Of course, since I have been barely logging into EVE over the last month or two… or maybe three… I might need that carrier to haul my crap out of null sec when the corp decides to kick me for being a slacker.  I think my last fleet op was B-R5RB, though I did come out for corp day to mine ice.  Life in space.

Actual skills I have injected stands at 283 now, up from 260 previously.  Those break out as follows:

Level 1  - 9 
Level 2  - 14 
Level 3  - 53 
Level 4  - 69 
Level 5  - 138

The new skill are primarily capital ship or armor tanking related.  The 9 additional level 5 skills are all in armor tanking.  Those cover so many ships that they seemed like a good investment for the long term.

As for my long running measure, how far away am I from flying titan, that has not changed.  I noted last time that there were only four skills left to train:

• Factional Titan Skill I (I could choose any one): 1 hour, 36 minutes
• Jump Portal Generation I: 1 hour, 38 minutes
• Astrometrics V: 12 days, 8 hours, 49 minutes
• Capital Ships V:  49 days, 8 hours, 54 minutes

At this time there is not much to be gained by investing in any of those.

So that is where I stand.  The only other big change is that I had to upgrade to a higher level clone, so now it will cost me even more every time I get podded.  On the bright side, CCP cut the price of clones a while back, so the latest upgrade puts me back to about the same price range I was in before the cut.  It doesn’t make me happy… 30 million ISK on top of every death is annoying… but it is what it is.

 

One Hundred and Ten Million Skill Points September 17, 2013

Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, EVE Online.
Tags: Meaningless Milestones, Skill Points
4 comments

The beat goes on, as does my obsession with nice round numbers.

It is time again to talk about where I stand with skill points in EVE Online.  Another milestone, another post tracking my skill point progression in New Eden.

The story so far:

• Ten million – November 2, 2007
• Twenty million – June 18, 2008
• Thirty million – January 13, 2009
• Forty million – August 5, 2009
• Fifty million – March 22, 2010
• Sixty million – November 11, 2010
• Seventy million – August 4, 2011
• Eighty million – June 12, 2012
• Ninety million – December 10, 2012

You will note that there is no entry for one hundred million skill points.  I was sitting at just about 99 million skill points when the Odyssey expansion dropped.  One of the big changes in that was breaking out battlecruisers and destroyers into  racial skills.  So before Odyssey there were just the skills Destroyers and Battlecruisers, afterwards there were those two skills for each of the major factions, Amarr, Minmatar, Caldari, and Gallente.

In order to preserve the concept that no update will keep you from flying what you could already fly, players were given credit in each of the eight new skills relative to how many points they had in the two old skills and prerequisites.  Since I had both skills trained up to V, I got the maximum skill point boost, which sent me from ~99 million to ~105 million skill points in a single patch.

So, technically, I have never had exactly 100 million skill points.  And that is how CCP saved you from at least one of these posts.

And, just to mess up my ability to track my progress even further, Odyssey 1.1 just dropped the other day, and it included a re-organization of skill point categories, along with some renaming of skills.  The categories are probably more understandable.  They just don’t nicely map to what has come before.  So we have something of a reboot of the category chart this time around.  Here are are the skill points laid out by category:

Spaceship Cmd   33,008,465 (37 of 67)
Gunnery         12,075,111 (30 of 39)
Missiles        10,278,191 (20 of 24)
Drones           9,053,104 (16 of 20)
Navigation       7,566,399 (11 of 13)
Shields          5,632,000 (10 of 12)
Engineering      4,834,275 (10 of 14)
Science          4,408,426 (21 of 39)
Resc Processing  4,291,323 (21 of 28)
Trade            3,271,765 (9 of 13)
Electronic Sys   2,458,519 (6 of 15)
Leadership       2,447,530 (9 of 14)
Armor            1,871,530 (10 of 14)
Subsystems       1,320,000 (10 of 20)
Scanning         1,301,230 (7 of 7)
Targeting        1,159,765 (4 of 8)
Production       1,157,986 (5 of 12)
Neural Enhance.  1,154,510 (4 of 8)
Corp Mgmt        1,108,784 (4 of 7)
Social             943,765 (5 of 9)
Planet Mgmt        769,335 (5 of 5)
Rigging            188,494 (6 of 10)

Total         ~110,000,000 (260 of 398)

This time around I appended the number of skills in that category I have trained versus how many there are in the category total.  That gives a sense of how many total skill points there are available in a category.  A category that only has five skills, like Planetary Management, is never going to be high on the list because there just aren’t that many skill points to train in it.  I have trained almost half (48.87%) of the current skills in EVE Online.

