It’s back to EVE, and the usual process of trying to remember how to play. Forewarned by previous experience, I’m making sure I ease back into the NPC Agent missions a bit more gingerly this time, and started from scratch with Frigate based Agent 1 missions. As it turned out I hadn’t forgotten quite that much, and am now comfortably grinding away on Agent 2 Crusier-based missions and working at faction standing in the hopes of opening up a new line of Agent 3 leads. My usual Agent 3 people are on the other side of the galaxy, and it never hurts to diversify a bit.
I’m using a fun little toy that I’d spent a lot of my previous time training to be able to fly; the Vengeance, described as an ‘Elite Frigate’, a very overpowered ship that is as least as powerful as a standard-type Cruiser, and which is probably not being stretched enough by these missions really. Still, it’s a fairly relaxed way to get back into the swing of things, and still requires a bit of thought to use well. As well as grinding faction standing, I’m also grinding cash to buy more skill training books. As usual, a few months away has seen me come back to find at least 15 new books I now need.
Planning and managing skill training is a bit of a sub-game all of itself, and requires a keen grasp of utility vs time. Skills in EVE divide into two types, skills that actually do stuff, and skills that let you learn skills faster, and this presents a bit of a choice. Do I spend time learning a Learning skill, which would make learning other skills a bit faster, and then learn the utility skill I want, or do I just go ahead and learn the utility skill, taking a little bit longer?
It’s largely about diminishing returns. An example:
A new player gets to Gunnery IV, one of the skills that helps with shooting. This skill works of the Perception and Willpower Attributes – numerical scores whose only purpose is to determine skill training speeds. To train Gunnery up to V will take 7d, 16h, 51m, 50s, (with Per 14, and Wil 10).
However, if that newbie instead goes off and learns Spatial Awareness I, which needs a little bit of cash, and 38m 27s, and grants +1 to Perception, the time needed to get Gunnery V goes down by 5%, to 7d, 7h, 37m, 15s, a saving of 9h, 14m, 35s, less the 38m 27s taken to train the learning skill. Also, any other skill that uses Perception as it’s main attribute will receive a similar saving too.
But training Spatial Awareness from level IV to level V would take that same character around 22d, 12h, 22m, 18s, and that would only offer an additional 3% saving in training Perception based skills.
Of course, whether the 7d needed to gain that extra 2% weapon speed is worth it, compared to how many other, lower levelled skills that could be trained in the same time, is another question altogether. Skill levels take orders of magnitude more time the further you want to take them. The exact numbers depend on attributes, and the rank (difficulty multiplier) of the skill in question, but in terms of magnitude:
- I takes minutes
- II takes hours
- III takes days
- IV take weeks
- V can often take months
However, the bonuses you gain from them scale linearly, often being a set percentage improvement in the field, per level. Clearly then it is often not worth going for V skills unless a particular ship, module or follow-on skill requires it, and sometimes even IV are a bit excessive, when you could get several other useful skills up to a III level in the same time. Usefulness vs Time.
So it probably seems strange, that I’m now about to embark on five Level V skills whose only purpose is to make subsequent skill training a bit quicker. Mostly it’s about the implants though. These are add-ons that boost your base attributes, in turn helping train skills faster, and my EVE Self is pretty wired just now. Trouble is, when you get killed, these don’t make it to your next self, and are lost. If, or rather, when this happens, (and if I’m to experience the grand 0.0 adventure, it will happen, often), it will effectively slow all my training times down a bit, which is about the closest EVE has to actually losing levels. I don’t like going backward in these games, so I need to free myself of my implant dependency, and to do this, I need to grind at the V learning skills.
It’ll take about a month to get the next +1 in each attribute, but that then qualifies me for the five ‘Advanced’ learning books, each of which I can get to at least II in about 24 hours, effectively giving me +3 in total in each skill, in just over a month, far surpassing anything my implants give me at present, and making the penalty of death hurt that little bit less. It’s not that arduous, as I tend to swap between short skill training while I’m online, and long ones for when I’m not, thus maintaining a tangible illusion of progress, while still getting long skills done over time.
One mathematically inclined message board poster worked out how long it would take before the time taken to train these Advanced Learning Skills to level V would be repaid, in time saved on shortened other-skill training. It turned out to be somewhere around 3y, 235d, 11h, 3m, 38s! Clearly this seems like an extreme waste of time, but then as a friend pointed out to me recently – I’ve been playing EVE Online on and off for nearly that long already, and am still coming back to it…
Edit: Just remembered - useful third-party app to help figure all this nonesne out here:
Future Falcon: EVE Character Manager