EVE Information Portal

Oh, I know all that. I'm relatively new to the game so I still vividly remember my own beginner experience not too long ago. I also have been trying the game practically every year since release, trying to get into it, but never really managed to make it stick.

I guess my point is that you can't tell people it's a harsh and unforgiving universe, and pit them against an enemy that can't possibly kill them. When a game is ludicrously easy it is just as much a turnoff as getting popped.

Though I guess it's a moot point anyway. Now that I think about it, I don't believe I ever had anyone I tried to get into this game come even close to getting popped in any tutorial. Heck, even L1s could be done in a snore coma with just one eye open. I guess what I'm saying is that it is a fine line between making the experience beginner friendly, and making it too easy and boring so they quit for lack of challenge. Myself personally, I tend to prefer games where the very first enemies make you work for it rather than just keel over from the first swing. It tends to be more engaging this way.

Quoted becouse I added an edit.

Looks good, however the gun tooltip is missing one major thing - tracking.

Most important number is first/top, since beyond this range (optimal + 1x falloff) you have less than 50% chance of hitting.

Overall this looks quite good.

But one thing bothers me: You made the assumption that the reason people quit the tutorial is because of a problem with the tutorial, that it was confusing or the player just did not get it. There is another reason: They understood the tutorial completely, but did not like what it was telling them. Take the "navigating your ship" step;

"You mean I got to double click in space?? I cannot fly my ship?? I'm out of here!"

Or "target practice";

"I just turn it on, and its random?? My personal skill is irrelevant?? I'm out of here!"

In other words, people may be quitting not due to the tutorial, but due to the game mechanics. Until you account for that, you do not really know what needs fixing. And you got to consider that if the issue is the game mechanics,maybe that is what needs to change.

Good blog. I really like the walktrough of your process at the start. The process seems a lot better than a lot of players, me included, give you credit for. Hope the implementation is as good also.

On a constructive note: Would it be possible to turn the text "optimal" and "falloff" in the tooltip into a link to a wikipage explaining the concepts thoroughly? They may not be intuitively understandable by new players. (or older.. wasn't there several questions to the commentators on this during ATX?)

If possible, you should also do this to all the things in the show info windows.

Looks good. Glad to see the overview given high priority. I remember in my newbie days, warping off on some mission and then wandering round for a while not knowing what to do because the acceleration gate was not on my overview. Also remember another mission where I had to mine a certain ore but guess what? The asteroid that had the ore was also not checked on my overview. I was flying around forever trying to find that little piece of rock. Finally went to google and found out that I had to add it ot my overview. Once I did that, I finished the mission in 5 minutes.

Be sure to plug the newbie section on the forums as part of the NPE as well

oh, tool tip for guns should so tracking speed as well

hope Auora comes back soon, love her voice

I'm not sure exactly what you're saying here, but it sounds like a non-tutorial bug? Have you fired a bug report?



A lot of it was the skill queue, but a lot of it was also making you walk the full length of the CQ, we suspect. In any case, there's no CQ tutorial at all now. We don't feel that starting in the CQ is harmful to the experience of new players, though, so we've not changed the way the client is initially configured.



It's just not feasible, sorry. As soon as we find a single text bug, or we change a feature that's mentioned at the beginning, we either have to re-record or drop the voice, and even if money was no object, the turn-around time on re-records makes it not worth it.



Quit the game IIRC that graph is for trials who've failed to convert to subscribers.

[quote=Jame Jarl Retief]Some thoughts I'd like to share about the blog. Overall impression is very positive, but some things just jumped out at me.

It was mentioned (and shown on the chart) that some people struggled with the part of the tutorial that introduced training queue and all that. Have you guys considered that the queue itself and the training system are the problem, not the tutorial?

What I mean is, I recently tried to get some people I know to play EVE. One of them, just as we reached the part with the skill queue, immediately wanted to see how long it would take for him to fly a specific ship. After he looked at training times, he just laughed and said the game is not for him because life is too short to waste on a game where it takes 3+ months to get anywhere. It's just too much of a commitment, one most people would be unwilling to make on an unproven game. Perhaps changing the skill training system, or even shifting the focus from character skill to player skill is the way to go.

Second thing that jumped out at me is changing the shields on the rookie ship so that the tutorial rats have no chance of killing the player. Did I read that right? Even in the most casual of MMOs, ones suitable for children of 6-8 years old, the beginner monsters have a very real chance to kill you. In some MMOs, being killed and dealing with it is part of the initial tutorial (like in upcoming Guild Wars 2, you where you get incapacitated during the tutorial no matter what you do). Off the top of my head, i can't even remember an MMO where you can't die to the very first enemy you engage.

Voiceovers being removed makes perfect sense, since tutorials are being reworked. But no audio for tutorials makes the game look dated and amateurish. In this day and age, there should be voiceovers for missions, for important events, etc. In other genres, voiceovers have been standard since approximately 2004. In MMOs, voiceovers are becoming standard, at least for important key quests, and some MMOs (SWTOR, and partially AoC) have voiceovers for everything. Having a wall of text thrown at you can be softened a bit with a voiceover, even a partial one that only generally describes the next step. Without the voice, it just reinforces the "spreadsheets in space" stigma that EVE has to deal with.

The +/- for full speed or stop is no better than triangles, really. Plus implies increase, minus implies reduction. If I knew nothing of the game, I would have assumed acceleration and deceleration, not full speed ahead or full stop. Changing the - to a stop sign and + to >> or "full" or something would be more in line with what the buttons actually do.

The new tooltips, while great, will do more harm than good for a new player. They show things like falloff or tracking speed, and the new pilot might see them before knowing what they even mean, or knowing if or how important that information is. Knowing myself, if I saw a tooltip like that, I would immediately start trying to find out how my actions influence tracking and falloff, because my assumption would be that the game is player-skill based, not character-skill based. And knowing EVE's...

I'm not 100% sure what's going on there. Is the tutorial window itself still open? I don't think you can remove something from the neocom while its window is open.

Nope window is closed option is there but even with the Neocom unclocked the icon does not get removed.

Edit.

Now it works. Next time i get it to hang ill bug report it.

Just to be clear what is being shown on the pop-up is your optimal range + falloff.

So from this screenshot from the dev blog: http://content.eveonline.com/www/newssystem/media//63099/1/08_new_tooltips.png

The falloff listed in the show info for the gun would be 3,750.
We display optimal + falloff giving the 8,437.