Best Solution I can think of, leave the Battlecruiser and Destroyer skills as combined skills; if you want consistency, make these combined skill prerequisites (for Battleships and Cruisers, respectively). So the skill tree looks like this:

Racial Frig IV ---> Destroyer IV ----> Racial Cruiser IV ----> Battlecruiser IV ----> Racial Battleship IV

For those who skipped the Battlecruiser and/or destroyer skills, give them the skills to level IV.
For those who have them trained, give them 363K free skill points.
Leave Racial Cruiser IV (and consequently Racial Frigate IV) as prerequisites for Racial Command Ships.

This is more reasonable than 6M sp free.
(I have started training BC V on all my alts. :-))

it is a waste if it's only trained as a capital ship pre requ.
my carrier pilot for example havs 2 BS5s but doesnt fly any BSs at all and has no large gun skills or other BS relater support skills, he has them purely to be able to fly carriers.
after these changes, those 2 BS5s turn into 60 days of totally wasted training time.

A lot of people have posted concerns about skill point inflation. The argument typically goes something like this:

This is the thread for discussing the dev blog and possible ship roles, before those poor example roles end up coded into the game by someone "just testing" :)

There should be more discussion about ship roles, less about skill points.

GG*also, since I missed it the first time:You're quite right: this is not a matter of inflation GGv it's actually a case of equilibrium. Yes, the amount of SP goes up, but so does the cost of the skills GGv end result: nothing happens.

Ok, that's not entirely true. What actually happens is that people get more expensive clones. The entire notion of GG#SP inflationGG# highest on the idea that total SP has any value. It doesn't. In fact, total SP is a detriment because it has exactly one effect on the game: it determines which clone you need to use in order not to lose SP. Giving people SP is not the boost Evanga thinks it is GGv it's actually something of a nerf since you gain nothing from it and lose a fair amount of additional skillpoints you can keep in your clone.

As long every single player in EVE gets same amount of these NEW skill points, this is not a problem.

We dont want this!

Changing skill requirements, Yes. Being able to train for, for instance, recons without having to train for covert ops first. That I can agree with.

Changing skill progression, NO. One of the appealing aspects of training for ships was that once I'd trained racial frigate and destroyers, I'd get access to ANOTHER race worth of destroyers, for free, once I trained up the racial frigate.

With these changes, you'll raise the bar for crosstraining further, to a point where it is even more daunting for new players to crosstrain, and makes it even more difficult for them to find useful roles.

Take a new PVPer, for instance. By training caldari and minmatar frigate, caldari and minmatar cruiser, plus battlecruiser, the player would have access to tackling frigates, t1 cruisers including ospreys, blackbirds, stabbers and ruptures, as well as two excellent and newbie friendly battlecruiser hulls, namely hurricanes and drakes. All this from a total of five skills.

With the changes, the same new player would now be forced to train eight skills, raising the bar for skilltraining by 75% and making it more difficult to find useful roles. The incentive to crosstrain would be largely eliminated, as it'd take almost as long to train for a single race's battlecruisers as two races under the current scheme.

Ship tiers: If ship tiers force you into balancing issues, you're looking at the problem in a completely wrong way. The ship tiers should not limit your balancing efforts. Don't make the mistake in thinking that a higher tier "must be better". That's not necessarily so. If anything, tiers should serve as a guideline for the general roles a certain group of ships have, for instance that all ships within a tier are designed as high DPS active tanking platforms, another tier being medium DPS buffer platforms etc, but not that they should be "better" than the previous tier.

It's not even as complicated as that.

As I keep reiterating every time new players come and complain about how they can never GG#catch upGG% with old players, SP amounts don't really matter GGv what matters is ability. SP is a way to unlock those abilities, and as long as the abilities of two people are the same, the amount of SP is irrelevant. Same goes here: it doesn't matter if every EVE character gets the same amount of SP GGv what matters is that every EVE character gets the same abilityGG*

After reading all this, I have come to the conclusion:

I must be the only person in eve to train bs 5 for normal bs

Carry on flameage

And I disagree with passion as after the abilities have been "unlocked" to match the previous training state, the players who did not have those abilities at level 5 will have to spend 4 times longer training them to get where L5 clients got without any extra cost.

We'll find a suitable reimbursement that makes everyone happy. I'm not terribly fussed about giving away a little extra if it moves we move the ship progression system into a better place.

The skill requirement changes for destroyers and battlecruisers is very tricky to tackle indeed. We fully acknowledge having to re-train for ships you can already fly is not appealing at all.

As said in the blog, nothing is set in stone yet, we are considering various reimbursement options as this is still quite a high level change.

EDIT SO PEOPLE CAN SEE IT:

• New destroyer and battlecruiser skills would be same rank than existing ones
• We have a "if you could fly it before, you can fly it now" philosophy, that means properly reimbursing/giving skills not to leave people stranded in ships they could fly before the change. Again, nothing is fixed yet.

MOAR STUFF HERE FOLKS (skills, confusing picture, apology to CSM).

Oh no you are not. Maxing up something you actually enjoy flying seems foreign to some people.

No! No!

Nonononononononono.


No!

We dont want this! please dont make this change!

Total SP tied up in generic skills : 8,457,600

Does this change mean: No more Drake/Cane blob during 1 week, while people retrain ?
Nice idea ! Hamsters will be happy !

Does this change mean: No more Drake/Cane blob during 1 week, while people retrain ?
Nice idea ! Hamsters will be happy !

Just to put this in terms CCP will understand. "incarna and nex store was a better idea than this" Hope this helps.

No, only 1,552k GGv BC V and Dessy III. The rest are not being being split up. Some of the T2 role skills will have their prereqs reduced so as to not require lower-tier skills (HACs no longer requires AFs; CSes no longer require HACs and Logis; Recons no longer require CovOps), but that's all.

No drake or cane blob for a week or two...
No command ships, recons, logistics, dictors, hictors, ceptors, blah blah blah for that same week or ten..... Oooh, yeah, seeing where this is going yet ? ;)

As I said above, CCP are gonna have to be damn careful how this is applied.

Hrm....

Okay, so if it's 1,552,000 SP tied up, then to return everything else to it's current state, I would need either a reimbursement of 6,208,000 SP to reapply to the racial BC / Dessy skills across the board, or recieve all of the racial BC / Dessy skills at V and III respectively as to not take away from what I can already fly at a certain level of skill.