EVE General Discussion

Well, yeah. I know that EVE is Old men online ruling the cruel world and stuff, but I think i've seen some efforts to small new guy department. Trouble is, these efforts went wrong direction.
Let's start with NPE.

Here is a list of troubles:
1)Game forces a new guy into a long "Do nothing and listen" sequence from the first second thus fails to get interesting.
2)Game forces you to pick up useless items yet fails to take them out of their hands.
3)Game actually fails to give the meaning of "fight or flight".

Changing sequence a small bit and problems are gone - drop the rat on the guy from the first second. Then you instantly instructed how to lock and fire. That saves the new guy from "just graduated" dialogue while doing nothing, gives the first thrill and first beef with said rats.

Then you are instructed to pick up survivors and DROP THEM IN a CAN shaped like shuttle. They bring up the trouble of Warp disruptor blocking ability to buzz off. When you start shooting the warp disruptor (And get it stripped from shields) the mooks drop in (Lock, orbit, shoot and loot sequence), again at armor stripped. Finally, when they get the warp disruptor destroyed, the big (Battleship sized) rat jumps in it throws strong racial EWAR on you (Well, web for minmatars). This rat should have enormous tank rookie has no chance of breaching. Commander then tells you to flee since not much you can do about it.

This way rookie learns that not all the fights give you chance to win.

When you arrive to station, you get the blueprint for civilian cyno, some materials to craft it and some fuel. Then, after "you are just a rookie, but in desperate times even jack in the hole helps" speech you are given civilian armor plate/shield extender and told to return to the Big Bad and lit the Cyno.
Big guy starts blasting after litting the Cyno and it hurts a lot. But you do it for fleet of friendlies coming in... and when you are deep in structure, fleet enters the battlefield, popping the bad guy.

This way rookie learns that friends are power and there are means to help the friends to help you.

And that's it for the first part. I think I'll wait a bit to see if people even care.

I don't think there will ever be a good new experience for EVE, you'll always learn the most from other players. That said, the NPE is better than it was in the past (remember bein told how to manually move in space then being set free on the universe?)

The other part of the NPE as Wolfgang stated is to find friends to teach you. The speed at which this game evolves is incredible in terms of tactics, friendships and alliances/dalliances, etc. This evolutionary speed, something thats intrigued me for a very long time, makes anything set in stone in the NPE almost worthless by the time CCP would create a new one and leave people still feeling as if they hadnt been "taught" enough of New Eden.

Frankly I would love the NPE to simply be a matter of a childs wonder at these marvelous capsuleers, these demigods that rule the heavens that graduates into a teenagers drive and fascination with getting to be one of the elite chosen and brings the player character from their worlds backwaters or shining metropolitan areas to try their hand at becoming one of the elites. And have it be this WiS style direction filled with all the Eve lore, interaction, learning, cut scenes, and player and CCP made videos that feels more like an interactive movie or like a themepark MMO that ends as you are built in a lab into a pod pilot and wake up in your CQ for your new life in Eve.

To tell the story as you learn the game. As someone thats grown up in New Eden and not just a visitor/refugee running away from every cop on the corner or having to buy passage from some shady group to die on a beach.

I agree with a lot of your criticisms here, like that the NPE doesn't take the items away or do anything with them, but this is not a good idea.

A new player experience *needs* to cater to the lowest common denominator. If you chuck someone into a game and say "here, kill a thing!" when they have no idea how to even control their ship then you're going to frustrate far more players than you hook. The reason for this is simply that being faced with a threat and not having the tools (in this case game knowledge) to deal with it frustrates more than it engages, by a wide margin.

Also not a huge fan of the cyno idea. First off it gives players the idea that a cyno can be lit in High Sec, it also has NPCs doing something in place of any kind of direct player action, both of which aren't a very Eve thing.



This is a flatly incorrect assumption. We can actually see new account creation at http://eve-offline.net/ and CCP's own statements on the matter also contradict your assumptions. Tons of people try out the game every week, and the vast majority of new accounts actually are new players, not just new alts. Hang around in the newbie help channel or in any of the newbie systems for any length of time and this becomes readily apparent even without the stats.

You can literally quit right out of it and disable it with a menu option...

Here's the problem with the NPE in EVE (using your fishing analogy)...

You give an Alpha a fish and you feed him for the day (standings).
You teach an Alpha how to fish and he feeds himself (missions).
All the while you're raking it in selling fake fishing licenses (Incursions, null ratting, wormholes, Officer Spawns, DED).

The alure (or lure perhaps?) of EVE is that you have the potential to do anything.
The reality is that the serious hard-core gaming in EVE has already been locked down by a select few years ago.