Player Features and Ideas Discussion

There are more Caldari pilots in EVE more than any other race. And everyone knows that Caldari and, in general, missiles are bad in PvP. So what's the root cause here?

First of all, there are a lot of Caldari alts, created by people that know their EVE stuff and place them near Jita for trading purposes. Those are not the subject of this matter.

The reason why people choose Caldari as their starting race is because they have the best description on the selection screen. Their description ends with "living emblems of strength, persistence and dignity". As someone who knows little about EVE, that seems like a good enough reason to start with Caldari. Let's see what the other races have to offer.

Amarr is the second most preferred race. Let's see why: "largest ... of the four empires", "most stable and military powerful". Yeah, seems like something new players would chose. But then there's "theocratic society" which puts off a lot of players.

Gallente are "champions of liberty" and a "true democracy". Not a really good motive to choose them.

And the Minmatarr are "enslaved by the Amarr" and have "tribal roots". Who would choose slaves as their starting chars?


I talked about this with some devs/gms and players at Fanfest and they all agreed that this is a problem. New players select their starting race only knowing a few words about it. Later in the game, when they join a PvP alliance, they'll find out that noone wants their Drake in fleets and that they just wasted months of training.

What needs to be done is putting additional information on the race selection screen. New Caldari pilots need to know about missiles, shield tanking and ECM. Those who choose Amarr will like to know about laz0rs, armor tanking and cap usage. Gallente have drones and blasters, Minmatarr have artillery and speed.

As a new player, the race you choose at the beginning will likely be the race you train for the next year. Having said that, new players must be presented with more information so that they can make a well informed decision. Put a couple of emblematic ships for each race, along with favored modules and maybe some videos depicting various scenarios for which that race is best suited.

The Caldari Achura bloodline and the superior attributes it used to give.

Beyond that, though, yes, it would be nice if the races were given a more thorough presentation, along with the rest of the universe (insert stealth give-us-back-the-old-intro argument here).

Am i weird that i became minmatar for the back story alone? When i first started i had no idea what attributes affected what skills and what ships i could initially fly.

Players can after all cross train now and do neurel remaps of their attributes, so i don't think it's really an issue seeing a lot of caldari, plus you don't need to be same race to join any FW activities.

Also drakes are used loads for pvp, month after month.

First off, Sure, people need to learn more about the races and what each of them is good/bad at, but doing this BEFORE they even have a character created? People are overloaded with information already - This is what is commonly known as the "EVE Learning Curve" Which is, more of a mountain than a curve.

Yes, it would be damn well amazing if new pilots would know all about ECM, ECCM, Shield tanking/ Armor Tanking, the pros/cons of Blasters/rails/missiles/projectiles, how subcap and cap warfare work, what industry is, how mining works in this game and how what null/highsec are/do, and what all the millions of skills in your skillsheet and market do, and what all the modules do and how to use them all effectively on your ship

BUT WE DONT LEARN ANY OF THAT UNTIL WE'RE VERY MUCH INTO THE GAME.

Yes, I would say it would take a good few weeks to get a handle on the basics of EVE, and then a few months to really feel like you know a thing or two about this game. I've been playing this game or 5 years and by no means do I think I know everything.

Yes, I definitely think the tutorial, the new player learning curve needs to be tackled with renewed vigour, I most firmly believe that the next expansion should be completely focused on the newbie experience and how to lower that learning curve to basically "A, B, C".

How they're going to do that? Well, i'm sure we could help them with an idea or two. At least, that's what my next few additions to the Features & Ideas discussion will be focusing on.

Now to address your topic directly. Your complaint is that the text backstory of each race biases new players into being primarily Caldari. All races need a backstory, the fact that the Minmatar was a slaved race is not going to change - If that deters people from becoming Minmatar then that's unavoidable.

Do I think having too much Caldari in the game is a problem? No, I don't really. I'm more concerned about there being any players at all left in this game. I'd love to see EVE online with a continuous 100,000 people online, rather than trying to fix what races people go into equally.

If you think Caldari ships are in any way better than other racial subcaps / caps, then you're really mistaken. Missiles are especially the worst for cap warfare which makes the Pheonix (Dread) and Leviathan (Titan) the worst of their catagory. The Wyvern also sees hardly any action since cap fleets are generally armor repping fleetings (As both the thanatos/nyx/erebus and Archon/aeon/avatar are both Armor tanks, and do better damage.)

Subcap, the drake outperforms ALL other caldari ships, even its T2 battlecruiser variant the nighthawk. And just because drakes are used a lot in fleet warfare doesn't make it the best ship for fleet warfare.

When i first tried eve as a trial account I chose Caldari Achura of course because of its cool looking space ships and missles, but before I wanted to buy the game I did some research and became a gallente pilot because my dream is to become a carrier pilot. The reason i think most newbies choose caldari or amarr is because the trailers always portray gallente and minmatar ships being blown up by caldari missles or amarr lasers. I have never seen a popular trailer showcasing the mini triumphing over their "ebil" amarr. CCP favors certain races, and this is pretty much propaganda. Tyrannis and Inferno both had images of an Erebus titan being blown outta the sky... I dont even get me started on the Templar One trailer.

They're simply easier to use and a Fleet Commander doesn't have to tie Range into his combat strategy; as long as you're within 81km the Primary is simply going to die. There's no question about it.

In fact, to further drive my point home, a character by the name of Flesh Rocket actually has a record holding 10,784 kills with a Drake.

So before you go about complaining that they aren't effective in PvP, it's probably good to do your research and maybe look at some other aspects of the game that are far more broken than whatever it is you're proposing.

Ugh, you've all went an transformed this thread into a Caldari vs the world one. That was not the point.

The point was that the race descriptions, as they currently are, favor joining one more than the others. They don't provide an insight on what you should expect from that race. Knowing that the Gallente are liberals doesn't inform you that, as per those lovely stats above, you'll never make it in top 5 PvPers. And yes, you can always crosstrain when you realize you chose the bad race. But wouldn't it be more productive if you knew from the start? I'm not talking about learning how to PvP in 3 easy steps, just some hints on guns, tanking and agility.

That way you won't run into all those people complaining about missiles and blasters and saying they need time to crosstrain to be useful.

I picked Gallente because of the ship design and the good guy feel.

The standings idea is just horrible. You gotta make that you only lose and gain corporation and agent standings. For hard to earn stuff that faction standings are a big help like level 5s and jump clones, a better alternative has to be found.

Also I think players should not start with the skills of their particular race. They should rather be introduced to all of the race's ships and their features and then they get to pick which skills they want to start with.

Give new players more freedom!