EVE Players Like Long Queues

Players of MMORPGs usually hate long queues.  Long queues to log into a game at launch.  Long queues in the group finder.  Long queues for battlegrounds.  Players just hate long queues.  With the launch of Phoebus on Tuesday, CCP will present EVE players with two new long queues.  And the players love it.

The first queue is the skill queue.  A lot of people are turned off by EVE's time-based skills learning system.  But I love the feature.  Of course, I have had some struggles.  I had to juggle my plan when I used to travel to Bulgaria on business and didn't have access to the game.  As a less than a year old player, I didn't have many skills that I could train for the two weeks that I stayed my first time.  And my last trip was three weeks.

But that changes Tuesday.  In Phoebe, the rule that a player cannot insert skills into the skills learning queue if the queue is longer than 24 hours goes away.  The new limits are a maximum of 50 skills that cannot extend for more than 10 years.  Also, a player cannot insert a skill if the prerequisites are not already trained.

Now, don't panic everyone.  CCP is not planning on shutting down Tranquility in 10 years (that we know of).  Instead, the dev blog states, "These limits are being maintained for safety as this significant change to the skill-training system goes live, and are not set in stone."

Order Subject To Change

I plan on taking advantage of the feature fairly quickly.  I'll use Wandering Rose, my CEO character.  She's trained to fly Minmatar command ships, achieved Mastery V in all Industrial and Transport Ships, and has learned every Resource Processing skill to level V except for Scrap Metal Processing and Mercoxit Processing.  I plan on finishing up Mercoxit Processing to 5, then work on getting the racial encryption and science skills to their maximum levels.  That plan will take me into January 2016.

My skill plan for once aligns nicely with another long queue CCP plans to add with their invention changes.  In Crius, CCP got rid of the bad queues when industry slots were eliminated from stations.  Now, CCP is adding the ability to queue invention jobs.  Okay, technically the change is not a queue.  But CCP Ytterbium did use the word in the dev blog, so I'm using it too.  He wrote:

"Since the Crius release in July, invention only consumes one blueprint copy run at a time. As such we are adding the possibility for Phoebe to queue those runs on a similar manner with Manufacturing runs."

I really like the possibility.  I like running my invention jobs 5 at-a-time for an item and then seeing the results of the random number generator.  Now I will just run 5 jobs off the same blueprint and research more items simultaneously.  I'm sure serious inventors will install a lot more jobs.

The New Invention Formula

I should explain why I intend to spend all of 2015 researching the science skills on a character.  The invention changes also include a revamped invention chance formula.  With my current skills, my invention chance is the base % chance for success multiplied by 1.367.  After the training completes, that will increase to the base % chance for success multiplied by 1.458.  So for instance, when inventing Barrage ammunition, my chance for success will increase from 46.5% to 49.6%.  When inventing Prospects, my chance for success increases from 41% to 43.7%.  Is taking up that much training time worth the gains?  Depends on how involved I get into tech 2 production.  But Wandering Rose is my CEO character, which means not really getting involved in combat except for providing boosts in missions when flying a Claymore or Slepnir.

So those are the queue changes.  Only in the EVE sandbox are longer queues cheered.  But who ever said that EVE players are your normal type of gamer?