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Queuing – a very British Occupation

Published on 15. Mar, 2009 ... written by Ecaf Ersa, Tags: Articles

The concept of queuing is one well known to us Brits – we love them. Very little annoys us more than somebody who jumps to the front of a queue after we’ve been standing patiently in line for our turn, except maybe being called away just as we make it to the front.

The call for a facility to line up skills in EVE has been long and loudly made especially since the removal of ghost training. “You’ve taken something away! Now give us something back!” was the cry, and CCP have heard, listened and delivered. We are finally indulged in the latest expansion Apocrypha.

CCP quite rightly had some concerns about such a system. They feared that some people would queue up a year’s worth of skills and not log on until their character was awesome and ready to face the universe with all guns blazing. This is somewhat understandalbe as, after all, the name of the game is EVE-Online not EVE-Offline!

Many possibilities were put forward as to how a suitable compromise could be achieved. One of the most common and reasonable of these was to have the next level of a skill automatically start if the user was not online when a skill level came to finish. Another was to specify just the next skill that would run.

But what CCP have given us is even better than both of these and resolves what is, for me at least, the most frustrating element of skill training, the short ones. Yes it’s great to get the same benefit from a level 1 finishing in just an hour or less than the weeks it can take for a level 5 but if you can’t be online for more than a few hours a day then there are only so many of these you can do, especially with the skill levels that take 5 or 6 hours. This gets even more complicated with a new character when there are so many skills you want that need this timeframe to complete or if you have the skill plans of 3 or 4 characters to juggle.

What we have is the ability to queue up to 50 skill levels as long as they all start within the next 24 hours. So in theory you could schedule 49 skills taking a total of 23 hours and 59 minutes or less and then one other skill level of any length at the end.

It only gives you an extra 24 hours of skills so there is no more danger of having people rarely logging on than there was before. But the possibility to now crack out 4 or 5 of those 4 to 6 hour skills during the 20 hours you are asleep and at work and still have a 2 week skill running at the end just in case you get run over by a bus in your rush to get back home to EVE is one that has me salivating.

No more will there be 10 partially trained skills in your plan because you keep having to swap from a skill with only a few hours left before you go to bed or work. No more setting the alarm for 3 in the morning because you have to have T2 Sentry Drones for that POS bashing operation tonight. No more lost time because a skill finished just as that interceptor locked down your battleship with ten of his friends jumping into the system. No more having to start a long skill that isn’t really a high priority for you just because of patch day.

What seems to be the only shortfall in this is that it does not look possible to queue skills that you have not yet opened the skillbook for. This won’t be a big issue if you already have the pre-requisites for the skill in question as you can simply open up the book for a few seconds then swap to another skill. However, if you need a skill that isn’t yet finished before you can open the new book then you’ll have to wait till you are next online after it finishes.

I can see this new facility having several possible effects on the game in general.

1. We should see a higher average skillpoint per day gain across the EVE universe as those who are not so bothered about making sure that they don’t lose any training time are given a total gift-horse. This should also help out new players who are yet to learn the importance of this.
2. One that I expect we will all forward to is the death of the “Server startup is delayed again and my skill finished 2 hours ago” whine thread on the forums! These people are already mercilessly flamed for not ensuring they had a long skill going. Imagine the responses once this system is in effect!
3. Less poorness, more mediocrity. It is now a much simpler matter to bring a skill up to level 3. I have many skills stuck on level 1 or 2 because they are not high priorities for me and I can only squeeze so many short skills into the time I am online in the evening. I predict that my shield tanking skills for example will quite quickly progress from being useless to passable. So it seems reasonable to assume that we should see fewer characters flying around in ships with poor skills.
4. Less greatness, more mediocrity. It may also discourage people from taking level 4 and 5 skills. The “new toy syndrome” could become a much greater beast than it is now with the ability to learn many more new skills in a much shorter time frame than it ever was before. The queue is in itself a new toy and one that I will enjoy playing with! I can see that even greater discipline is going to be needed to make sure those skills get up to level 4 before moving on new things.

Could these last two possible outcomes combine to usher in a new age of general averageness? I expect that only time will tell!

But regardless of the possible outcomes for other players and the game in general, this writer is excitedly shouting WOOOOOT!, YAY, \o/ and Thank You CCP – We Luvs Ya!

Tags: queue, skill, training