ne of the most common questions I received from friends and corp-mates upon first beginning to play EVE Online was "Have you trained up your learning skills?" This soon led to me buying the required skillbooks and training the skills, sometimes without a thorough knowledge of precisely how said learning skills functioned.
And now, as detailed in this developer blog and covered in this FAQ, CCP is removing learning skills altogether, along with the one hundred percent learning speed bonus that was attached to new accounts for the first month.
In practical terms, much of this won't actually change the capabilities of my character. Learning skills merely increase character attributes, which in turn decreases training time, and the base attributes will be increased with the changes. This change means one less thing for new players to worry about, especially since they may not understand exactly how skill training functions while trying to comprehend the numerous other aspects of the game. I certainly found my first few months in EVE to be full of a particular quality of confusion.
The fact that all of a player's time spent on learning skills will be refunded is also pleasing. In a game where I've seen players plan out their future skills for a hundred days or more to be able to use a new ship, the value of planning the skill queue so as to most efficiently reach that goal often involved some level of training learning skills, as the time spent on such would be surpassed by the benefits.
While I've seen a few complaints about the new system so far, I hope that it will soften the learning curve for players new to EVE — although that might as easily be achieved by flashing "Do not fly what you cannot afford to lose" on every login screen.
