EVE Information Portal

Just a little idea for the tutorials:

Have NPCs that can show up in your captain quarters and tell you something about the game. What you can do with them:
1. Let them tell you what they have to say ("next" through the main dialogue)
2. Ask questions from a list (queries to a database, gives a random list from the available dialogues of that NPC.)
3. Send them to hell (Vote them down, they will never come back to you)
4. Add them to contacts (subscribe)

The nasty idea behind it: Have the players create those dialogues.

Points 3 and 4 are there to get a ranking of those NPCs. For point 1 and 2 we would need a convincing interface to build dialogues, but that shouldnt be too hard if it is text based. Making NPCs with the charakter editor is easy, that is already there. They just need a little script for coming into the room and leaving and some gesture while they talk.

Players can share their knowledge with noobies, do a bit of advertising for themsevles and their organization (which leads new guys to corps faster) and fluff out the universe.

Educational Corporations will add a great lot of helpfull stuff into such a system. And i think many people will love to make a cool/funny/whatever guy and put a lot of effort in it.

The downside is: I dont exactly know if the voting system is enough to prevent misuse by spammers and scammers. But wikis work, so why shouldnt this one work?

When this runs a while, you can go through the highly voted list and adapt some of the dialogues for the official help (have own npcs wich "cite" the player made ones. Give some credits )

I can tell you first-hand from experience that the tutorials, and the entire new user experience, needs a huge make-over.

I have been urging my college-bound nephew to try Eve Online for years now. This summer, he stayed with me for a month, and I got an opportunity to sit with him and start fresh: to create a character with him and do the tutorials. He can see just how exciting Eve Online is, I thought. It started off great with the new Character Creator... *finger twirls* ....

Bottom line, you have lost an Eve Online player. *Permanently lost one for life." (And, sitting there with him, I have to say, I can not blame him. At all.) And, if his reaction to Eve Online is any indicator, you have lost a new player for DUST 514 as well. And, he was in the prime target audience for DUST 514: he's an amazing PS3 first-person killer.

Lost. Gone. Never.

You have a LONG WAY TO GO with the tutorials. Adding little things like UI tweaks is not going to do it. A major overhaul.

And, if DUST 514 doesn't have an amazing tutorial system, well, "The Future is *NOT* Yours" at CCP.

I wrote a review of sorts on my blog, but in case you'd sooner read it here, I'll copypasta it:


Designing the Future Experience (or "Have CCP Thrown the Storyline Baby Out with the Incarna Bathwater")

To address Blog Banter 38, I decided to get an insight into the current design philosophy behind EVE. In order to better understand how the revitalised CCP would be moving forward and addressing design idiosyncrasies in the future, looking at incoming improvements might be a good barometer of change. After all, there's only one chance to make a first impression, so the upcoming changes to "New Player Experience" will be crucial to the EVE playerbase of tomorrow. How that first experience is received will determine who sticks around and who clicks uninstall.

Singularity, the EVE Online test server open to players, allows early viewing of new content coming to the "real" EVE Online on the Tranquility server. Yesterday, I played through the new tutorial to get an idea of the first impressions New Eden's new arrivals might have. The experience left me excited, impressed but ultimately sad and disappointed.

For those of you without the inclination to read through what has evolved into quite a lengthy post, here's the TL:DR;

New Player Experience = Technically Improved but Increasingly Soulless

For a deeper analysis, read on.


Necessary Sacrifice

The most fundamental change is immediately apparent, with the ship hangar view being used in favour of the Captain's Quarters. This is a complete U-turn on the previous approach and I have mixed feelings about it. On the positive side it keeps focus on the core spaceship gameplay, but the "disconnected" feel is back in force. Established EVE players might not see the problem here, but that's because they've already adapted. For many players who have migrated from more traditional MMO environments, that humanoid avatar connection is vital to ease their transition into the universe of New Eden. However, given the current lack of meaningful content or player interaction in the Captain's Quarters, this was the right decision. It's just a wasteful shame.

The next thing that is noticable is the new tutorial window. Defaulting to the lower-right corner of the screen, it occupies a similar portion of the screen to its predecessor, but appears clearer and cleaner. The most welcome change is the auto-resizing. There was nothing more frustrating with the original UI than having a default window size that required you to scroll down to read the last line of text. I look forward to seeing this technology applied to other UI elements, such as item info and the Unified Inventory.

The flow of the tutorial has more pace and doesn't get bogged down in as many details as before. Without much ado, the new player will find themselves floating in space in their capsule, where they are quickly encouraged to understand the camera controls. This is a great change, with the needlessly bloated previous experience of drowning in windows banished and the disorienting initial in-space experience better explained. Basic gameplay elements are introduced as necessary, with just enough introduction to the overview without having them running for the hills. Ship fitting is handled well too, with a simple step-by-step process being presented in a rewarding manner. Once the rookie ship has been obtained from it's location in space, the rookie is guided to dock up to fit a weapon and a shield module - the default civilian weapon and miner are gone! Sadly, the Aura voiceover has also been dumped, but it would no longer make sense with the new tutorial flow, I can only hope there are plans to record new audio.


