EVE General Discussion

This.

This.

Highsec ISK is what kept me there for so long actually. Moving out of starting areas is a standard MMO convention.

Random Events: while a new player is traveling, npc ship could send a distress signal to all newbies in the system asking for backup. Is it a trap!? can you blow up the stranded npc's ship and loot him? do you save him instead?! Try to make them similar to dev-run events, except script them and spawn tons of them all throughout the day, fully automated.

Egg hunts: fragmented message from concord was intercepted! a pirate blew up a hauler somewhere in the system!

Pirate Tips: intercepted transmission from Caldari Provisions of a hauler about to jump into lowsec!

Newbie Tourneys: New Player Experience shouldn't just be about missions. maybe there needs to be tournaments for new players only. brackets based on SP 1m, 1-5m, 5-15m, 15-30, 30+
The tournaments should be hourly, or daily. There should be leader boards for each tier to give a "goal" that is attainable by new pilots. a goal that cant be taken by higher SP characters. This would be a great way for corporations to recruit new players as well. Rewards for winning streaks, etc
Allow us to observe and bet on fights.
Maybe use free & pre-fit ships so they dont feel like they're wasting their money or losing anything.


NPC-organized mining ops: Have an NPC act as fleet booster for new players, and recruit miners in the constellation into their fleet. This will bring solo players together, create communities, friends, etc. One of the major reasons people keep playing eve is the other players in eve. They'll ask eachother questions, and learn together.
Every tick, count how many fleetless newbie miners in the constelation. if you have 5+ then Caldari Provisions should send them a foreman
Let pirates kill the foreman!

NPC wingman. Have an NPC fly along with the newbies, and guide them through their rookie missions. If you don't arrive at the gate with him, he gives you better instructions. He will instruct you each step of the way.

"We need to take this cargo to station is XXX. We are a few stars away from there, so we need to set our ship's autopilot destination to make travel easier, rightclick this link and set destination."
//wait for player to set desto, repeat instructions if he doesnt//
"Follow me to the gate which should now be highlighted in yellow"
//wait for player to land on gate//
"select the gate and activate it"
//npc jumps and waits on other side//
"ill race you to the destination!"
//if player wins, gets a bonus reward//



Wingman instead of Help Channel: Need to give alpha players the sense that they can enjoy the game as an alpha, without ever becoming omega. They'll switch to omega once they are addicted to the game and want better ships etc. Right now, alphas feel limited. They're always asking in help chat: "what can i do as an alpha", "whats a good alpha ship for pvp?", etc
They should never need to ask this. Their NPC wingman should tell them what ships are good for mining, pvp, or ratting. basic suggested fittings for these ships should also be given to the new players.
When the player asks his wingman for ship suggestions, you should get a window with all the alpha ships available to you, a short description of what each are good for, advantages/disadvantages, and at least 1 fitting preset for each of them.

Ask the wingman questions: how do i join a corp? wheres a good place to pvp? how do i mine an asteroid!? Do i refine or sell ore? and of course give the option of killing the wingman and stealing his stuff. This is eve after all.



Force them into the mindset that nothing is sacred and nothing lives forever. Encourage them to lose ships in lowsec. "You're not a real pilot until you've had your mind thrown through the cheese grater a couple hundred times."



Walking in Stations: Right now, new players feel dumped into the madness. And for some this is awesome, for many, they are lost.
I really think WiS would massivly help Alpha/new players. It would get them out of the ship. They can walk around, see their character. ask their wingman questions about what he can do. Right now you're a metal ball that jumps into mysterious spaceships that you dont know how to fly. You dont feel connected to your character. In fact, it doesnt feel like you have a character at all. You have a picture and a spaceship. Let us get out and interact.
Eventually as you play, you discover your character, but as a newbie, you basically have no character. you may as well be playing as pacman or some amorphous generic thing. Not much different than the cube you get in a default Blender scene.