EVEMon also shows the percentage of skill points for a given category I have actually trained.  Those numbers are surprisingly small.  This is because, for any given skill, the level 5 version of the skill requires 5-8 times as many skill points as levels 1 through 4 combined. (Multiplier pulled out of my ass based on glancing quickly at some level 4 vs 5 training times.  Feel free to correct me.)  So you go to level 5 skills only when you need to or when you think a skill is important enough to your operations to refine it that extra bit.  Generally, the benefit from levels increase in a linear fashion, unlike the skill points required.

At the top there is, as always, Spaceship Command.  It has the most skills, it is the category that holds the keys to the basic ships across the board.  That gives you a sense of how many ships there are in EVE Online.  Yes, some of the skills like, say, Amarr Titan, unlock exactly one ship.  But the frigate skill for any of the factions unlocks, as you can see in that chart embedded above, unlocks a good six different ships and sends you on the path to more.

There there are the “shoot things” skill.  I have spent a lot of time training gunnery of late.  I had a lot invested in missiles and drones already.  Then it goes into flying ships (navigation) defenses (shields) and the ability to operate modules (engineering).

After that we start to drop into the “Wilhelm is all over the board” skill points.  Resource Processing is a mining thing, and I haven’t mined in ages.  Subsystems is for strategic cruisers.  I can fly a Tengu or a Loki.  I just never do.

I also threw in some time to train Planetary Management at one point with an eye to getting some semi-passive income going.  I trained all the skills up to 4 and then haven’t done anything with it.  My usual method of operation.  I have a lot of skills trained up that I have never used.

Meanwhile, if I am going to continue to fly in armor tanked fleets, I need to invest some time in the Armor category.  I have a lot of points in shields, but not so many in armor at this point.

As noted above, I have trained 260 skills in total.  That is up 37 skills since the 90 million skill point check-in.  Of course, I got six new level 5 trained skills for free as part of Odyssey.  My 260 skills map out as follows:

Level 1  -   4
Level 2  -  15
Level 3  -  51
Level 4  -  61
Level 5  - 129

Nearly half of my skills are trained up to level 5.  That is 17 more level 5 skills than there were at the 90 million skill point mark.  I suppose that shows commitment or some other mental defect.  Level 4 skills are up 10, level 3 skills up 7, level 2 skills remained the same, and somewhere I picked up 3 more level 1 skills.  Checking EVEMon, those three skills were all gunnery specialization skills so I could mount tech II guns of various types.  I guess I didn’t think they were worth training beyond that at the time.

Finally, there is the metric I have used for every one of these updates.  How much training time until I can fly a titan?

The total currently stands at just shy of 62 days, which is a 4 day drop over the last update.

That does not seem like much, given that I have been investing in capital ship related skills.  I will have finished jump drive calibration V by this coming weekend… unless I change to something else.

Basically, only four skills stand between me and flying a completely unfit titan at this point.  They are:

• Factional Titan Skill I (I could choose any one): 1 hour, 36 minutes
• Jump Portal Generation I: 1 hour, 38 minutes
• Astrometrics V: 12 days, 8 hours, 49 minutes
• Capital Ships V:  49 days, 8 hours, 54 minutes

Which gets us to 61.87 days.  And that is with my high sec clone with the +4 implants.

I probably won’t get much closer than that, unless feel the need to get capital ships V trained at some point.  While flying a titan makes a nice theoretical goal, my character Wilhelm is a generalist, with skill points spread all over hell and back.  Turning him into a super capital ship pilot would be a waste, as once you are in a super you are pretty much stuck there.  You cannot dock up and swap ships.

If I was going to create a titan pilot,  would start a fresh character from scratch and train him up with only the skills he needed for the job.  Plans for another time.

So that is where I stand on the skill point front.  As long as I keep that training queue filled, the total just keeps growing.

Ninety Million Skill Points December 10, 2012

Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, EVE Online.
Tags: Meaningless Milestones, Skill Points
4 comments

I think I am now officially “invested” in the game.

