A Postcard from the Imperial Academy Hangar January 10, 2014
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, EVE Online.Tags: Gevlon, Naglfar, Skill Points
2 comments
I haven’t done much in New Eden recently. I have spent a lot of time in a high sec station that sells skills.
Somewhere in Amarr space
Some of it has been that I haven’t had the time to get in on fleet operations that have been going on in Curse since our redeployment back down there. But more of it has been around the fact that I have a long list of things I want to do in World of Warcraft and it is frankly easier to log in and get busy on that list than it is to hang around hoping a fleet op will come up. Accessibility wins for the moment I guess. Plus my corp leader, El Supremo, has been slacking even more than I have. I see him playing Farming Simulator 2013 on Steam some nights.
Still, things move along all the same, so I have a couple of items to bring up.
Naglfar Capable
I am finally fully skilled up to fly the Naglfar in CFC capital fleets. Back when I started down that path, I put the timeline as ~20 days of training. Of course, I ran into a couple of additional skills I needed along the way, but it only added a couple more days.
Now I just have to purchase one. I have held off on that just in case there was another doctrine change and in hopes that Naglfar production will ramp up and there will be more choice at slightly lower prices.
Alts and Skill Points
Jester has been thinking on skill points and alts and the distribution of the skills we train and so on. Good stuff. Worth looking at just for the charts. There are two posts so far:
And there is a promise of more.
Anyway, it got me thinking of my own approach to alts in EVE Online. They always start out as an attempt to cover a segment of skills that my main does not have. But over time I seem to aim my alts back at my main in order to let them act as a backup pilot in the same roles my main fills. Meanwhile my main, now at 116 million skill points, tends to eventually pick up some portion of the role I was attempting to fill with the alt.
Right now I am only running a single alt, but his skill plan has been to try to catch up to all the subcap doctrine skills required for CFC fleet ops so I can be two places at once in space. I have cloned jumped with my main on a couple of occasions only to have a fleet called and 16 hours left on the clock until I can jump to the start point. So my alt is purely about operational flexibility at this point, allowing me to show up at one of our staging points able to fly.
Because Gevlon
The Greedy Goblin has found a new purpose in EVE Online. A purpose is an essential part of sticking with a sandbox-like game. This time Gevlon has decided to war on Goonswarm. He has a declared a forever war against Goonswarm in high sec. He also has a thread up about it in the official forums looking for allies.
Now the question is, how will this play out?
On the one hand, there is no shortage of hate for Goons. At no time since the Goons appeared in the game have they lacked for some alliance opposed to them. There is a whole EVE Online news site devoted to hating them. So a “shoot Goons” platform seems like one for which there might be a line trying to get in, especially since it will be in high sec.
On the other hand there is Gevlon. He is space famous. In fact, he is probably more famous in game than many alliance leaders or a couple of the members of the CSM.
Portrait of the Goblin as a Spaceman
And while Goons might be hated, Gevlon is not exactly the Dale Carnegie of New Eden. I admire his fortitude and his ability to set his own rules and proceed to win according to them. He clearly belongs in EVE Online and the game would be a poorer place without him. But if you haven’t been categorized as a moron or a slacker by his definition, you are a rare person indeed. So I am going to guess that there is a not insubstantial Goon-hating demographic that wouldn’t mind watching Gevlon attack as much for a chance to see him get stomped on as to see him pester the Goons.
We’ll see how this one plays out and whether Gevlon has a new purpose in a month or two.
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.
The new path with Odyssey
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 don’t even own a Loki
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.
Avatar and Ragnarok Titans
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.
Towards a Confederation of Dreadnoughts August 6, 2013
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, EVE Online.Tags: EVEMon, Moros, Naglfar, Skill Points, Training Plans
15 comments
It seems to be an unwritten rule of EVE Online that, once you have a training plan all nailed down and under way, something will come along to make you change it.
And then change it again.
I lucked out to a certain extent when I moved out to null sec space back in December 2011. I showed up just in time for the CFC to start up the Drake fleet doctrine, a ship I was already exceptionally well skilled to fly. I think I had all related skills to level IV or V at the outset and have since honed them up even more. I have many a post here about flying with Drake fleet.
Happy Days in Drake Fleet
That luck gave me time to train up for logistics, so I was able to fly a Scimitar with Drake fleet or Alpha fleet. I trained a little for Alpha fleet as well, but there was not much pressure because there was a tech 1 Megathron fit I could fly already. So I could idly train whatever I wanted.
