EVE General Discussion

Not for everyone. I've been around maybe 5 weeks and already having fun playing around on the market, hanging around the RvB battlegrounds making some great (newbie) ISK salvaging, doing some PvE to get combat experience and joining a corp and making friends. There is PLENTY for new players to do, we just can't do it as efficiently as you guys yet, and I'm fine with that.

Alternative TL;DR

He talks alot, but doesn't say anything.

Thank God, there might actually have been a change announced from the last 10 years of Database........ehmmm Spreadsheet........euhm no that neither..... oh I mean Eve Online.

I really consider those rudimentary skills, however that's beside the point. A month you say? Well, stop and realize that for most new players that still qualifies as "too friggin' long". And yes, to a degree this is "instant gratification" or "entitlement" mentality that so many folks here hate so much. But guess what? If you want new players, that's what new players want these days! And if you don't deliver it, guess what? They'll play some other game. Hence EVE's stalled 450k subs, 2/3 of which are alt accounts, despite a year and a half of exclusively FiS content since Incarna. What does that say?

If CCP continues with their "more of the same, and hope for the better", I don't see it getting better. I see a lot of 'more of the same'. And yes, for some folks that's enough. More than enough, actually. You just won't attract new players with it. Just like you won't attract new players with a nice shiny tutorial that then drops them into the same 'ol game that's been around for nearly 10 years, with obscure, broken or outdated mechanics at every corner.

Please explain to me how a day old newbie who can barely fit guns, navigate the UI, set up an overview properly, etc can be "useful" or get anything meaningful out of the game. As bad as the guys who say it takes a year to get the needed skills to play the game people like you and Malcanis need to stop spreading the opposite line of "instant usefulness".

Maybe a day or week old can be useful as cannon fodder/meat shield for your 0.0 blobs but, not for much else as far as anything fun for the newbie is concerned.

I believe the appropriate phrase is 'hero tackle'

Another is 'Red vs Blue'

Ask the Goons or TEST. They do it on a regular basis.

From what I've heard: you have him run the tutorials while the application goes through. You explain to him how clones work, and deathclone-jump him to your home system. You give him a link to a ready-made newbie overview and explain to him how to import it. You explain roughly what the settings do and how the tabs differ from each other (and you give him a link to the wiki explaining it). You then throw every rank-1 and -2 skillbook at him, with the ships and equipment to go with it, give him an idea what to train and in what order (while at the same time explaining the concept of prerequisites and how to read them off the info sheet when, inevitably, he'll try something in the wrong order). With his new frigate and small guns (im)properly fitted, you run of to explode somewhere.

What he gets out of it is a community and some instant action that ends in hilarious misfortune and a complete lack of the “come back in a year” stigma that makes people quit early or get into the game too late. What usefulness you get out of it is that you now have a new member that will log in tomorrow for more fun; who has figured out that asking question doesn't hurt, nor does the loss of a ship; and who might actually listen to further advice since the first things you said were reasonably sensible. One day, because you did all that stuff at the very beginning (at pretty much zero cost, for the miserly gits out there) that guy will get the infinipoint on that enemy titan; hear the rumour of the CSAA being ready to spit out a new ship; gate in the entire fleet when it is most needed; valiantly go green on his triage module to get the job done just in time.

The problem is, though, that we're not saying anything about instant usefulness (beyond the use of having N+1 members in your group). We're saying that it's 100% incorrect that it need take [random ridiculously long time] before you can do stuff in the game — something that holds true for anything you want to try your hand at except maybe capital ships (and there's an argument to be made why this is actually a good thing in that one case). We're saying that the whole “train to V before doing X” philosophy is toxic to new players, when the reality of the situation (courtesy of the brilliant skill system) is more along the lines of “if you want to try X, start to train to I and then see if it's something you like… it takes all of 15 minutes”. Incidentally, 15 minutes is a good amount of time to look through various wikis, blogs, and community websites to get a hang of what you're about to do…

We're also saying that, when properly cared for, a new player will only ever become more “useful” over time, but that will only happen if you make him understand that even from day 1, he can come along and play rather than sit and mope in some miserable Caldari Navy station and just watch the SP slowly tick by while waiting to get his CNR (or whatever he's been tricked into believing the ultimate ISK ship is these days).

For my part, I can say all of the new sounds and UI changes feel very intuitive. I found myself knowing what little beeps and blips and flashes meant very quickly, and appreciating the information that they conveyed.

This noob gets Eve, was motivated to get off their backside and do the research to make their early days a success, sounds like they're having a ball and isn't demanding instant gratification, this is the type of person that sticks around in Eve and the type of person that we, the players, want to see playing Eve. The instant gratification mob are of course welcome to start playing, but instant gratification just isn't the Eve way, working long and hard for something makes it so much more satisfying when you achieve it, if it's given to you on a plate it's not an achievement or satisfying.

The NPC corp channels do have the occasional bit of wisdom, generally it comes from alts, the people who've never left the corp they started in are the ones saying you must train everything to V, you need x million SP to PvP etc, they're saying things like that because they don't know any better, as for people saying that the skill queue is what kills Eve, be thankful we don't have learning skills these days, in the case of those it was advisable although not mandatory to get those out of the way as soon as possible due to the boosts they gave to the speed of skill training.

Welp, they gave PvP Vets the ability to Bounty Day-Old Noobs (always there but now encouraged), so I'm not sure of the validity of the eponymous headline.

Thats all very well thought out, but the reality is the server pop is peaking at 40k and is down to 25 the day after the expansion. 25k. Eve hasnt even got short term appeal to millions of people who literally burn their money every day on awful awful mmos. Dress it up how you like - the issue/s preventing new players subscribing and sticking around are pretty apparent to anyone who starts a new character: it takes too long to be useful/unlock content and there is 'nothing to do' except wait for months and months to unlock content you are then really underwhelmed by. The so called sandbox is just a glorious way of saying: there is nothing to do. Unless you join Goons or Test obv.

The explosion of popularity of the Chinese server which iirc is currently free to play says it all. People will come and play Eve and they will accept long waits to unlock content, but they won't pay a monthly sub for it. They quite rationally look at the skill queue that says '172 days' to X and say thats $60 **** that! Since Eve is so complex and can be so time consuming to grind isk in, that immediately alienates a lot of people who can't justify $15 month (what they probably pay for their mobile phone tariff) to just not play the game or be blown up by people who do ad nauseum until they can.

Sperging in rifters isnt what the marketing people are selling and it patently isnt what people want to buy.