EVE New Citizens Q&A

I’ve been playing Eve for over 3 years now and this week decided to use the buddy invite to add a second player to my portfolio.

So far I’ve done 4 of the tutorial missions and must say I could write a book on the problems with them. As many have said items are given to you without training skills to match, instructions are often vague or are out of sequence with the actual mission you are trying to complete.

The worst ‘blunders’ so far;
Tells you to stop your ship by clicking the small triangle but does not say left or right.
Told to go and mine an asteroid but no mining laser provided (I did get mine from the previous mission by looting a wreck) .
Refined the Trit only to find the mission was incomplete because I did not destroy the NPC that attacked me.
Ask me to fit a small armour repairer without the skill to fit it.
Was given the Salvaging skillbook but unable to train it as I did not have Mechanics L3 and Survey L3.
Given the Contracting skillbook but according to the message this cannot be trained on a trial account.
Given the Negotiation skillbook but this needs Social L1 and I don’t have that.
Hacking needed Electronic Upgrades L3
Overdrive Injector needs Hull Upgrades L1

And so it goes on.

The biggest problem I had was doing the scanning tutorial.
Now with my main I can scan down just about anything in 5 Mins or less using just the standard Core Probe Launcher and Core probes.

But the tutorial missions took ages.
First you were not told to make a safe spot to do your scanning from (even in Empire this will get you killed).
Second there were no instructions on deploying more than one probe and nothing on how to use them to scan for a signature.
The first mission took me over half an hour to reach 100%, every scan got me 99.99% and still a red circle, in real mode I would have expected over 50% to give one or more red dots and over 80% to give green triangles to allow positioning of the probes.

It was when I didn’t follow the instructions to enlarge the scanning diameter of the probes and kept them all as deployed did the following missions complete as expected.

At this point I gave up taking notes, to be honest I much preferred the old way, here’s a ship with a miner and a gun go shoot red crosses and rocks and learn by yourself lol.

Just wanted to ask the devs to fix a problem where on creation of new characters/alts, the normal tutorial begins but not the 'first steps in eve' or whatever it is, so yo udon't get your core skillbook(s) eg armour repair, so when you get the repair tool and are asked to equip it, you can't, nor can you afford to buy the book. You need to go in to the F12 menu and start that tutorial. Seems like an oversight, but it's a regular occurrence on the rookie channel and I was also stumped by it a few times. Please fix this! Thanks :D

Granted, in the early days of EVE we litterally got a noob ship, something to shoot with (civilian of course) and a civilian miner, and that was it. Good luck kid, go have fun!

The current tutorial system is a huge improvement in that area, but there are too many errors present. If I remember correctly at some point I got a skill book for small projectile weapons when doing my Advanced Combat tutorial.
As a Minmatar, I start with that skill at level 2 (if I remember correctly) upon character creation, so why on earth do I get that skill book? And of all moments, in the Advanced Combat tutorial?

I recognize everything everyone here mentioned. I just returned after a long time being away from the game. Made myself a new toon, knowing that things will have changed quite a bit, and rather start from scratch at least knowing what it is that I am doing. Thank heavens I know part of the core mechanics, otherwise I would have gotten stuck like others have.

Oh, and the scanning tutorial is indeed the worst. I did watch one of the tutorial videos, but it would have been impossible without it to even come close to probing something down. Then at times you really have to scan for like 30+ minutes to find something. That is absurd. Also, what is a red ball? And what do those red circles mean? It is all not clear at all.

It is staggering how many players actually follow the tutorial, undock and immediately start launching probes. I still remember from the days how to create a safe spot, go there and then I start probing. Doesn't it make sense to teach rookies that habit right away? As it is now, those tutorials at times are teaching new players sure ways to get killed really fast by experienced players who pray on them. Not really the best or most fun introduction into a game if it happens to someone, I would say.

EVE already is a totally different experience from other MMOs so one cannot assume that people will 'understand'. Most likely they just get frustrated most of the times and quit.
You guys would do those new players and yourself a favor to really have a close look at those tutorials. There really is a lot of room for improvement there.

At some point in the Advanced Combat tutorial I noticed a lot of text trying to explain certain game concepts. Get rid of that, barely anyone will read that. Just make it short, to the point, and clear. Give survival tips, and refer to the Wiki and other sources for those who want to sit down and read. And yes, force a sequence. It definitely is not true that the order doesn't matter, it does at times when it comes to skill books and needed skills.

I could write more, but that has already been covered by others. Good luck improving the tutorials. Once improved, those could bring in quite a bit more people than now, for sure.

1. Dunno about you, but if someone tells me to click on something (with no modifiers, such as "double" or "right"), it is understood as "single-left-click on the thing"
2. Civilian Mining lasers are (should be) provided for you.
3. Read the mission descriptions/outlines -- Usually they say "go here, kill that guy, and get my loot"
4. You probably got that skill as a reward for the previous mission (or they screwed up and had "armour" instead of "shield")
5. yeah, and?
6. Yeah, not all the tutorials have stuff for trials. This stuff is a "carrot" to sign up.
7. See 5.
8. See 5.
9. See 5.

