wautd wrote:New players start with 2 million skillpoints these days, which allows them being competitive a lot sooner (the bastards). Since almost for a year now afaik.
Don't really care about skills, those were always silly because all you needed was time. Interesting they chose to go that route though.
Regarding cash, you can but don't need to grind to get some buck. There are more ways than just mining/npc'ing.
That hardly answers the question. When last I joined, the only way to get to the "Good Bits" was to join a player alliance out in 0.0 and those were always funded in bulk by large scale mining ops. Player Owned Stations were a HUGE waste of time, and the only ways to make any serious amount of money were grind-tastic.
+ I'm near broke most of the time. I usually get bored when I have too much money
So short answer, no. Bored with too much money means you do boring shit to get money in the first place, which of course means that doing the fun stuff (PVP), is of course still expensive as it ever was, which means the death penalty is still fucking insane.
As an example, the latest annual PvP tournament has clearly shown that cheap tech 1 cruisers can still be a formidable force. So unless you're idea of fun is having the rarest and most expensive gear all the time, money isn't everything to have fun
Now, when you say that, do you mean that 1v1 or 2v2 cheap tech 1 cruisers can stand up to more expensive tech 2 cruisers and win, or do you mean something else? Last I checked, T1 ships with baseline T1 gear was utter shit most of the time, and the only way to stay competitive was to get either named or T2 components and usually named was the way to go because it had lower requirements than T2 for the top-tier shit, but of course was so fucking expensive it blew your mind.
Meanwhile, let's not forget that even lowly Tech 1 cruisers are pretty fucking expensive. When I last played, the cheapest (and, naturally, worst) was around 3 million ISK. The baseline combat models, like the Vexor, Thorax, etc. were 5-7 million ISK. Components, of course, were more, and uninsurable, much like T2 ships.
Now, you get shit money and risk-return for piracy, 0.0 Alliances are jumpy as hell about new members they don't know for obvious reasons, mining is boring as hell and just doesn't pay well in secure space (not even ice mining, because, at least when I played, POS's sucked ass). Running NPCs could lead to crazy cash, but only if you got and sold higher level implants all the time, and that took impressive amounts of grinding. If you managed to luck out and get a good high-tech blueprint, you could make gobs of cash...IF you grinded the fuck out of the needed base materials needed to build the thing, or if you MAYBE sold BPCs (but they gimped that a while back, hooray limited research slots with increasing costs). Sure, you could do the "instances", which got retarded after a point because they spawned so many ships the game couldn't actually HANDLE the combat without lagging to a halt, and of course were prime targets for PC pirates. Running asteroid belts could work, of course, but the really good shit, again, was out in 0.0, which of course was dangerous as fuck.
Of course, judging by your comment about being constantly broke and your other one focusing on cruisers, I'm guessing you have maybe a battleship to do some Level 4 missions with in secure space so you can fund playing with cruisers on a regular basis.
). Sadly, a third not-so-noob-and-anti-intyfitted-battleship eventually helped them out and blew me to smithereens. Good fun tough, skirmisch took a whole 15 minutes