Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Hi there. I had a friend sign up for Eve last year and gave him some game time and isk as a gift. While the isk helped him to buy frigs and skillbooks, he had too many frustrations with how "dumbed down" the game felt initially. I told him, "Just train up for a month or two, and we can run some low level missions together. Play for a few more months and maybe you can come out to my alliance or something." Yesterday he told me that he doesn't want to subscribe to Eve because we can only talk about it, not play together quickly like in other games. I thought of two ideas today that might help someone who was in his situation to enjoy the game more quickly.

1. I suggest that CCP - rather than let people buy skillpoints for PLEX as has been often suggested in other threads - should offer a starter pack to players either initially activating their account or upgrading a trial. I'm not sure about a price point. I'd go with 15 USD. What about an activation starter pack that comes with about a month of skillpoints to assign, say 1.5 mil or so? Some players are more intuitive and want to get to fitting and pewing with more than what comes in the tutorial missions right away. My friend described his initial fitting limitations as "beyond irritating" as he is a mechanical engineer IRL and was looking forward to tinkering with his own ship. Using this bonus sp he could have, say, quickly fit an effective destroyer or cruiser.

2. An alternative or addition would be missions run through the player's starting school that offer skillpoints to disperse. These missions could only be completed once by each character. Completing these missions could grant base skillpoints, allowing players to assign a certain amount up to a threshold like 500,000-900,000 sp. (The cost of an alpha clone) Players past another threshold (say 3 million SP?) would not be allowed to do such training missions, thus preventing veteran players from taking advantage of the system.

Veterans making alts would do these missions to quickly create useful alts and newbies could do these missions so that they could actually play with an experienced friend quicker. Being able to play with your friend quicker increases the chances that you'd stay to play the game, unlike my friend.

What about combining these two ideas?

People who are activating an account for the first time could pay that extra price to upgrade their account, create ships that could more easily pew or mine through said skillpoint-granting missions, and then end up with a character with about 2 million SP in a matter of days. I think helping players to get to that mark faster will help to increase the playerbase.

They already have cerebral accelerators, which does quite a bit for a new player.

I think new players should start with a couple of additional skills pre-injected and trained to 1 (so they can play with some fittings).

Other than that I disagree. The moral of Eve is specialized pilots are very useful quickly, while generalized pilots spend forever getting into ships.

Unless your goal is a stealth: Let me very quickly create an army of alpha clone catalyst/thrasher gankers.

I've also done the same, using a spare character slot. It did remind me eve starts off very slow, and is frustrating in the lack of things you can do at a low level of learning.

The specialized pilots aren't that useful very quickly. They aren't for several months. Let's be honest - they fly and die even if they put everything into spaceship command skills for PVP. Most decent-sized corps have complicated skillpoint and API requirements. Smaller corps or highsec corps are different but why not help the newbro to be more useful to them as well? (If they are looking to quickly work with others...)

I'm not paying 120 dollars USD to create say 6 accounts to suicide gank in highsec. If someone else wants to sounds fine to me.



It's really dreadful. My friend described his first week as confusing, limited, and torturous but occasionally "the space was beautiful."

Its both dull and overwhelmingly complex for new players, so many items, so many windows to watch at the same time. I spent incredible amounts of time when I started just reading all the info tabs on items. There are things that would make it easier, like l1 and l2 mission basic ship fits for t1. not providing modules, but just the fitting so there is less messing around. Newbro ship contracts that provide the ship and fittings for the various missions of that level ( just one and 2), so the ship fits can be just dragged and dropped.

The market interface is a scary, daunting thing to a newbie, so much stuff. if tutorial missions provide you with a module and a skill to use for a mission, could they also link a fit, with an mod by mod explanation. if you give reasons and logical steps to building a ship, people would skill into the stuff they felt was the most important point of the explanation.

I still remember trying to fit shield boosters, armor reppers AND hull reppers on the same velator my first few days. Then I grasped armor tanking, and it was freaky, letting the shields just fall away like that, and let the armor tank work.

CQ informative movies/ "communications" can help with a bit more of a humanizing feel, and you won't feel harassed by an inhuman voice. EVA sounds like a bored disclaimer reader of a PA system.

"you don't have to fit all three, pick one, and then work with that. now look how it fits, and if we add this or that, note the armor increase, and if we add another, not the diminishing returns. now, you have some decent tanking ability, but you have to keep it powered so.."

Then you buy the book and raelise you also need CPU management III to train it so you add a few hours on top of that.

To him the game was not that fun when he looked at the prospect of playing with me... eventually. I wasn't doing anything but pointing things out for him. I was just talking; ranting about things that were far down the road and around the corner. "Oh yeah, eventually you'll be able to do this." So in response to your critique, I tried to help him to create goals. But immediately there was no satisfaction for him, nothing that he could really do other than fly around in the noobship with the most basic modules. The game was a hard sell.

And in most other games you are wondering what someone else brings to the team. Look at other MMOs, RTS, etc., I do PVP. But I was looking at at least a month before he could fly a decent tackler. There is no gratification for that for him. "Oh yeah, eventually we'll see each other in space." And if he focuses entirely on that with his training, then what?

And what about making isk? If I'm not fronting isk or if he's not buying a PLEX to sell for isk, then there isn't much that he can do with the skills that you start out with. And why would he front the money when he can't do anything with the isk for weeks?

I'm saying that he had nothing to look forward to but grinding and waiting. I had to remind him to log on to change skills and study the heck out of everything. And he wouldn't see me in-game for quite awhile.

It does not take anywhere close to a month to fly a decent tackler.

It is funny how some things come back around.

Once, long ago, you got free skills allocated to you by your choices in character creation. Being Gallente got you some basic frigate and fitting skills, the bloodlines granted q few, your chioce of school a few more, and then your educational specialty capped it off.

People complained that this led to wasted skills (somehow, they were free after all), and all those choices got turned to fluff because now you start with nothing and everyone gets whatever they want from the tutorial, but they have to train it... Though the first million or so is at double speed.

You can thank those people for not being able to fit basic guns on gour newbie frigate at character creation.

My idea has long been to create implant sets that allow set levels of competance. Equivelant of level 1 in everthing that affects a hull would be cheap, Level 4 would be several hundred million into the billions depending on ship.

Giving unallocated SP to new players is bad idea.

Sure, it works in theory because everyone who trains an alt can instantly get that alt into a mining barge or a cheapo gank catalyst hero.

But a true noob will waste all that unallocated SP on the wrong skills, and STILL be completely useless. Woo! I trained Gunnery to 5! Wait... why cant I shoot missiles?!??!?!

People appreciate the game more when they have to work at being good at it. Giving stuff away only leads to more entitlement and people asking for more free stuff.