On Not Learning Anything Any Longer
[caption id="attachment_1007" align="alignright" width="150" caption="Learning is for sleepers."]
[/caption]
[Due to a publishing issue, this was originally posted by the wrong author. That has been corrected. Sorry Penny. Ed.] There is some griping and much discussion about the disappearance of the learning skills. Most of the distress is not in making the game easier for newbie—indeed, this is seen as a positive move by the same people—but that the investment in the learning skills is now going to waste. That is almost understandable, as the raw skill points injected in to the learning skills, and that will be refunded, do not translate directly to the gains those skills will give a character. But this is also the very point that renders the complaint ineffective.
‘I chose to invest time’, writes the typical veteran, ‘and now I am getting nothing from that investment’. Sort of. Your advantage of training in the learning skills will be negated, but the effect is not gone. Far from it, as the training you invested in the learning skills helped you get in to the shinier ships with bigger guns faster than if you hadn’t learnt those skills. There is simply no way that effect can be removed from your character. The time you spent waiting patiently for the learning skills to complete has helped you gain skills faster than any short-sighted or impatient capsuleer who didn’t plan similarly, and has done so for however many years it has been since you trained them.
[caption id="attachment_1008" align="alignleft" width="150" caption="Get it working"]
[/caption]
If I were to offer any pilot the opportunity to go back in time and train from scratch, knowing that this deletion of these skills was coming one, two, or six years down the line, I daresay no one would choose to eschew training the learning skills. It would not be seen as optimal to put those couple of million skill points elsewhere, knowing that that’s where they would be put eventually once the refund was given, as the overall rate of skill point accumulation would still not be as great. After all, the whole point of planning ahead and investing the time in the learning skills was to eventually gain more skill points than would otherwise be possible. The accelerated training rate would mean you would recoup the skill points invested in the learning skills after a period of a year or so, and only continue to reap the benefits after that.
Indeed, the clever capsuleer is taking last-minute advantage of the imminent learning skill refund, dumping more points in to a learning skill using her favoured attribute, with a view to refunding the points in a skill of her unfavoured attribute. Such cunning, using learning skills to gain skill points faster than normal right until they are taken away. But that’s what the learning skills were there for, and any pilot that took time to invest in their training has either gained the obvious benefits for a long time, or will see the skill points refunded for no loss. And as the learning skills are themselves affected and accelerated by the attributes they increase, any training in them will still have created more skill points to be refunded than a new pilot would have gained normally.
[caption id="attachment_1009" align="alignright" width="150" caption="We all start somewhere"]
[/caption]
I don’t see any reason for veteran pilots to be frustrated by the removal of the learning skills. To claim they now have no advantage over new players is absurd. A new player will not gain ninety million skill points overnight, because of this change or otherwise. And the very existence of the learning skills means that every pilot must invest in them in order not to fall behind, which just puts everyone in the same boat. Rather than having new players have to find the ISK to buy the expensive, second-tier learning skill books, then themselves get frustrated as they spend a couple of weeks learning with no immediate gain to their character skill, we now all train at the same rate.
That is, we all train at the same rate except when using the expensive implants that only veteran players can really afford, after training the cybernetic skill. As for the time investment, neural remaps have made available even longer-term skill training plans, for pilots who like to think in years instead of months. Removing a pointless part of the already fierce learning curve can only be a good change, which is what deleting the learning skills achieves.
