Player Features and Ideas Discussion

EVE sucks when your new.

You load up the game for the first time and are bombarded with so many buttons, controls, windows, and chat channels that your eyes just glaze over. The tutorials, while far better than they were years ago, are still complex and riddled with parts that aren't explained to well.

You are losing new players because of this.

First, why not hide the entire Overview when you first open the game then unhide it, piece by piece, as the tutorial unfolds. Because right now its just a clusterf*** of blinking controls and is really confusing. Does a brand new player need to see the Wallet, Market, Overview, Contracts, etc immediately upon starting? No. Make it similar to how World of Warcraft does it's tutorials. As the tutorial progresses more and more buttons are shown. This keeps the new players focus on what they currently need, and also gets their attention when a new control is added and explained.

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Second, all other popular MMO's have a small dedicated "starting zone" where new players can get a grasp for the game controls before they venture out into the more dangerous areas and interact with the public. I am curious why EVE doesn't implement something similar.

Why not change it so that when a new character is made you enter a simulation called Pilot's Training. 5 to 10 isolated systems for each race where everything is virtual and is not connected with the rest of EVE whatsoever. Think the Matrix. When you finish the tutorial you "wake up" in your Pod and join the rest of us in space in your valiant new Noob Ship.

This environment allows for some rules to be bent. A major problem with EVE is that once you finish the tutorials there's nothing blatantly apparent to work towards. A lot of new players need goals, mainly a ship that they want to train for. So players could be allowed to fly bigger ships such as Battleships or Battlecruisers in lieu of skill requirements in these tutorial missions. Maybe have the final missions be some epic arc where they need to fly a Titan and Doomsday a huge enemy fleet. This would give them a taste of "the awesome" and get the excited enough to want to continue playing despite the crazy learning curve.

It also would make the tutorial missions more engaging and exciting. Right now, they are boring and often skipped which means certain death to a new player. Why not spice it up and outline the relationship between the different races while your at it? In the current tutorial there is a mission called The Stand where you get blown up by a huge fleet of NPC's. Meh. What if instead you were in an Apocalypse, accompanied by a large Amarr fleet, and the NPCs were Jove. Viola, you're now in The Battle of Vak-Atioth. Your ship still gets blown up, but you also learn about the Amarr, the scary Jove and get to see the excitement of fleet battles.

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If CCP wants to increase their subscription amount they need to address the insane bounce rate their game has. EVE is known as the most complicated f****ing game ever. Whenever people complain on other MMO's about something being hard there is always a "Go play EVE" remark in there somewhere.

One of the biggest ways they can fix this is to make an awesome tutorial for new players. EVE is a stunning game, and if the tutorials could teach new players better while exposing them to a huge Fleet Battle, the rich Economy, the amazing Story and the many different kinds of ships I think they would get a significant rise in player numbers.

CCP, stop hiding the awesome and confusing your new players. Instead, get them hooked from day one to this addicting game.

Well, most new players are impatient (I sent invites to a couple of my friends recently), they don't have the patience to wait months before they can do something fun (pvp, higher difficulty pve).

As they start, they're left doing only missions, which all feel the same (shoot stuff), and that just doesn't work for people who want to get in a game and immediately see explosions/dead zombies.

Changes which would expose people to higher varieties of EvE gameplay such as incursions, wormholes, low/null sec pvp, FW pvp and similar may increase their interest, but at the end of the day, EvE is for people who have patience, and that would feel a lot like false hope.