Skilled Capsuleers,
As discussed throughout the EVE World Tour in 2019 and further in the July Status Update dev blog, placing emphasis on embracing new players is important for EVE to continue standing the test of time, and to set it up for a thriving third decade. With the ongoing EVE Forever initiative and the focus on embracing new players, we are updating one of the game's core systems: Skills.
Have you ever been browsing the forums for a good list of skills for a particular goal, or been playing with EVEMon and said to yourself "I wish I could do that in the game"?
Coming this September, the Skill Plans feature will be introduced into EVE Online. It will allow you to create, share, and interact with purposely created lists of skills within the client.
In addition, that release will bring big changes to the skills and training queue interface.
What are Skill Plans
To plan your training, currently you need to have bought and injected the relevant skills and have placed them into your training queue. This presented an opportunity for improvement. The easiest way to describe this feature is through an analogy. The Skill Plans feature is to skill training what the fitting window is to ship fitting. To get the right fit, you can experiment using the fitting simulator. Neither the ship nor the modules need to be purchased first in order to see the end goal.
With the Skill Plans feature, you will be able to build a list of skills without needing to buy and inject them first. A Skill Plan is an ordered list of skill levels with specific goals, which you can create and keep track of to follow your training.
The unrestricted planning of your character development is only one of the reasons for this feature. Another reason for its inception is to enable players to share lists of skills with each other. It is often difficult even for seasoned players to pick the right skills for their goals, and the number of player-made lists of skills on the forums and wikis is evidence of that, as well as the dedication of the creators of third party tools like EVEMon. Now, the possibility of sharing and interacting with such plans in the EVE client has been opened up. You will be able to share any Skill Plan in a chat, EVE Mail, corp bulletin, etc., just as you can share ship fittings. You will even be able to leave a link to a corresponding Skill Plan in a ship fitting description.
Every one of your characters will be able to save up to ten Personal Skill Plans that you will be able to track, edit, and share with your friends (or your alts!).
You will be able to start - or continue - training a plan by moving its contents to your training queue with one click of a button. Similarly, the buying of all missing skill books and application of unallocated skill points will be able possible with one click, for each individual skill or for all of them.
Milestones
So what about those goals mentioned earlier? A Skill Plan can be created with a concrete goal in mind, like flying a battlecruiser with T2 weapons, or maxing out all Planetary Industry skills. It can also be an open-ended journey through your character development. Either way, it can be long and the anticipation for reaching its end might be stretched out in time. Enter Milestones, which will help you track your progress towards the smaller goals within the plan.
You can set up to five Milestones in a Skill Plan that would indicate specific sub-goals within it. For now, a Milestone can be any item or any skill, and it will be completed as soon you train all the skills required for the item or skill in question. For example, you can set a few Milestones in that "battlecruiser with T2 weapons" Skill Plan that will be useful for you to complete along the way:
- Hurricane - so that you will be ready to fly the ship
- 425mm AutoCannon II - so that you will be able to use the turret
- Minmatar Battlecruiser IV - to keep track of when you will get those better bonuses for the ship
The Milestones may simply act as a reminder for yourself, but if you will be sharing your plan, they might very well carry vital information about the intentions behind the plan and its skills.
Certified Skill Plans
While many of you will be preparing Skill Plans to help new players, there was also a desire to give new players clear, guided paths embedded in the game. A few months back, the first version of the EVE Academy website was launched, listing multiple careers that players could choose from and included a couple of ship fittings for each to make the beginnings of the EVE journey a bit easier. Now, a Certified Skill Plan will be introduced for each of those ship fittings within each career (and per Empire). A new player entering the Skill Plans screen in the client will be met with a choice of career and corresponding Skill Plan, which will contain a list of skills that are useful at the start of that career and which will enable them to use that career's ship fitting. The description of the Skill Plan will contain a short amount of information about the career and why those skills are useful for it. On top of that, the Milestones should alleviate new players' concerns about when they can engage in a particular career's activities.
The Certified Skill Plans can also be shared, so even those who haven't built a custom beginner-friendly plan on their own can still help others by sharing the plans that are certified.
Interface Changes
Skills can be seen as the primary progression system in EVE Online, and are an important element for new players to understand. As such, it is important to ensure that they are more prominent in the game, so with the introduction of the Skill Plans feature, the skills window will be changing as well. The skills window will be removed from the character sheet panel and be given a new, fully separate window, accessible directly from the NeoCom. It will be divided into two main sections: Skill Plans and Skill Catalogue. While the first section will contain the whole interface related to Skill Plans, the other one will show all skills and the level you have trained for each, similar to how the current skills panel does. If you don't plan on interacting with the Skill Plans, they won't be in your way and you will be able to train skills as you do today. One thing worth mentioning is that there will be a return to the horizontal arrangement between the skills catalogue and the training queue. Your requests for this have been noted, and the hope is that the new skills screen will be easy and enjoyable to use. Be sure to give us your feedback on the new interface changes!
As you can see, the character sheet itself will change a bit as well. Now you will be able to see your whole body - apparel and all - in all its glory!
Changes to the Training Queue
To accommodate some of the goals for this feature, Alpha and Omega clone skill queue lengths will be matched, and their limits will be increased.
- The current limit of 50 skill entries in the queue will be increased to 150 for both Alpha and Omega clones.
- The current restriction of the Alpha clone training queue allowing only the skills that would start training within the next 24h will also be removed.
The reason for increasing the length of the queue is that some of the Certified Skill Plans are longer than 50 skill levels. The limit is being increased to 150 to make sure that new players especially will have a smooth experience when adding such a plan to their training queue, rather than having it be obstructed by skill queue limitation. The previous limit of 50 skills was implemented for technical reasons and the current limitation of 150 skills exists due to the same concerns, but now it will be big enough to not be a blocker in most scenarios. This is an especially important part of embracing new players that need to learn many new things at once. The aim is to make skill training simpler in the beginning while new Capsuleers are still figuring out what they want to do, and discovering which skills will help them achieve those goals.
Skill Plans will not have any limits for the number of skill levels in them, and short of them putting an unexpected load on systems, that's how they will remain.
What's Next
The above is what the Skill Plans feature will include in the September release. Plans for adding Corporate Skill Plans later this year along with other improvements are in motion, and we also look forward to reviewing all the discussion and ideas from the community! We encourage you to leave your questions and comments in the official forum thread.