I agree Arga, but I personally think we should let people have fun, and try all kind of sub-optimal builds.
Without a soft respec, people would be able to try all kind of different builds, knowing they aren't making any permanent mistakes.

And yes, I do consider that you can make mistakes. As example, I learned and leveled energy transfer. I am never going to use that skill ever, yet it's not worth reseting my whole account for only 2 days of EP. I also made mistakes with my insurance skills. And I'm never going tu use my light bot skills now that I have a collection of mechs.

A soft reset to fix small mistakes is fine.

However, a big hard reset of everything is just wrong in my eyes. People can exploit this to first, level everything related to light bots.... then once they have enough total EP, they can simply reset everything, and jump into a fully optimised Mech.
This is way too convenient.

The problem isn't that people can do this, the problem is that light bots are nigh useless the vast majority of the time. It's a balancing issue, not a valid argument against a feature attempting to increase the dynamic of the game.

I admit I was wrong here but i will throw it out to the learning curve.  I will try to explain what happened..................

I started 2 more "alts" on my one agent account.  I only just started them and did nothing with them and had them less than 48 hours.  Once i realized the pooling effect of EP earning and how it works I reacted by deleting those accounts not understanding the effect as I do now.  I ended up with -5176 EP on my remaining original bot!  It deducted the cost of deletion from my one remaining account. I did not recall seeing any message other than the standard and certainly not "you are deleting and any unavailable EP will be bumped to your main account"  My initial error was I did not realize the fee related to "alts" and I understand (I think) the rationale for the penalty.  Of course the penalty is a lot worse when the account is brand new since there was no EP earned on the accounts in the short time they were active.

As to my one allowable reset I took it early on in the game when i realized I was all FUBAR when first starting so instead of just getting a new account i reset.  (I could have obtained another account then of course.   Tough luck that I didn't realize that deleting the two "alts" would have such a cumulative negative effect you say?  I never would have started them if I had understood.

Anyway I can see somone (perhaps) doing the same thing so here is a warning and a request for the masters to put my EP back and forgive me for not understanding the application of the rules.  As the timeline shows the penalty is applied far to early in the game when all i am talking about is cancelling the "alts" I created a short time before.  It was my intention to start another agent after deleting them since I did not understanding the pooling mechanism of EP.

I gained no advantage from my action nor was any intended so no foul no penalty i say.  I appreciate the forgiveness and thank you in advance.  I don't mind begging in public either.

Sorry for the confusion. 

Really all i wanted to do was delete the two additional agents i had just created foolishly since I realized the way to get another character for industry was to start another account, not create two new "agents" which would share in the EP pool.  I went ahead and deleted them not realizing that I would lose the EP on my main agent.

Since I am new to the game and coming from another MMO known as EVE I poorly presented my story using improper terms.

My bad.  It's just pixels so definately not even close to world ending,  but the grind to regain 4 days is a harsh lesson where there was no gain intended or received.   See you in 4 days i guess.

Just for the record, we have a confirmation box saying the deletion will cost you 2880 EP both when deleting a character and also when creating a new one.
And yes, like Arga said, having negative EP will not prevent you from playing in any way.

thought i would put my 2 cents into this subject as it relates to me.

this is a very complex game for new players even old eve vets like me tend to make mistakes the 1 reset is nice but it does leave open one flaw.

that is new players don't realy know what they want to do as they dont' know the game yet.

i had a char even made 3 before realy understood what thos popups meant. i did't understand which was the vital extensions that would help my char progress the best in the direction i wanted to go spending the first 20k went all wrong.

being I did create 3 chars on the account I would have had to wait a week to delete all the chars on the account by this time the expansion launched so did't get to use my free reset in the old system.

anyhow i finaly did the reset after the patch. but now I am in the spot were the path I chose doesnt realy suit my playstyle.

this leaves me with two choices wait another month and train into another color bots as green skills dont realy cross over to yellow etc.

or do another reset which will cost me 11k ep just over 7 days of lost ep. which isn't alot when consider that it would take 667 days to  raise all needed combat electronics and eng skills to level 10 not counting the optimazation ext.

anyway the way I see it to make life easier on new players could do one of three things.

1. give new players 4 free respecs in the first 45 days the account is active this would allow them to try all 3 factions and the 4th one to make the final choice.

2. make a way new players can get on to test server is there is one and try out the diffrent extensions there not sure how this could be done maybe make chars who start on test start with 45 days worth of ep + the 20k ya start with.

3. make a small offline sim of the game that would give new players 100k of ep that can be reset as much as they like put in a simple term free mods in and robots in the market  and 4 spawns outside the term that would give them something to fight to test on.

just some thoughts as I know this type of game is hard to understand for the first time player and even some eve vets and its very time consumeing if you mess up and most people this day and age have the attention span of a fly if you tell them that sorry wait another week and you will be able to fix that mistake. most will just chose to end there sub

My office is full of foul smelling smoke, so I'll try not to be too trolley, between coughing.

It seems like this comes up with each 'rush' of new players, first was the trial accounts and now the expansion.

What I'm reading is that players shouldn't have any responsibility for thier choices. If they choose something, they should be able to change their mind without penalty.

Having a game without consequences is OK, there are lots of them out there that are just 'fun' to play. Games with consequences are more like real life, like chasing a maid around your hotel room, where you can't just say "Sorry, I messed up" and have everything reset.

The question is which game do you want to play?

When players start asking for changes that effect the basic principal of the game, then they really don't want to play that game.

Of course as a community we want more players, this means that the barrier to entry into the game can't be too high, but we also don't want the flavor of the whole game changed either.

The question then, is how to keep the barrier to entry low, while maintaining a game that has consequneces?

One way is to reduce the number of 'choices with consequences' that player has to make.

In decreasing order of severity:

  a)  Dont allow additional characters, only 1 character per account
  b)  Require 30 days of played time before alts can be created
  c)  Change the character deletion method around, and 'charge' 2880 EP to create the character

If the game removes the Alt function, they can also remove the 20K starting EP, and just give starting players the equivalent higher levels.

Players want choices, but they don't want those choices to matter? So remove the 'choices' and let them play for a while, then make them decide. The 'downside' would be that they can't earn or advance their character until they choose.

Mouse

Technically there is no difference between a 'main' and an 'alt'.

In order to provide a more enjoyable starting experience, players have the opportunity to earn NIC and items.

... can you see where this is going?

If you can create and delete characters without penalty, the new character experience would need to be adjusted so it would not be productive to 'recycle' alts. So you now create a harder start for everyone to correct an issue that only effects some players.

This isn't about if an Alt character is useful or not, because it can be, but if it causes the new player experience to be broken and the only remedy is to dilute the persistance of the game experience for everyone, then the question is it worth giving up for that reason.

there are two reasons for the agent delete-costs
a, exploit of the training assignment to collect a bunch of NIC and a stock on free items
b, to put a cost on alt-agent metagaming.

actually, i like the idea of having to pay the 2880 EP to create an agent.

To bad its already to late for implementing a system like it was in Tabula Rasa, where youre Character name consisted of two parts -
A variable forename for each character and
a fixed surename that all characters shared and could only be set for the first char on an account (you had to delete all your chars to enter a new surename)

The new player missions should be what their name suggests, once per account, I did not realise they were actually new-character missions. Not hard to change though