Friday, February 27, 2009

Certificates: Elite = 1337?

After Energy Management V finished I took a second to update my certificates. Last time I did it I had mostly standard and basic with a handful of improved. Now I have Core Capacitor at Elite.

It's my first elite cert, but I'm not sure if I feel any sense of accomplishment from it. I'm not really using them to plan my skills per se. I know what I need to do. It's cool to have them, but I'm not sure they had the effect CCP thought they would have. I wonder why that is...

QR has come and gone and Apocrypha is just around the corner, so I want to know what the long-term effects of certificates has been, especially from the players who are more than a year in (since we all know it's been helpful to the noobs).

Is it completely superfluous or can it be tweaked to be better? How would you tweak it?

o7

6 comments:

Kirith Kodachi said...

I think once a player reaches a certain point the certificates are definitely superfluous, but perhaps the next generation will come to depend on Certificates in a way that replaces a lot of the blind groping and experiementation us vets go through constantly with new ships.

Kevin Prier said...

As far as CCP's original intention's, I believe the Certificates feature is supposed to be a way to publicly 'prove' that they are in-fact an elite gunner or an elite engineer or otherwise. It also doubles as a 'guide' to help newer players train but that's a secondary.

Given that the primary purpose is supposed to be 'proof of specialization', I think the certificates would be a lot more useful if they lowered the req's for elite certificates SLIGHTLY.

Like instead of requiring 3 different skills to be at level 5, require 1 level 5 skill and 3 level 4 skills or something similarly balanced.

Side Note: Did I read somewhere that CCP is making changes to the certificate system for Apocrypha?

Myrhial Arkenath said...

CCP is also working on a sort of community for EVE. Certs will be excellent e-peen material then if you can display the,. Bit like achievements on xbox live or steam.

I think the certs are mostly balanced as they are. Elite should ask for level 5's since that is the highest after all.

John Holt said...

The certificates helped me to see some holes in my skills. I think they are good for that.

Anonymous said...

They do two things for me personally: help me see a few areas where I could improve (e.g. some useful skills I hadn't previously considered), and for corp planning in the sense of determining what requirements to set for new recruits.

As I haven't opened the corp to recruitment yet, I don't know how that last one will end up working out. But I have high hopes...

Anonymous said...

I actually haven't used them at all besides looking through them when they were first introduced. But that's mainly because I already have my skill queues planned out for the next year...so I haven't really needed to work on certain certificates. I think they were a good idea, but from what I've heard from some people...it wasn't planned through complety. (like some beginner certs requiring rank 5 lvl 5 skills (multitasking coming to mind...)