Player Features and Ideas Discussion

So, recently, with all the talk of new player retention, I decided to talk with some of my old friends and the groups of players they played with, both the friends who stayed, and the ones who didnt.

I noticed one thing fairly common, the ones who stayed in an NPC corp for their first couple months quit, i think it was somewhere around 7 out o 10 of the people i talked with, the other 3 stayed because they left the NPC corp.

Other groups joined a corp, but it was usually a 1-man corp they made (and a few tried to recruit for), or it was a "by noobs, for noobs" corp, where the leadership was even <6months old. This was what a majority of the people I talked with did, roughly 40 of them took this approach and generally quit because they wer egiven this illusion of an impenetrable wall between new and old players, and that they would just forever be grief targets, exasperated especially in the case of the ones who joined the pure-noob corps as the CEO and leadership would refuse to teach them how to fight and instead would say "stay docked or quit".

The only way I've seen that gets players to join EVE and stay, is when they join a corp, big or large, that has experienced leadership, that is, someone whos done indy, done pvp, and generally spent a year or 2 throughout EVE actually playing it. And the poeple who played under their tutelage also branched out, did some of everything, PvP in lowsec, indy/missions in high, figuring out if they like nullsec/WH.

So on to my proposal, refuse the right to create a corporation for an account younger than a year old, instead pressuring the importance of learning in a more experienced corp first.
Or if that is too against the "sandbox" choice, then at least VERY EARLY on in the tutorial stress the importance of not only player corps, and their necessity for survival, but how to find the RIGHT corp, to check the history of the CEO/leadership, see where they have been, how they performed.

The misinformed, cowardly, and just plain idiots who always recruit the fresh noobs in highsec, and then insist on giving them a perverse, pessimist view of their lot in the game, is IMO one of the strongest threats to new player retention, and the noobs dont know any better because they arent given the tools to decide whether their CEO is worth following or not, and make the mistake of doing the "1 man corp" thing if they dont like the CEO they had, which is often just as bad.


Sorry if its a little ranty, will do a spellcheck/grammar check later tonight, its -4 degrees in my house and im trying to finish on the computer so i can hop back into bed.

TL;DR Remove the ability for misinformed noobs to elad and therefore ruin the experience of other noobs, or give noobs more clearly represented tools/criteria for picking an experienced corp leader to train them.

Meh... I disagree, especially in cases of friends playing together. I joined a corp with some RL friends immediately upon starting EvE, and that was a major pull to play.

I agree that pointing out the benefits of having people to play with greatly improves what you can do in this game, and the value of joining a corp should be emphasized, but I'm not sure I care for your implementation.

A while ago I had an idea that somewhat falls in line with the spirit of this.

Basically it was to create a "corporation startup fee" that would be substantial enough to...

- dissuade people from making a corp "just because" (the fee would be an "investment" of sorts).
- penalize people from dropping their corp and making a new one to avoid wars.


It would not outright prevent people from doing whatever they want to do... but it would introduce an "incentive" to do or not do certain things (the same as war declarations)