Late to the Party

I'm back from my vacation with my wife, and ready to get blogging again.  The internet at our resort was fairly bad, so I had difficulty just checking my PMs and director forums, let alone trying to blog.

I know its old news by now, but one of the best things I saw when I came back was the news about learning skills.  In E-UNI, I've constantly seen how new players are encouraged to do learning skills early.  A lot of older players, myself included, would try to reinforce that they should concentrate more on skills that will make the game more fun in the beginning, but human nature would always win.  People who play videogames will often go for the min/max approach, and this trait, combined with learning skills, would lead to a poorer new player experience.

CCP's plan to remove learning skills isn't perfect, but it is a great plan.  Some of my chars (older) have had the skills long enough to almost pay it off (except for some of the adv learnings to V), so those bonus SP are extra.  Others of mine, because of younger age or not training the adv to V until further into their life cycle, haven't had a chance to pay off the SP invested in learnings, so the extra reimbursement is very nice.

The plan of reimbursing skillbooks in hangars is also nice, as E-UNI would take a hit if those skillbooks just disappeared on the patch day, as would a lot of older players I know that have some in their hangar to hand out to new students. 

Yes, min/maxers won't be able to get quite as high of an sp/hour value, but I consider that slight decrease well worth the benefit to new players and EVE as a whole.  I've heard a lot of people complain that this is dumbing down EVE, but I really don't see it.  EVEMON told people exactly which learning skills to train to maximize their time in a plan, and its almost impossible to be a new player and not get advice about learning skills. There was no real thought about it.  It was just "If I plan on being in game for x years, train y."  The slight lose of complexity is vastly overshadowed by a more new player friendly plan, removal of a pointless and flawed mechanic, and removing skills that were some of the least fun skills in the game to train.