There was a time when ninety million skill points would have seemed very impressive.  Now that I have meandered to that level of training, I have to think the bar for anything worth mentioning has to be well past 100 million.

But I will mention it anyway.  As I do at every interval of ten million skill points, I look at where I have been training.  The start date for all of my training was August 29, 2006.  Past reviews can be found here:

• Ten million – November 2, 2007
• Twenty million – June 18, 2008
• Thirty million – January 13, 2009
• Forty million – August 5, 2009
• Fifty million – March 22, 2010
• Sixty million – November 11, 2010
• Seventy million – August 4, 2011
• Eighty million – June 12, 2012

At ninety million, here are how my skill points are distributed.

Spaceship Command: 23,227,296*
 Gunnery:          12,890,926*
 Missiles:          9,628,426*
 Engineering:       7,514,510*
 Science:           7,170,676
 Drones:            7,069,944*
 Electronics:       4,558,761*
 Industry:          3,912,704
 Navigation:        3,330,255*
 Trade:             3,271,765
 Leadership:        2,447,530*
 Mechanics:         1,555,747*
 Subsystems:        1,280,000*
 Corp Management:   1,108,784
 Social:              943,765*
 Total:           ~90,000,000

Asterisks represent the areas that have changed since the last checkpoint.  And it looks like I have been training things all over the place, as usual.

For those who are more visual, here is a pie chart of my skill distribution.

Last time around my training ended up with me having a new ship on my list, the Scimitar, complete with all the skills to be a healing space priest in fleet operations.  This time around, the big change is having all of my Tengu related skill at level 5… just in time for Tengu fleet to disappear as a doctrine… as well as the capability of flying the tech II Rokh fleet fit.

Getting up to spec for the Rokh meant gunnery skills.  Nearly 3 million of the last 10 million skill points went into gunnery.

All of this training ended up adding a net of four new skills, bringing my total to 223.  That isn’t a lot of new skills.  Three of them were gunnery related, and for no particular reason I trained up Jump Drive Operation, just in case I got the capital route some day I suppose.  It is the cheapest skill on that path.

My 223 skills are distributed like this:

 Level 1:  1 skill
 Level 2: 15 skills
 Level 3: 44 skills
 Level 4: 51 skills
 Level 5: 112 skills

14 more skills are now level 5 from last time, making half of my skills at maximum training.  Levels 4, 3, and 2 are down 5, 3, and 2 skills respectively.  A spent more time improving the skill I had rather than acquiring more.

Then there is the constant metric I have used since I started playing the EVE Mon skill point game: How many days until I can fly a titan?  I managed to shave about 3 days off the training time for a Leviathan, the Caldari titan, leaving me just 66 days and 10 hours away from being able to fly it.  Unfit, of course.  That would probably add another 90 days.

And finally, there is the question that is clearly as old as EVE Online itself:  What should I train next?

I am almost at the peak of points for shield and missile skills.  I am covered for the upcoming changes to destroyer and battle cruiser skills, which will divide those into racial rather than general skill.  So when they are split up, I ought to actually get a free skill point boost towards 100 million when there are Caldari, Gallente, Amarr, and Minmatar versions of destroyer and battle cruiser skill.  Gaff has been trying to get me to work towards a dreadnaught, though that takes some real money.  Even the skills are expensive.  I would have to work on earning some ISK to get there.  Or I could just tune up my armor tanking skills.  I have some skill points invested there… I have some skill points invested just about everywhere at this point… but fleet doctrine might change some day.

Large projectile turrets V is actually what is training for the next few days.  After that, what path should I take?

Eighty Million Skill Points June 12, 2012

Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, EVE Online.
Tags: Meaningless Milestones, Skill Points
7 comments

I was not sure I would get to this milestone.  The last such post, a little less than 10 months ago, I was saying that 70 million skill points might be the extent of my involvement in EVE Online.    That was the height of the Incarna debacle, the Jita protests, and the potential end of EVE as we knew it.

Since then, the game has come around.  CCP has refocused on flying in space by fixing, revising, or improving what was already there, along with some incremental ship introductions, in the Crucible and Inferno expansion.

And, probably more importantly to me, I have moved out to null sec space, which revitalized the game in my eyes.  In my first five years of contact with the game, I had dipped by toe in almost all of the non-piratical high sec options.  Now new options are available to me.