I got myself set for Tengu fleet, just in case. I never actually flew the Tengu part, sticking to logistics there. When Tech fleet came out as an armor tanked doctrine, I trained up that part of logistics as well. I trained up Planetary Management, with the idea of setting up a bit of semi-passive income at some point. I haven’t quite gotten there yet.
And then came the war in Fountain and the subsequent doctrine changes. Drakes had been nerfed into oblivion by CCP, Tengu and Tech fleets were not holding up, so new plans were made. Sure, I had Caracals covered when they were thrown in as a cheap stop-gap, and it doesn’t take much to fly a Celestis. But when Batltec fleet was announced, and the mighty Megathron was the order of the day, I was a few skills shy. I could fly logistics, but not the Megathron fit. And while that was all of a day’s training, I was still at the very low end for armor tanking skills. How I missed Drakes.
I have a lot of Megathron screen shots now
And then we added AHACs with lasers and Harpy fleet and I was clearly behind the times.
So about three weeks back I put together a plan in EVE Mon titled “Fly All the Subcaps!” and put in all the things that might ever get included in a future doctrine, training them all up to level IV (or V when needed), giving me about a 200 day training plan. You would think with 107 million skill points, I would be covered, but there are a lot of skills in EVE Online. I biased the plan towards things that would help current doctrines first, so Armor Honeycombing was in there early, and set off training.
And then the fighting in Fountain ended and rumors started that we would be moving to Fountain. Gaff poked me and suggested that it might be a good thing to train up to fly a carrier so as to be able to haul ships back and forth at need. If we moved to Fountain, I had a pile of ships to move there, and if we didn’t, I had a pile to move back to Deklein.
That seemed like a plan just reasonable enough to blow up my previous plan. And I had laid some groundwork for it during my aimless training time. I had Jump Drive Operation up to V and Jump Drive Calibration to IV. Flying a carrier… and I could chose any one, they were all equidistant… was just 19 days away. So off I went on that plan, the Archon being my target.
Not THAT kind of target!
And then, a week into that, with the Fountain fully taken, there was an Alliance Update that, among other things, assigned new training goals. We were asked to max out sentry drones and work towards flying a dreadnought. The plan is to abuse the “assign drones to the FC” mechanic (which did not work all that well for TEST at G95F or 6VDT) until CCP fixes it and to fling dreadnoughts at everything in future conflicts.
Since I was already at maximum skills for sentry drones (trained them years back and never really used them until now) I started looking at dreads.
I am equidistant in training time from 3 of the 4 dreadnoughts, though the Phoenix is out due to being unsuitable for a “blap dread” (a subcap shooting dreadnought) fit. (Gaff, who owns a Phoenix, blames me for this, saying I told him to go Caldari back in 2007.) The Revelation is the furthest out of reach, as I am way behind in laser weaponry. So the choice is between the Moros and the Naglfar.
The Moros seems to be the favored choice among many who purport to know best. They certainly seem common. They are a bit bulbous, looking a bit like Dabiggreenboat, to coin a phrase.
Moros Firing at 3WE-KY
And then there is the smaller, but quite vocal Naglfar faction, whose primary arguments are that it uses no capacitor for its guns and looks damn cool with its vertical orientation.
Naglfars stand out among dreadnoughts
Fortunately, the work I started on for flying a carrier applies to dreadnoughts, and I have a bit of time to decide on which one to choose.
And I have to start working on earning some ISK. This is going to cost. The skills alone are pricy, and I haven’t even gotten a price on hulls and fittings yet.
Anyway, once I finish the dreadnought plan and then the carrier plan, I can get back to my subcap plan. Unless something else comes up.
And something else always comes up.
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.
Pie! Yum!
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.
A new Rokh… unfit so far
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.
Wilhelm’s first Scimitar
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.
Seventy Million Skill Points and Out August 24, 2011
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, EVE Online.Tags: Incarna, Learning Skills, Meaningless Milestones, Skill Points
9 comments
I came back to EVE Online for Incarna, to see if there would be anything new that would bring me back into the game. And, in my usual method, I picked the three month subscription. The would have given me plenty of time to explore the Incarna expansion, had it held anything for me.
Instead, it held mostly disappointment. And drama. That took a while to work through.
Which meant that my subscription time has been spent doing what a lot of EVE subscriptions do, training skills. There was enough time for me to hit another skill point milestone. So, as I did at the 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, and 60 million skill point mark, here is where I stand at 70 million skill points.
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
Asterisks indicate areas that changed since the last post.
Spaceship Command, always at the top of the skill point chart, surged forward and nearly double due to my skilling up to fly ships from other factions… mostly so I could take screen shots of them for EVE Online Pictures.