They don't give you everything so you can start getting familiarised with getting crap from the market...

You are bad with it then.

I did it recently with alt to get standings and that career agent is maybe fastest to do - when you know how to do it.

Before talking to agent, get scanning ship, find 2 of each site type, save location of each. (Scan near planets, took maybe 1 minute or less per site for me.)

When doing actual missions you don't need to do any scanning, just use bookmarks you created and run through missions. (Bookmarks aren't valid forever which is why you should have more than 1 each.)

But I do agree that this is maybe the most difficult mission for new players who don't know to check video tutorials.

Fab' feedback... refreshing to see new players take the time to suggest improvements (and fixes) to their experience, though one would have thought after nine years silly oversights in the tutorials would have been eliminated... as the OP would say: over to you Dev's.

Well ...

I've not run the tutorials with a new character in some months ... and it sounds like things have changed. That or I just don't remember ...

*sigh*

For me - the start that I liked best - was when they started you in your rookie ship with a miner & a weapon out in this asteroid belt and walked you through how to engage a rat and mine an asteroid. They cut that for some reason ... then they got rid of it all together. Crash Course was what that was called at one point in time.


Now ... two things ...

1) The tutorials should either give you what you need - or - tell you to buy it and how to do that. They should also test the damn things thoroughly so that new people aren't sent through low sec on a tutorial currier mission ... Gaming companies are notorious for not testing their software properly. Why bother to spend money testing something when you've got all these people playing the game you can inflict your untested software on and have them do it for you?

2) There are always going to be some people who just don't get it. Sometimes they're dumb and sometimes they just don't get something. I've had times when I just didn't understand what I was supposed to do - only to have one of those "OH!" moments - figure it out and go on from there. The problem for CCP - is that they are NEVER going to be able to lead 100% of the new people by the hand through the tutorials without some of them just not getting it - no matter what they do. These people will whine and complain and cry - the dumber ones cry the most - and these people should just be ignored. The developers shouldn't screw up a good tutorial just because someone didn't get it. In short - the developers need to be able to tell the difference between legitimate complaints and whining ... which most developers can't do.


The things that have always bothered me the most about the tutorial missions - was that:

1) Like a regular mission - it was possible to fail them.

2) Like a regular mission - you had 7 days to complete a series of missions or they timed out.


Neither should be the case.

.

I'll have to go back and check, but I think you can actually get many of the skillbooks simply by viewing the tutorials via the Help button on the NEOCOM. Normally, those are prompted during the course of Aura's missions, but you can front load them if you want. I think I did this my last run through so I could immediately start training the skills I needed while running through the tutorials.

Some thoughts:

- I think the most helpful redesign of the missions would be more "hand holding" by the agents. While EVE is a very "not hand holding" game, but I think it would be helpful in the tutorials. In every mission, I think you should fly out to meet another ship who provides instructions on what to do in a very deliberate manner. I think this would make it much easier to understand the purpose and function of certain modules, like afterburners, stasis webifiers, etc.

- It would be nice if a pop-up box showed up whenever you completed a mission, even if it was only for the training missions. I'll always remember the lesson I learned on the training mission that features the bomb in the hotel: always keep local up. When the bomb went off, I didn't have local up, so I really had no clue, as a rookie, what was happening. Then the two ships showed up and tore me apart. I had stuck around because I didn't know the mission was complete (again, I didn't have local up).

But yeah, I think there definitely needs to be an examination of the tutorial/training missions to help smooth acclimation to the game.

I totally did that a couple of days ago.

I'm a new player. Did the mining missions first, then went to the exploration missions.

So I get to probing, jump out of the station, and immediately opened up the system map to do the scanning.

Couldn't work it out at first, but I did eventually manage to stumble my way through it. But it was hard.

Note to Devs: From memory, the scanning tutorial did not mention that holding down shift would move the probe locations in union. Knowing that in advance would have saved me a lot of time.

Anyway, after about 20 minutes of mucking around with the probes I eventually stumbled on the 'start big, then reduce down on the target to improve the accuracy' thing and found my target.

I then logged out of the map before warping, because I still like watching the warp sequence...

And realized that two big-ass yellow-flagged ships were fighting just outside my docking station.

'Eeep!' I thought. 'They could have killed me!'

'Hang on a sec,' I reflected. 'This ship is insured, and I can afford to replace my mission fittings... So who cares? Let's watch.'

So I did.

I can't claim to have picked up much about what was going on in the battle. Too much going on for a newb to follow. But it was still pretty to watch.

Not only skillbooks, but also some of the modules.

I believe the general advice is that only a frigate is required for most, if not all, Level 1 missions.