And so, here I am again, at another milestone.  As as I did at the 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, and 70 million skill point marks, I am going to summarize where I am and what I have trained in this last cycle.

First, my skill point distribution:

Spaceship Command: 22,095,390*
 Gunnery:          10,095,065*
 Science:           7,170,676*
 Engineering:       7,093,137*
 Drones:            7,069,104*
 Missiles:          6,838,701*
 Electronics:       4,556,076*
 Industry:          3,912,704*
 Trade:             3,271,765
 Leadership:        2,394,844*
 Navigation:        2,199,295*
 Mechanics:         1,443,982*
 Corp Management:   1,108,784
 Social:              917,422*
 Subsystems:          151,865
 Total:           ~80,000,000

Asterisks represent the areas that have changed since the last checkpoint.  And it looks like I have been training things in all areas.  The only exception is Social, which actually went down since last time.  They must have removed a skill, though I couldn’t tell you what they yanked.

Mostly training went into things to help me fly and equip new ships.  So Spaceship Command went up, as did Gunnery.  Early on I needed to be able to fly the Alpha Fleet fit Maelstrom and kept on that until I could use the tech II 1400mm guns.

I also trained up to fly a fleet fit Scimitar, which I have done exactly once.  It was blown up on its first fleet op and I haven’t replaced it yet.

I also just finished up the skill set for flying heavy interdictors (hictors).  And due to my getting Minmatar Cruiser V for the Scimitar, I can fly both the Broadsword and Onyx hictors since the skills are otherwise the same.

All of this training ended up adding a net of 10 new skills, bringing my total to 219.  They are distributed like this.

 Level 1:  1 skill
 Level 2: 17 skills
 Level 3: 47 skills
 Level 4: 56 skills
 Level 5: 98 skills

12 more skills are now level 5, while level 4 skills went up by 4, and level 3 skills went up by 19.  Level 2 skills dropped by 13 as I trained a bunch of stuff up.  No doubt some of that last was related to mining crystals.

So I have been not only been learning new skills, but getting them up to higher tiers.  A number of things have required level 5 skills, especially the logistics and hictor training plans.

Going back to my long time metric, flying a titan, I see that I am still just over 69 days away from the basic flying skill, almost all of which would be tied up in learning Capital Ships I through V.  Since I do not need that for any of my current plans… and frankly cannot afford to buy it just to train it for fun… a titan will probably remain that far away for the foreseeable future.  The funny thing is that, for the first time in the game, I am actually in a position where I could purchase and fly one, if I had the ISK.

And where will I head for the next 10 million skill points?  Well, there are a lot of skills to trained up to hone my options.  I am about max’d out on the Scimitar, but the hictor skills still have some room.  And I just noticed the other day that I still have a couple of skills that would affect heavy missiles that I could train up.

There is always another skill to train up in EVE.

Spaceship Command: 18,084,237*
 Gunnery:           8,358,825*
 Science:           6,808,636*
 Missiles:          6,620,426*
 Engineering:       6,583,849
 Drones:            6,455,156*
 Industry:          3,539,500*
 Electronics:       3,117,673*
 Trade:             3,271,765
 Leadership:        2,332,334*
 Navigation:        1,777,805
 Mechanic:          1,426,568
 Corp Management:   1,108,784
 Social:            1,015,932
 Subsystems:          151,765
 Total:           ~70,000,000

 Level 1:  1 skill
 Level 2: 30 skills
 Level 3: 28 skills
 Level 4: 52 skills
 Level 5: 86 skills

Spaceship Command: 9,806,622*
Engineering:       6,583,849*
Science:           6,331,167*
Gunnery:           6,300,315*
Missiles:          5,566,701
Learning:          4,805,843*
Drones:            4,753,666*
Trade:             3,271,765
Industry:          2,941,576
Leadership:        2,307,163*
Electronics:       1,853,203*
Navigation:        1,777,805*
Mechanic:          1,426,568*
Corp Management:   1,108,784*
Social:            1,015,932
Subsystems:          151,765

Total:           ~60,000,000

Level 1:  1 skill
Level 2: 31 skills
Level 3: 34 skills
Level 4: 62 skills
Level 5: 81 skills