Exactly how have you gimped it?

That's really valuable input. I feel like you should post more. Maybe write a book!

@OP: 20k EP is just about 14 days worth. Not the end of the world really. And if you really messed up it's like 9 bucks for another account atm. Also nothing major

no

1 respec per account within the first week (or even shorter, 48/72 hours?) of the first character creation/login.  You get a grace period to play with the EP but really never have enough time to fully utilize or even make a FOTM before you'd need to respec that 1 time.

Helps newbies play around with extensions and see what they did wrong to do it right the next time.  Cant be exploited by veterans as it starts as soon as the account activates EP gain and is only once per account not character.

I invite you to try and break my suggestion and find something exploitable beyond "spec into industry and do *** on that for 2 days then respec to combat with extra gear trololol!'.  A good suggestion is one that cant be broken, so please try so we can find a solution for this 'problem'.

Making more advanced tutorials just wont help much because no matter how informative you make them people just wont read.  you'ld have to make them voiced for people to pay any attention to it.

A 72 hour respec option would be great for new players and would definitely help retain players who feel they have ruined their account forever, however wrong they may be.

Especially with the cost of character deletion now, a new player might feel dissolusioned with the game if they screwed up the agent with their main handle.

A grace period for new accounts is probably the way to go.

This might be good for Avatar Creations or for you, but it's absolutely horrible for anyone else.

Mistakes are made all the time, especially if you're a new player. Being expected to pay for a new account is completely unreasonable.

I came into this game expecting it to have a fair learning curve and I don't mind reading up on games and learning all the nitty-gritty details about them, in fact, I enjoy doing so. I might have made some mistakes in that first part of the game but it doesn't bother me since I'm one of the people who can simply ignore it.

However, just because I like learning that way doesn't mean everyone else does, it's simply bad design to develop your game in such a fashion. Why? Because most gamers lack the patience or desire to read pages upon pages of tutorials, instructions or "how-to" guides before even actually getting to play.

People want to dive right in and explore it for themselves and if the game is not readily available to these players (you can call them casuals, but even hardcore players share these traits) then they will quickly lose interest. If they feel they've made a mistake they cannot undo, then they will lose interest.

It's all well and dandy for you to say "just buy a new account" or for developers to go in with the mindset that "well those people aren't our target audience" but guess what: Everyone is your target audience. The primary goal of a video game (and any business) is to make money. The second goal is to make the service or product work well and be enjoyable.

Instead of a full respec that would give all EP back in one large chunk, how about a respec system based that allowed individual skills to be untrained?

Proposal:

Let's say you thought that the Basic Kinematics skill was the best skill in the game, and you raised it to Level 10, at a cost of roughly 24,500 EP. When you realized that it wasn't as useful as you thought, you would be able to untrain levels with a high cost/penalty. The cost would be 1 million NIC per current Skill Level to go down 1 Level. The penalty would be that you would only get refunded 25% of the EP that was spent on that level.

To go from Level 10 to Level 9 in our example, it would be 10 million NIC and refund 2800 EP, out of a initial cost of 11,200 to go from 9 to 10. Total cost to go from Level 10 to Level 3 (default start for a full military character) would be 49 million NIC. The total EP that you would get back from this would be 5,964.

This would allow someone to recoup some EP from a misclick or poor skill choice, but would not be a real option to completely respec and try to follow a FOTM build.

The obvious disadvantage is that by the time they could implement a full respec for characters less than a week old, my characters and many others will already be out of their first week. Even though many of us may have made poor or uniformed choices during our first week with the game, we would be stuck with EP placed in Extensions that we would not have picked if we had known better.

Using a system that would allow for modification of individual skills would allow people to correct mis-clicks or poor choices with an equal opportunity, regardless of the length of time a character has existed.

It would affect me personally because I would not be the one offered an option or opportunity that was given to someone else. Perhaps then I would be the the one not enjoying the game experience.

I realize you will be past a week if that gets implemented, but I see no other way to do this safely.  They would have to just have some "amnesty period" where anyone could respec then limit it to only noobs.  Still, that could open up a can of worms.

Live and learn, then buy a new account

Best analogy ever.

But all seriousness a respec isn't a horrible thing. I don't think anyone here wants the community to go as far as FOTM builds and what-not. After all there aren't elves in this game, thank god. Most people who messed up barely had a week with beta and the real issue was throwing 40k/20k of points at people who really didn't understand the full spectrum of choices and that the decisions they were making would impact their character for some time. Will it be forever? No, but if they REALLY *** up or thought something would be fun that isn't they should have the opportunity, even if only once, to fix it right?

I suppose the one I agree most with is Neoxx. Give new accounts a week to respec. Hell let them respec freely in that week so they can find their niche for what they want to do. This makes people happy and keeps subs instead of having people buy and say bye.

As far as letting everyone else do it? I don't see why not to for the first week after the system would be implemented to allow that. This early in the game it won't really affect the long-term player base allowing such a thing would it?...

that "just" is just not possible. EP is gained account wide. The initial EP is not for your first agent, its on your account.

if the DEVs would give out 20K ep for every new agent, you would simply start with 60k EP
(three agents)
after 24h you delete two of them and spawn another batch of 40k EP. The 2880 EP Agent-delete penelaty would be a drop water on a hot stone.