The increases in the skills listed above actually add up to more than 10 million skill points. Spaceship Command alone went up nearly 9 million.
Since my last milestone at 60 million, the learning skills got pulled from the game, which freed up 4.8 million skill points for me to reallocate back in December 2010.
That change is also why my total known skills went from 209 to 197.
Skill level distribution now looks like this:
Level 1: 1 skill Level 2: 30 skills Level 3: 28 skills Level 4: 52 skills Level 5: 86 skills
And, that one key measurement, how many days of training would it take me to fly a Caldari Titan, went UP this time around, by a little over a day. I am now over 69 days away from the basic flying skill, almost all of which would be tied up in learning Capital Ships I through V. I am not sure why the timeline went up since I last checked. It probably relates to how I set my attributes after the removal of learning skills.
But now my subscription is coming to its end. In a little over a week, my account will lapse.
I have explored most of what I wanted to in EVE. Potshot and I never did get that space station built in wormhole space, w-space being pretty well camped these days, and I never once poked my nose into a 0.0 system, but such is life. By the time I was done in empire space, I did not want the commitment that 0.0 requires.
And I suppose this casts the future of EVE Online Pictures into doubt. I have enough screen shots to get through the rest of the year at the current rate of two pictures posted a week, but after that I might have to put that site on hiatus.
What To Do With 4.8 Million Skill Points December 17, 2010
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, EVE Online.Tags: Skill Points
4 comments
The removal of learning skills went through this week in EVE Online, which left me with some newly freed up skill points to allocate.
4.8 million skill points.
That is somewhat over 3 months of training time right there, a significant boost to some lucky skills.
Now what should I spend them on? With 59 million skill points still there, there are not a lot of skills I need to work on for my rather limited needs. I guess I can cap out that ORE Industrial skill for the Noctis.
I wonder if I have any missile skills left to train?
The End of Learning Skills in New Eden November 25, 2010
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, EVE Online.Tags: Learning Skills, Skill Points
6 comments
CCP Greyscale posted today that all learning skills will be removed from EVE Online shortly.
The skill books will be off the market by tomorrow this time and the skills themselves will be removed when they are ready, which sounds like between now and Christmas.
On the down side, I spent some time and effort a long while back training up learning skills to speed up other training. At my last marker, I had 4,805,803 skill points in learning. Not an inconsiderable percentage of my 60 million skill points.
On the bright side, players will be getting something to compensate for the loss of the skills. From the post:
- All skillpoints invested in learning skills will be reimbursed, including all the fiddly corner cases. If you have 2,012,692 SP in learning, you will find yourself down those skills, but with 2,012,692 skillpoints to redistribute.
- All skillbooks not currently injected into people’s heads will be reimbursed at the old NPC sell price. The money will go to whichever character or corporation owns the container that the skillbooks are in. For example, things in cans you’ve anchored for yourself will be reimbursed to you, things in corporate hangar arrays or the “deliveries” bin will be reimbursed to the owning corporation.
- This will also involve cancelling any and all market orders containing these skills. Contracts containing learning skills will have those skillbooks substituted for copies of the Pax Amarria.
- All new and existing characters will have an extra 12 base points (ie, non-remappable) in each attribute.
- The 100% training speed bonus up to 1.6m SP will no longer be available. People partway through this bonus will lose the remaining bonus amount. They will of course gain a huge attribute bonus to make up for it.
- Miscellaneous other cleanup tasks will be performed that are not very interesting, details available on request.
Which means, if nothing else, that I should be able to continue on training at my current rate, plus I will have that 4.8 million skill points to invest in other skills.
More details about what is happening are in the post.
As to the “why” of it, all I could get out of it was that people don’t like learning skills to help learn skills.
Sixty Million Skill Points November 11, 2010
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, EVE Online.Tags: Incursion, Meaningless Milestones, Skill Points
4 comments
Another 7-8 month window of time has elapsed and another 10 million skill points has accumulated on my main EVE Online character, Wilhelm Arcturus.
Since our wormhole space station expedition went bust for lack of an unoccupied wormhole, training is about all I have really been doing. I have no other account active and I have been riding on PLEX purchased with ISK. My biggest EVE event of late has been the Screenshot Contest.
I actually crossed the 60 million milestone a ways back (I’m at about 62.5 million at the moment), but haven’t gotten around to writing about it until now. I did take a snap shot of EVE Mon at the magic moment, so I know where I stood at the time.
Tracking my skill points every 10 million interval has been a tradition and there are posts on the site for 50, 40, 30, 20, and 10 million skill points.
Here is where I stand, or stood, at the 60 million skill point mark:
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
Asterisks indicate areas that changed since the last post.
