CSM Campaigns

I thought I'd take a moment to expand my thoughts on my platform regarding a 'Post new player experience'.

Ideally what I'm referring to here is the 4 month to 8 month old player, someone who is certainly playing the game, and can reasonably be considered to have progressed beyond simple tutorials and is beginning to dive into the real meat and potatoes of EVE, or at least more controversially is floundering amidst what I think we can all agree is slightly repetative highsec PVE for isk generation.

This hypothetical player is interested in maybe two or three specific items in the game, and for this situation we'll say he's interested in lowsec faction warfare, general pvp, and finding a corp that promotes the game play he's after in his time zone. Currently the resources available to him include a lot of outside Client items, including EVE Forums, Various Wiki's, some great informational videos via you tube and the Corp recruitment subforum, but this player has spent a lot of time in the various NPC corps, and has had a less than spectacular experience with the first corp they attempted to join and is now very apprehensive.

What we have here is someone who exemplifies just one of many types of 'post new player experience' players, a key demographic from the standpoint of player population health. This is the customer that enjoys the game and with support and good experiences may turn into one of us multi year bitter vets; however this same player is reaching the second wall of a learning curb that EVE is known for.

The first arguably being the first 5 days of a new player's existence where this game is hugely exciting but they have SOOOOOO much text to comprehend to just learn basic mechanics and in which CCP has devoted volunteers in the form of the ISD members to try to help orientate. The second stage I feel is where the player needs to reach outside of the game and really become a part of a community- be it a corporation, a favored blogger, a solid Advice and Q&A thread on the forums, whatever really- to move forward in their goals for the game.

So Johnny Pilot here is stuck. The In game corp recruitment tool is terrible for feedback. Something as simple as integrating a "glass door" style of rating a corp after you have departed it and verified by your history would be interesting, but frankly every corp uses a lot of the same buzzwords. Buzzwords that Johnny here doesn't really understand. He know's there are videos for pvp out there, but frankly he can't tell what's a good one to go to and becomes frustrated with the lack of general knowledge he is working with and therefore he is becoming angry with the whole thing.

We've got a potential unsub here, And while it may seem to cater to CCP, really every unsub of a character at this tier loses us a host of targets, potential corp mate, and fresh blood that could have been saved.

Our content kung-fu is strong in the player community. From Fittings Tools to Market analyzers, Coalition level Sov Maps, killboards, character skillpoint estimators, turret tracking graphs, mining guides, mission guides, guides to walk your fedo. If an eve player needs it, chances are its out there or someone is diligently at work developing a work around, patch or brand new application. A lot of it is genuinely good, some of it is phenomenally outdated, wrong or just plain bad. We expect this not so new player to sift through and dig out what they need.

I was raised on Second Genesis, Castor and Exodous... The game was hard, no one knew much of anything, I'm not angry about that. I'm a lot less concerned with making the lives of people who came after me hard and more concerned with ensuring the game continues on. I genuinely believe this game will always have a pretty significant learning curve, it's part of the nature of the sprawl. There's a massive amount of content in the game. It's target audience will never be young players due to the sheer amount of literal studying one has to do to wrap their heads around even a single nuance. Yet I vote to try to engage the second tier player with a tool they can use to search for helpful out of game content within the client.

My initial thought was to allow the community to determine what was out of date, poor advice, but most importantly what is good, solid, informative and helpful. The best means I could think of was to allow open voting for this via that same in game tool. Allowing, topical searchable tools, articles, videos etc. with strong ratings to stay at the top of the search que and relegating bad or useless content further down the list.

There's potential for meta based abuse, as is much of the game really; but I think in general the player community would find such a tool and experience useful.

Who better to say what is helpful, than the players whom are helped?


Let's build some better functionality.

Good evening, folks. I'm Med Lacroix from Repercussus, and I'm helping Roland with his campaign. We have an amazing opportunity for you to meet our candidate! On March 9, 2014 (this Sunday), at 16:00 EVE Time (Noon EDT).

1. You'll need to have Teamspeak 3 downloaded and installed. You will be joining the Repercussus server, which is at ts3.repercussus.com, default port, no password. In our public channels, you will see a town hall channel. Join it and listen in. Please note that this channel will be heavily moderated, and you will not have the ability to speak in channel unless granted privileges. We only ask that when you join, you set your username to your in-game character name; we like to know who we're talking to. I know this sounds a little crazy, but we actually welcome members of our own families, as well as neutrals, and even reds to join. Your questions and concerns are no more or less important than my very own.

2. To ask questions, you'll need to have the Teamspeak 3 chat interface open, and all questions will be asked in text form there. If your question is selected, you will be notified in Teamspeak that you have been selected, and when your turn arrives, you will be given voice access to ask the question of Roland directly. Keep in mind that my role is moderator only, and I will not be answering any questions, so don't even try.

3. This event will be recorded, and the recording will be made available to select media outlets. By joining the server, you give consent for the Roland Cassidy for CSM 9 Campaign to use your voice, likeness, and in-game character name and affiliations in any additional media, regardless of source or format. Furthermore, since this recording is not in the public domain, we ask that you seek permission before posting any part of this conversation elsewhere. Seriously, we're not mean, we just want to make sure we're receiving credit for our hard work.

Thank you for your continued support of Roland Cassidy, and in case you missed it, here's the initial announcement video (shameless plug!)

A simple bump with a bit of Campaign Propaganda:

Myself placed on a Hearthstone card as done for me by one of my awesome corp members.

http://i.imgur.com/w2o2dsp.jpg

I'd like to take this moment to thank all the people who've been working to support me as we get underway with the actual election setup. Several months of constant forum scanning, chatting with people, talking to random folks, and trying to get a finger on the pulse of what's going on in game along with the corp members, family members, old friends and new who have all stepped up to help me out so far.

Thanks for being with me on this so far and I look forward to the next few months with a lot of hope and a lot of appreciation for each and every person who takes the time to read what I'm offering with an open mind and wiliness to support it.

Just posting a quick link to my Candidate Profile on CSM Vote match.

http://match.eve-csm.com/candidate.php?id=16

Be sure to check out my profile and all of my fellow candidates up for CSM election this year.