EVE General Discussion

So I've been running a training corp since I was 4 months into the game. You lose about 8 in 10 of the new players.

The little game I've been playing is how to make sure the people we want joining us here don't slip away because of the tedium of having a character who only has the skill points to run missions. This is a real issue in my organization.

For example I had one of my most motivated new players, a promising young man we are carefully moving up the rungs say to me the other day, "I had my first moment of boredom playing EVE yesterday." What's keeping him in the game? Not running missions for an NPC corps. That's not what kept me in the game. What kept me in the game was the metagame. Running corporations, teaching other newbies, learning security. What kept me in the game for that first 2-4 million skill points was my new friends who played EVE. More to the point, what kept me in the game was what the other players provided me with. What CCP provided me with--as someone who didn't like mission running--for that period was mostly potential. Even as a month old player I at least dimly understood that building my first starbase was a bit more than a month or two away, for example.

I want a bigger New Eden. But I have my prejudices. I like people who can play for the long term. But these people are often bored to tears during the time when pretty much all they can do on skill points alone is run missions and scrabble for ISK. (I say this knowing that not everyone wants to buy PLEX and that's as it should be.)

There's the stuff we players have relatively little control over For example getting rid of learning skills. I'm finally going to admit that CCP did the right thing by getting rid of the learning skills. As much as I loved having all of mine up to 5, there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. We leave to CCP taking out ads for EVE online. Etc.

So where do we greedy players step in? Where we stand to gain the most, with the people in their first month of playing. A group that is widely ignored, both to the detriment of New Eden at large and our various alliances and corporations. And this is somewhere I think we experienced players are missing a trick because we are too busy watching the skill points and not watching (or at least, listening to) the players behind the skill points. Fantasy versus reality. Nagging little details.

Most of the people who never make it past their trial accounts are people who decide that they don't want to play EVE, at which point our business with them is done. Almost none of the people who aren't going to play EVE will ever even speak to you. All you ever have to do is clean them out of your corp, say, once a month based on the last time they logged on. That's hardly a cost at all.

Where you and I as current inhabitants of New Eden stand to gain is by accepting everyone, even trial accounts, now we are that much more likely to gather in that smaller but critical group of people who just need to hear a friendly voice to explain to them, "There's not much you can do right now in the game." This how a trainer in the first corp I was a member of with my first character in my first month put it to me when I asked him why I kept getting killed whenever I tried anything but mission running. Suddenly the light bulb lit. It was my expectations, my timeline that was off. Not my playing ability. So I asked if I could do any volunteer work to help run the corp. I was told that there was nothing someone with my skill points could do to help run the corp. Now, as someone who had spent much of his adult life running volunteer organizations in the real world, I immediately understood that this was just not true and started to lose interest in the group I was with.

Part of your recruitment pipeline is that the CEO or officers or trainers need to talk to each and every one of the new players you get into voice comms. Make sure these people get stuff to do in addition to running missions or you run the risk of losing the most driven and talented gamers whose interests will range far wider than the limits of their skillpoints. These guys will be among the most loyal, long term and obsessive members of your corp and alliance.

I started as a recruiter shortly after starting to play EVE. My career as an EVE recruiter has been a way of blindly groping to recreate a situation that existed for about 20 days during the Spring of 2010. We were getting a minimum of 15 new applicants a day while we were in hi sec. It stopped when we left for Geminate. I've never seen anything like it before or since. I'm still mystified as to what it was I could have done to cause this because since then I went on to recreate everything I was doing and still haven't been able to get to anything quite like that. New players. Old players. Everything in between.

But I have been able to get good results enough to where we are able to keep our training corp at about 100 active members.

LINK TO COMPLETE ARTICLE

http://heartsandmindsalliance.org/index.php?option=com_kunena&func=view&catid=4&id=93717&Itemid=232

ARTICLE CONTINUED IN FIRST REPLY

Tldr. Stop teaching newbs to pve, get into the real game. They can be fast tackle in the new t1 intys at a day old.

Good topic - I think having more players is good, but I have heard folks say 30-50k players online is enough, if we had 10 times that amount (World of Tanks has >500k on a single shard), then it would be chaos, too crowded, etc.

For me, and I hear many players - Eve is a game that takes several attempts before it sticks. You REALLY want to enjoy the game but....

I think I tried and quit 4 times over 2 year period before this last time.

One key I believe to making someone's probability of staying is getting them on voice chat ASAP!

Also make an effort to get them to talk - take em in private room during training, ops, etc.

The old "my mic is broke" usually means they feel akward.

Now, this is hard in majority of Corps as there are only 1-5 active players on voice chat.

Sucks when you log in and no one is in TeamSpeak AND you are doing boring missions/mining.

If you develop a sense of community on Voice, folks will log into Voice to chat/listen even if they are playing other games.

Speaking of other games, second piece of advice - if you can....get a second monitor (worst case use alt-tab) and find you a second game that you like (Minecraft, WoT, LoL, etc.) and play that to supplement Eve. Run 5 missions, take a break and do a few battlegrounds, then back to Eve.

Another piece of advice - give newbs FREE T1 Tackle Frigates and take em on roams/ganks. They have fun, learn pvp mechanics, die, get new FREE ship, rinse and repeat.

Anyway...just some thoughts...good luck!

I found being a new player, that PvP was more boring than PvE.
Tackling isn't so fun.

About 2 weeks ago i killed a Minner minning in low sec, I convoed him afterward and had a lovely conversation, he was a resonable man and didnt curse me out or threaten to get revenge. The next day i got a mail from him askign if i can give him some pointers at learnign pvp. I not only offered him advice, i offered to take him under my wing. I gave him some pvp lessons, gave him some decent training fits, and helped him with his skill plan. Last night he joined me and a small armor BC in a fight in an armor thrasher and we kicked the butt of a larger fleet. He did die, but he told me it was the best time he ever had in eve.

Yes that was a nice recap of how i made a noob enjoy eve, but to get to the main point of how to keep people interested in eve is to mentor new players when ever we can, big alainces and shut up and follow orders just isent good enough. Also as some people said, gettign into the thick of it in eve and not babying them in high sec is a good way to make eve exciting.

Uh?


You seriously think that new players care about in-depth content? they barely knows what skills to train next. Players can only run L4s properly when they gone through at least a few weeks into the game, if not months, at that point they already have decided to "play" and subscribe.


Not a bad idea, but idk about how to actually stuff this into the existing tutorial without making it worse.


New players don't care about all of these, heck, I'm pretty sure most if not all of players who's just start trying out the game even knows what a POS is. Most of those stuff you mentioned are what you want, not what supposed to attract new players.

James 315 and his crusade or RVB are the best options for Eve-born high sec newbies.

Yeah, because nothing is more fun for a noob than getting killed so some higher-skilled player can get a cheap killmail.

This is stupid advice, and I wish people would stop giving it.

lol. Just lol.

It's... complicated. They need to learn to fit their ship without being afraid of losing their ship, and fly that ship without being jealous of other ships. All that without overexposing PvE and the Market window. Too many people let ISK run their game experience.

... Honestly, I think the tutorial should start them in some unreachable space that ends with them getting podded with their clone in one of the current rookie systems. And be exclusive to fresh new characters.