The changes since the last post reflect an attempt to round out my skills to be able to fly all of the ships in my hanger effectively. With my alt in cold storage, I transferred all his ships to Wilhelm who then had to learn how to fly a few. So, for example, the Dominix is primarily a drone platform, and enjoyable one at that, so drone related skills saw a huge boost.
The total number of known skills went up by three, from 206 to 209. Those three were in Spaceship Command. I think I can now fly the battleships of the four player factions in the game. The total skill distribution changed to:
Level 1: 1 skill Level 2: 31 skills Level 3: 34 skills Level 4: 62 skills Level 5: 81 skills
Level 5 skills took a big leap, going from 67 to 81. When you are not playing actively and have a pretty loose agenda, you can find time for those 8-22 day skills.
And, of course, there is the Titan benchmark. How many training days remain between me and flying the Caldari Titan?
This time around I am down to 68 days, a pretty big drop from the 92 days I stood at before, and 100 days down from the first time I calculated what it would take for me to buy and fly a Titan.
Of the 68 days remaining, 56 and a half of them are Capital Ships V.
Since there are only three remaining skills, Capital Ships, Jump Drive Operation, and Caldari Titan, I am going to guess I won’t be getting much closer to getting my license for one. None of those skills figure in my immediate plans, whatever those might be.
And with Incursion coming along some time this month… maybe… there might be something new and interesting to try out in New Eden.
[It looks like Incursion now has a date... or several dates it seems. The November release will be in January, essentially.]
Fifty Million Skill Points March 22, 2010
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, EVE Online.Tags: Meaningless Milestones, Skill Points
8 comments
Another 7 or so months have gone by, which means I have accumulated another 10 million skill points in EVE Online. Whether I am playing actively or on a bit of a break, the skill points keep coming.
The trail of posts go back covering where I stood at forty million, thirty million, twenty million, and ten million skill points.
After another 10 million skill points, here is how my skill point totals line up.
Spaceship Command: 9,218,308 Science: 6,284,291 Engineering: 5,740,869* Missiles: 5,566,701 Gunnery: 4,423,706 Learning: 4,111,530 Trade: 3,271,765* Industry: 2,941,576 Leadership: 2,307,163* Electronics: 1,642,458 Mechanic: 1,178,568* Navigation: 1,145,570 Social: 1,015,932* Drones: 951,798 Subsystems: 151,765 Corp Management: 48,000 Total: 50,000,000 (asterisk indicates no change since last report)
Spaceship Command remained my top category again this round. Science jumped up past Engineering due to my finally finishing off the skills required to fly a Hulk on my main. He could haul and fly an Orca before, but now he can actually do the actual mining.
Gunnery also saw a big surge over last time. I have been training up some of the Amarr related skill, mostly to fly their ships on a mission or two for screen shot purposes. Yes, it has come to that.
Learning saw some growth as I picked up a couple of level 5 skills to help speed things along.
And then there was the new category, Subsystems, which you need for tech III ships. That came as part of my tinkering with the Tengu.
When it comes to total skills known, Wilhelm has 206 known skills, up 15 since the 40 million mark, and they are distributed as follows:
Level 1: 1 skill Level 2: 32 skills Level 3: 37 skills Level 4: 69 skills Level 5: 67 skills
That is 11 more skills at level 5 and 10 more at level 4 since the last time. I have been doing a number of things that have had level 4 and 5 pre-requisites, so those two levels have been growing as a result.
Finally there is the titan metric.
Way back when I calculated with EVE Mon that it would take me over 168 days to be able to fly the Caldari Titan. At the last checkpoint I had that down to 99 days, thanks to finishing off Caldari Battleship V. As of this point I am just over 92 days from being able to fly that titan.
Not a big gain, but I doubt there will be any big gains going forward unless I start on capital ships. Nearly 68 of those 92 days are just getting to Capital Ships V, with another 20 in Advanced Spaceship Command V. I am not likely to pursue either. Unlike Gaff, I won’t be going after my Rorqual license.
I did miss my estimated target for 50 million skill points by almost a month. My account lapsed, as I have been paying with PayPal and you cannot do recurring, back in November which not only stopped the skill I was training for a few days, but reset the skill back to its initial state. That lost me 14 days of training on a 20+ day skill. I know training is supposed to stop when you lapse, but the resetting back to the previous level seems a bit harsh.
And when will I hit 60 million skill points?
That will probably take much longer than past increments. I think my long subscription streak will coming to an end with the next billing cycle. Training queues and screen shots are about all I have been doing in EVE for the last few months, so it might be time to step away for a bit.
