Among all the recent changes that have been announced coming to the galaxy, I’ve tried to hold my tongue and just let others discuss the to death. I’d like to think I had learned from experience after crying foul for the Quantum Rise Apathy Patch [personal code name QRAP!] that really did nothing more than introduce 1 new ship, a couple new ways to build it and some rear-end servicing [oh, wait, I mean "back-end, database and hardware upgrades]. The combined effect was not only under-whelming, it was quite frankly disappointing in that a supposed ‘industrial’ upgrade for EVE was little more than a collection of little patches and a mini-Rorqual. Thanks for the ship but don’t try to… Gah, have to stop going there.
So, coming back to the Apocrypha changes, I’m trying to remain more detached and aloof. I know I’ll continue to fly my ships, mine/mission/manufacture my way to dominance and generally let any changes wash over me like Trinity, Empyrean Age and QRAP have done before. I look forward to new things becoming available in the form of exploration [never mind that a Sisters' Launcher now seems like an over-investment] and wormholes [Sleeper NPCs will severely hurt me] and adding a RAM disk that just makes my mouth water. I am even excited that they are revamping the character creation process and experience. Hopefully gone will be the crazy decisions about locking yourself into something that you have no idea what it entails. New players will have a greater freedom to really explore what is possible in the galaxy before committing to a given career.
But what about the over-all experience? My burning question relates not to how well a new capsuleer can find his way out of the loading bay and into a microwarpdrive fitted Rifter, but more along the lines of, “Mistakes made early on help define all of us as pilots and who we are.” If we just let things float and allow everyone to flip around at whim, there goes some part of our ships’ souls so to speak. Don’t you want to learn as you go? The arguments against the New Player Experience [NPE] changes so far have come down to two basic points however, that completely miss the experience as I’ve defined it.
The GoonFleet, ah, goons, are upset/worried/troubled that reducing the starting pilots to 50,000 skill points will result in capsuleers being unwilling to train for 2 days to get into the aforementioned MWD Rifter for 0.0-sec PvP ops. I’m more inclined to think that people are just shocked by the appearance of the change from 800,000 average skill points to 50k. Nevermind that a new pilot will learn skills at an accelerated rate until they reach 1,600,000 skill points, it must be just plain wrong to reduce the amount of skill points you start with.
The second discussion surrounding the NPE is strangely not about the NPE at all, but about the efficacy of the Learning skills themselves. There are two distinct camps that either want them abolished/banned/nuked/removed/plastered all over the asteroid belts OR they like them and think they are a positive aspect of the game. The first crowd views them as a unholy time sink that are only trained because they are forced to do so if they want to be competitive. They are angry that they train for something that doesn’t make their ship fly faster, guns track faster, missiles fly farther, manufacturing go smoother or mining more lucrative. They just want them gone because they are a, “kick in the balls to players” who want to train real skills. The second, somewhat less vehement group either acknowledge that the learning skills, “aren’t fun” but want to keep them, or they whole-heartedly love them as one of the things that make EVE great.
I have to admit my own personal bias here, and state that I think the choice to train your learning skills or not is part of that fundamental ethos that helps the galaxy of New Eden be what it is. Pilots that fit a shield booster on a Vexor or autocannons and artillery on a Typhoon are generally laughed at for making poor decisions, but there isn’t a cry to change the system so there is one tank system, one weapon or one propulsion option.
TL/DR; The Learning skills are about choices and reward. Grow-up, make a choice and live with it. Don’t demand that something be removed because it doesn’t fit your specific style.
It seems I am not alone after all in my condemnation of the watering down of Eve, although your less hostile than I am
In the past few months I have attempted to make people see where these current changes are taking Eve with the WoWifying simplicity that CCP are implementing. Singular changes tend to go unnoticed in a world of fanbois but together I fail to see how people are missing the dumbing down of Eve. You are correct in your assumption that new pilots will not become what we today have become from our experiences and the learning curve in Eve. You train, you don’t like, you throw it away. In a world of disposable landfills we have just added Eve pilots to the heap.
Combine the new player experience which is no longer an experience but more like three trials in one with the other changes and we get something quite sad IMO. Specialisation has gone out of the window in one overly easy game killing move by CCP. You train for 6 months then you swap atts and train something else till the next swap is due. It isn’t a possibility that may happen, it is what WILL happen. You give the human race a soft option and it will take it.
As for the learning skills. It is only a matter of time before they get wiped and those of us with them are offered yet another system to add those SP to something else instead. This will complete the system and enable pilots once again to change the fate that they set, or had set, before CCP decided money was everything.
I am not opposed to change, change is what keeps a fragile game like Eve going, or its what breaks it. They broke it. As I have posted on my own blog several times, for those that do not see it as so, come back in a year and re-read my comments. Then try laughing.
Good blog mate. As I said in the blogger channel, Id read it soon and now I have
Gah, I made a rather large comment to all of this and it didn’t post
Trust me when I say it was a good comment 
I cannot be arsed typing it all again though:(