EVE Information Portal

I personally disagree. (And I must stress that this is my personal opinion as a player, I am not a games designer, I am not trying to tell CCP how to do their job, just sharing my thoughts.)

For some reason many developers in the past few years, now CCP included, pretend that the only interaction a new player has with the game is through the tutorials. They feel the need to explain every tiny bit through lengthy series of "do this, trust me" instructions and/or throw a huge wall of text at the player.

Now I don't know about others, but when I get into a game, especially such a complex one, I tend to do a little bit of reading on it. I knew EVE was advertised as extremely complex, I spent about two weeks browsing the official website, forums, and guides before I even registered to get a feel of the game. Even if one doesn't do this research beforehand, all these resources are readily available - in EVE even without tabbing out of the game through the IGB.

In my opinion the tutorial should explain how to use the UI - how to undock, how to fly your ship, how to shoot at things. As far as I remember that was what it was like when I started. Then there were I think three career agents to show off the various career paths, and off to the real game. The tutorial shouldn't be explaining game mechanics - especially as complex as tracking or fitting ships. These should be explained on the game's webpage in a quick guide, and then in great detail through manuals and gameplay guides.

(Going off on a tangent here, but still related to the NPE - these kind of things are ridiculously difficult to get to from eveonline.com. Personally along with the links "One universe", "The Sandbox" etc. at the top I would add one for "Guides" or "Game Mechanics" or something.)

Quite often showing too much is even worse than showing too little. If the game doesn't explain a mechanic, the player looks for another source of this information. But if the tutorial provides a half-arsed explanation, the player is under the impression that he already understands it, and is content with what he knows. However in fact his understanding is lacking at best and misguided at worst.

The tutorial also shouldn't be explaining how to do things efficiently - as in, how to fit your ships, how to run missions, etc. This is something for the player to explore and discover by themselves. Trying to imprint a certain way of doing things to people early on has the same negative effects as I pointed out above (lack of detail leading to misguided understanding), but also ruins the sense of discovery, trying various approaches and seeing what works - basically everything that makes a game a game, and not just following a set of instructions you read off the screen.

This is not about making the game more difficult for the sake of it being difficult (or conversely easier for the sake of being easier). The information should be readily available,but it shouldn't be forced onto the player in bits and pieces however CCP thinks is the best. I don't like being told by an NPC to fit a web and use it on another NPC. I want to read a little about what webs do, why is it a good idea to use one, and when should one be used.

Would be interested to see, how many people quit after seeing the awful inventory system.

you can now use Back and Next to page through the entire string with no breaks or restrictions.

why not have basic skills inject and start at level 1? I'm honestly just curious what the goal is to make players train these skills instead of starting them out with them?

IMO this will lead to a lot of confusion.

The new player will never know if he actually did everything right or not when clicking 'Next'.

Worse is, before recognising that there are no restrictions, he will have the impression of having done everyting correctly even if he hasn't just because he can go to the next page of the tutorial. He will then end up in a dead end where the tutorial text does not match his actual progression soon. This is totally different from every other game tutorial out there...

No, No, No, No, NO!

You call Caroline Dalton up and you bring her right on back.

This is something I don't mind seeing my RL bucks being spent on.

We tried that. Works nice enough, but there were problems then with translation, and making the screen into a real media player (pause, replay, etc)...

But it's not maximum range, just the range where you do 50% damage which is a good guideline to what range you should usually try to keep inside. Maximum range is Optimal + 2x Falloff.
Calling it something that it's not is not better.

Thanks for the suggestion, we'll think about it.