Learning Skills, and Why They Fail

I’ve been on a small crusade against learning skills recently.  Don’t get me wrong, learning skills aren’t a huge problem for me: my main character has been around since late 2005, and so most of my skills are trained to 4-5.  As a game design concept however, I find them bizarre and pointless: one of the main appeals of EVE, at heart, like most other MMOs, is seeing your character evolve from a blubbering idiotic child with the skills and experience of a toothing baby, to an all-powerful demigod with enough firepower to put the Death Star to shame.  It’s a learning experience.  So why do we need to learn…how to learn?  Why do we need these all but mandatory 2 months of EVE training where all we have to look forward to is more training?

In the past, I always thought that learning skills were an accepted failure of EVE game design: a relic of the EVE beta, back when nobody was too sure how EVE was going to work out, that just like POS’ had been left in simply because CCP couldn’t think of any decent way to remove them without angering the entire world.  A necessary evil, simply because we hadn’t yet thought of a way of removing it that worked better than just ignoring the entire issue and maintaining the status quo.

Imagine my surprise then to find an enraged community reaction when I posted this thread in the CSM section of the forums.  I had expected the motion to be widely supported: I did not suggest any methods of solving the issue, and only mentioned that learning skills were an element of frankly horrible game design that should, preferably in the near future, be addressed.  Yet, in typical EVE community fashion, people suddenly took offense to the suggestion that I might want to “simplify” the game, and thus the argument continues.

There is an argument for forcing hard choices on the player, especially in a game like EVE where choice is always present and has huge repercussions on how you play.  It is crucially important to teach players that this isn’t World of Warcraft: you’re in this for the long run.  Expect to be poor, expect to have no friends, expect to die.  CCP even seems to have picked up on this, and is planning on introducing a forced death sequence in the next iteration of the new player tutorials to be released with Dominion, according to their presentation at fanfest.

Forcing you to make the choice between training your learning skills now, and thus boring yourself to death now, or training your skills later and getting bored then, isn’t a choice between option A and option B: it’s a choice between sucking now or sucking later.  The main issue being, there is always sucking involved.  Is this really the lesson we want to give new players?  Welcome to EVE, prepare to be bored out of your mind a lot?  Welcome to EVE!  It involves much sucking!

The crux of the argument is this: EVE is, at heart, still designed to be fun.  No matter which tough choices you make, who pops you, who you get scammed by, where you get your PLEX from, every choice is designed to promote you having fun.  You train skill X to get into your new ship, you rat to have money to get into your new ship, you get your ship to shoot people, etc.  Each element in this chain is an individual accomplishment.

What do you achieve from learning skills?  The ability to do more learning.  Well woop-di-do.  I’ve bored myself, so I can do more boring myself.

Learning skills are an outdated, malconstructed, pointless and anachronistic mess of a game mechanic.  Get them out of my game CCP.  I don’t care how you do it: reimburse the points, remove them altogether, or just remove the learning skills bonus and hope nobody notices.  It’s a horrible problem we’re all ignoring, and needs to be dealt with.

Quick status update: My first article was published on the Tribune today!  I hope you enjoy reading it…Let me know what you think!  As a quick sneak preview, expect an article on an incredibly interesting character in next week’s issue…

Thanks for reading!