this thread. wow. had a few beers so maybe I'm misreading but everything is anecdotal at best. So give them an SP boost. You gonna overlord every newbro and dictate what they drop it into? What's that OP, you already "carry" the newbie players so you can't be bothered to teach them more? How are they going to learn how to USE the SP without proper experience (active corp recruitment---i'm lookin' at you babycakes---, TRAINING, and *cough* PV-mutha-fuggin'-E)? Give them all the SP you like. Hell, give them 10m for academy graduation---as a nice lil' welcome aboard gesture. Where is it going to go? EVERYWHERE. "Holy sh!t, batman! I can try this, and that, and uh OMG wtf is this over here! GOT IT!1!1!11" And no one is going to have a decent advanced to proto level fit because it's all over the place. As if they'd be able to, or even know how to FIT it all, without the boring cores that most everyone would probably skip over because well, they don't have the experience to know better (see points above somewhere between the first and 5th sentence probably). Oh, and that those moaning like alley cats in heat to give them the boost aren't going to teach them.
Even if they do proto a suit/weapon, what then? Do they suddenly know fitting range? Do they know how to USE it? Do they even know how to read TACNET or watch for blurry blue scout goo smearing across the horizon? Nerp. They will still be instakilled, only now they lost a ton of quickly invested ISK that they don't have as newbies and are even MORE pissed because of it. Wait.... I got it! Boost ISK rewards for academy grads too. Now that I think about it maybe you're on to something! Give them more AUR dailies as well. Because once the gain curve drops steeply after 10m (or whatever arbitrary cap you wish to place upon it all), then those puffed-upnewbies are going to be upset because suddenly they're not earning nearly what they earned when they first started! And by some screwy gaming progression logic they might actually think they should be getting MORE as time goes by.
You're right though. Closed Beta Vets didn't have to face full proto-stomps with a deficit of 30+million SP to the enemy. But we also didn't have near the resources today to GET sp in the first place. I will agree that there is a problem. SP gaps are side-effects of larger problems. Without the in-game experience to effectively UNDERSTAND how SP works, or even how to apply it for long-term gains, newbieboosties won't change a damn thing. And that goes back to the point. Another bandaid pretending to be a solution to a problem that isn't the problem.
SIMPLE PVE (i.e., a personal firing range!?) can go a long way to prepping new players of the weapon choices at least. Reinforcing the fact that there are militia variants to use before speccing into chaos is a nifty thing too, if paired with some form of testing ground. But that doesn't exist. SP boosting isn't going to do anything other than giving them more selection of toys to play with while still getting their arses handed to them by skill-capped SQUADS.
Helpful replies have been made, but that "yup... sarcastic eye-roll" reply peppering the first page is so much easier than considering another view.
Yup. I swear, these forums sometimes....