OOG Notifications: Out-of-game way to notify new players of ingame events. You have the eve app for iphone/android now, which would be perfect for this.
Large alliances use things like jabber so people know to login and join fleet.
Alpha players should get notifications using the eveonline app. Notify them of time-sensitive missions, random events, tournament results/starts. notify when their "nemesis" has joined the tournament queue (someone who has beat you 3x in a row or something) Find ways to pull players back into the game.
Most things in eve you really need to dedicate an hour or two of your time to really make a dent in. You wanna mine you're not going to mine 2 or 3 cycles and call it a day. you're gonna sit there for an hour or two mining.
Give us quick action that takes less than 20 minutes to beat. Now that i've logged in maybe ill mine too, or wait till next notification.


A large barrier to new players is finding things to do. Its not that eve has nothing to do, but rather theres just so much to do, you dont really know where to start. Further, everything you can do, only gets better with time/SP, so its important to give new players goals they can obtain early/easily, so they can enjoy themselves without the feeling of "if only i had 50mil sp and an ishtar"

The dscan jitters are the worst.

Agreed on the wormholes thing. I wasn't just being trite though. The goal is to entice players to find gameplay elsewhere. More rewarding or interesting. Somehow better. If there's nothing to leave high sec for then yeah they'll quit, and that's the basic problem.

In other games players leave starting systems for advancement, better items, more XP. EVE has those things like ISK rewards and the SP it can buy now.

In my opinion the biggest problem is still the gameplay interaction per minute aspect of EVE. While you might run through a forest in other MMOs and run into critters that reward you with money, XP, and item drops, EVE's pace is molasses.

This is a new one for me, but I would try removing the wait of lock times and finding another way to balance ships. It seems kind of redundant anyway, now that I think about it. Damage is calculated based on sigs and resolutions anyway.

A lot of popular games reward players for quick reactions. I think it's worth exploring parries. It would require very recognizable attack animations, and with server ticks operating at 1 hz it's a pretty good window to give players for a blocking move. Increased resistance to one damage type, for example. If you get the parry activated on the same server tick as the attacker's volley, you reduce incoming dps.

You could make it double blind to save server load and avoid a 4 second delay. Say the defender gets the rhythm of the attacker's guns and is able to activate the parry just before the damage notifications. Attacker has the option of delaying a volley to get through the parry. Make the parry duration 1 tick, keep it finnicky.

In fleet fights you'd still get murdered and that seems appropriate. Unless you could parry a whole fleet's alpha which would be sick too.

EVE's movement is also very uncomfortable. WASD movement is in the game and I think it needs to become a viable ship control method. It's not as strong a reason as the previous ideas, but it's a familiar control scheme for visiting gamers. It also lets the player make meaningful inputs to help address the interaction-per-minute problem.

Awareness is very weak. There is a lot of information already being sent to the client that isn't represented in a recognizable way. Weapon type is one. If your client didn't know what weapon type was on someone else's ship, you wouldn't be able to see the appropriate weapon models with "look at." The weapon type info should be fed to your overview in a column or something.

Lastly is the HUD. A spaceship game should have a sick HUD instead of data tables. EVE needs a meaningful graphical display. Elite does it, SC does it. Flat icons in orthographic view is the exact opposite. Square, opaque icons rolling around the screen like a snow globe is just frantic and confusing.

This is completely true of all the things people have wrote in this discussion, this one of the things CCP should pay attention and work into.

The high PCU for March this year was around 44K.
Last year the high for March was around 38K.

That's about a 16% increase from last year.

Keep in mind the record is only 65K... so a 6,000 PCU increase is a pretty sizeable increase.... especially for a game nearly 15 years old.

Cut the training time in half. It is super slow and tedious as it is. And this is what always bothered me the most about EVE - abysmal skill training times. This game mechanic was intended to prolong the time spent in game, so that more money could be generated through subs. Totally opposite to positive player experience.

Yea it's not about the highs, especially with all the alpha accounts around, I came back last year after taking a break in 2012 and the average logged player numbers are about halved of what they were then. You can see this even more logged in where once thriving areas feel empty and quiet. Even the help you used to get in game is gone, replaced by a website and longer wait time. The company shrunk it's employee pool as well and finally introduced a ftp in demo mode. If you are seeing some sort of a Renaissance you are not being realistic. Game wont drop of a cliff or anything, well unless Star Citizen finally comes out, but even with 10k players it will likely function and follow the same path it has since the beginning,