Technical Triumph

The real jewel in the crown for the New Player Experience is the floating tooltip technology. This new system boldly directs the player's attention with a laser-pointer-like line leading to an encircled object of focus. This line is "rubberbanded" to a text box containing useful information. Not only is this an absolutely superb way of leading the rookie by the nose and avoiding that "WTF do I do now?" experience which was probably the single biggest cause of loss of interest, it suggests some exciting applications in the future. What if targeted items could be linked and highlighted in such a manner? Imagine a customisable heads-up-display with information previously crammed into the overview able to be presented dynamically.

In support of this new, fresher tutorial interface are some great UI elements streamlining interaction with agents and missions. An elegant Agent Mission drop-down menu hides in plain sight in the top-left of the screen beneath the system information. It cleverly avoids unnecessary screen clutter by being almost invisible until interacted with, when a number of contextual options appear as a dropdown. As with other recently introduced UI elements, it has a smooth feel as you interact with it.

The user interface improvements really are very promising for the future of the client experience as a whole. It could herald the dawn of a more attractive and user-friendly interface throughout the EVE client. Exciting future possibilities are flooding through my mind as I write this. Anyway, I digress. At present, it's just a useful and effective way of presenting information to rookies.

All things considered, the tutorial is a big positive step toward better new player retention and the introduction of elements which could bring so much more to the game as a whole.


The Importance of Words

But for me, there's a problem and it's potentially a big one. Game-breaking even... (continued on Freebooted)

Here are my thoughts:
- The pointers and in-space pointers help a lot, but I think you don't use them enough. You should also use them for the ui elements of accept mission button, complete mission button, item hangar in the inventory window, etc.
- In the part where it says the stargate will be highlighted yellow, the word yellow is highlighted green. I think you should highlight it yellow.
- Can you make the mission shortcut in the upper-left work with both left-click and right-click? It is a bit confusing to use right-click for almost everything, but use left-click just for this.
- I understand you are guiding the users to use context menus all the time to simplify the tutorial , but I don't think this is enough of a reason not to teach them all the basic stuff they will need later on. My suggestion here is to include a paragraph on the fourth or fifth time you ask the users to right-click something saying "Keep in mind that you can issue most of these commands by right-clicking the desired element in the overview or in space or by selecting them in the overview and then using the buttons in the selected item window. Try them all to check which you are more comfortable with."
- Again, I understand you are trying to simplify the tutorial, but not teaching them about hotkeys as fast as possible is really, really, really bad. As someone who started playing when the chat channel was still the 'master of all the keys' I assure you that the longer you go without using them the worst the playability will be and the harder to change the habits later. The suggestion here is to either add another 'career' tutorial for 'advanced general topics' with all the stuff you dropped and other stuff not otherwise covered or, specifically for the hotkeys, go for a non-canonical way to address this and add a counter for each command type that has a hotkey. Once the user issues a command some ten or fifteen times without using the hotkey, display a tooltip saying what the hotkey for that command is.

Hmm...so I wrote a big long post chock full of all sorts of good feedback for new players (much probably off topic)...and then the forum ate my post when i tried to preview it. ugh. I guess that is my punishment for not getting to the point. So here is attempt #2 in far fewer words.

- The tutorial is a good system, the improvements, given a month of work, are great too.
- Read post #36, paragraph 3 about long skills time. Great illustration of a key new-player problem.
- And thus, the biggest hurdle to getting new players to stick, in my humble opinion, is the skill system when you start. Even having to wait a few hours to get a few basic mods is enough to turn off a new player for good. The first week of skill training is *huge* with respect to what it opens up in the game, even more so if a vet can advise a new player on how to get the biggest bang for that time.
- While the problem may not be as critical for a new player trying the game on their own, I think the problem is much larger when an existing player tries to get a friend to play EvE. We get embarrased when we have to tell them how painful the first week will be because of waiting on skills once they are in. They usually never return.

I propose a simple fix that should be possible to fit even into the August 8th release even:

Credit a new account 500k of unallocated skill points (the system is already in place). Let new players decide where they go and instantly train them (have to buy the book first obviously). This way I can get a friend into the game and into some actual fun within 30 minutes, not several days (if they ever come back that is).

If a simple unrestricted credit opens of too many exploits (like insta cyno accounts) then I'd suggest a few restrictions that shouldn't be too severe of coding work:

1. Can not allocate points to level 5 skills (noobs can have a lot of fun still with no level 5 skills).
2. The credit only applies to the first character on a new account (or rather once to an account regardless)

Implement this and virtually all wait-for-skills-new-player-emo-rage-quits--over this reason--should go away. Maybe even only 250k points would be enough. We're talking a free couple weeks of skills to get new players that might be around for years. It's a no-brainer to me.

Cheers

Nice changes.

Yes, please give us a way to customize tool tips and what they show like we can customize the overview.

Personally, I want way more info out of them so I don't have to show info on everything every 30 minutes because my memory is crap.

I can learn again! hehe

This is very unfair for those poor tutorial NPCs and i demand a change to give them "a chance" :-P

I loaded up Sisi and ran through the tutorial on a new character

The only issue I have with it is having to click next all the time.
When I played Portal 2 it asked me to do an action, and then doing the action progressed the tutorial, with out restricting me from doing other things.