EVE General Discussion

An early filter is good only if it's accurate.

IMO EVE selects reasonably effectively, but excludes far too many genuine prospects.

My personal impression is that much attention is paid to the "New Player Experience", but that it's unwisely limited to the first 30-odd days of play.

A player is "new" until they are economically self-sufficient, and feel comfortable with where they are going - meaning they have the knowledge and experience to make a realistic plan, and be confident they can achieve it. 30 days is enough for some, but in general, it takes far too long in EVE to get to that point.

IMO this could be fixed relatively cheaply. The current "NPE" and Career Agent Missions work (mosty) ok, and don't need to be extended to provide a longer period of structured play. But entry into many of the possible activities in EVE, especially those that generate income, needs to be "smoothed out".

To actually "get EvE" is not something you can teach, it's something you have to manage on your own. This requires the right mind set and the patience and imagination to look for. All the scripted stuff can teach you some basic mechanics, but not what EvE actually is about, and maybe is even a distraction, because it gives the false illusion of similarities to other games ... I fell for this as well in the beginning and took me about 6 month to "enlightment".

It's because they just halfed the learning speed. Alphas are training slower than old accounts did before they got rid of training skills.
Trial accounts had normal training speed and access to all racial ships. There was no reason to remove the ability to fly what you want when the old trial gave you a chance to get into whatever you wanted and have training speed to be able to actually get skills done in order to try things out. The current alpha clones are a massive step backward from old trial accounts in an actual trial regard. You can try anything and it takes forever to do what you can. Even if you only had 2 weeks before you got more done in 2 weeks than you'll be able to accomplish in 2 months as an alpha until ccp fixes the training speed issue. You can't learn to play if you're locked out everything ans just waiting for one skill to train that takes 2 times as long to finish for no good reason.

Any alpha clone is going to be exponentially behind current players because one has can train much faster in multiple areas.
Making a new npe won't fix player retention if there's a paywall right after it which is how it is now. And that's not even taking implants into account. Which makes the exponential gap over time even wider. Alphas might as well be back at 10 for all attributes and omegas are up in the high 20s low 30s on average. People dont remember just how bad it was back when there were learning skills and we all started out with crap attributes unless you were an achura.
The double speed training for omegas is an outright lie by ccp. It's the normal training speed and they shafted all the truly new players who are worse off than they were as trial accounts even if they dont know it. They'll never catch up.

Did you forget that alpha clones are also locked to ~5m SP? Even if they did increase alpha training time. Alphas will always he limited in comparison to Omega. The only difference is that they will run into that wall after a few months instead of the 6+ months or so now.

Yes for some people they can jump right in. Find a good Corp etc etc in very short order. But others take longer. I spent years without a Corp because it always took me a while to find a group of people I wanted to fly with. Often I would come back for a month. Maybe two. And then leave because I didn't want to keep paying for the game just to look for a Corp. (And wasn't having fun without one)

The reduced training time and the SP limit work together to allow an alpha plenty of time as a free player to get settled in while still preventing alphas from being abused as free alts.

I identified the 1st part of your problem as soon as I read that. EVE is not like other MMOs it's not about 'catching up'. You can compete (if you are smart and willing to innovate a little) from the 1st week.

Other MMOs have 'levles' because they know that people have a bad psychological reaction when they feel like they are 'behind' other people. EVE doesn't do that, EVE is a game for people who don't CARE where they are relative to other people (for the most part).






This is problem number 2. EVE is a game for people who LIKE not knowing what to do and use that to drive their exploration of the game. Other MMOs kind of do this for you, or make it to where you don't feel too lost. EVe WANTS you to feel lost.



The highlighted part is problem number 3 for you, EVE takes patience. I've been playing 9 and a half years and I STILL don't know some things (I learned just last year that ctrl + shift + click delocks a target......) People are still coming up with new ways to fly ship, kill other ships and do PVE in ever faster/more profitable ways, even in an almost 14 year old game.



Some regulars around here get mad at me when I say this stuff, but I don't say it to be mean, I say it because it's the truth as I see it. EVE Online is a game that caters to certain character traits ,among them patience, challenge seeking (ie seeing things as challenges instead of seeing them as obstacles), the willingness to both compete and cooperate at the appropriate times, and the ability to defer gratification.

Your post suggests you lack , in some measure or another, the requisite traits needed to enjoy EVE. In other words, EVE just isn't for you. There is nothing wrong with that, it's not crime, my own cousin (whom I grew up with like a brother and who is also a gamer) hates EVE and loves League of Legends (which I hate). Everyone is different.

You need to find someone to team up with. A good alpha corporation. Or you are just to sane to play.

The publicity and raw number of new trial might draw in some new blood but it will indeed not be a great source. The available player base seem to have been tapped by now.

I read that too in the beginning, its excellent.

Here is another great one that I have read several times:

Eve Online Exploration Guide.

The main reason you dont like this game is fear.

I had it, still have it a bit.

There have been many eloquent explanations of why the OP is not suited to the game. It's missing the point.

OP is gone. Might there be information here that would allow CCP to make the game better, especially more likely to attract and retain new players?

I think so.

I see no such useful information in the victim-blaming. It's very well developed of course - but then again established players have been selling this negative vision for a very long time.

How does a person not liking a video game make that person a "Victim" of something? If that's the case I need to sue Blizzard, because WoW victimized me years ago...

Every time I read the word "make the game better" I think "better for who". EVE is fine for people who like what it has to offer, and some dude who played for 4 days isn't going to tell CCP anything they don't know about their game that they started developing 17-18 years ago.