Player Features and Ideas Discussion

So I want to talk about skill training for rookies. It's a pain.

EVE is a complex game, and I like that. I did my homework, flew missions, grinded standing, read dozens of guides and encyclopaedia articles. I played around with EFT and EVEmon. I believe that I still suck at this game, majorly. But, I believe that given the appropiate tools, I can be of help to my friends who persuaded me to play EVE with them.

Only that, I do not get the appropriate tools. It takes 4 days of waiting to fly a Drake which does like no damage (almost no missile skills...).
After that, if your friends fly with armortanks, training for a decent Oracle takes 11 days.

"So, there must be something I can do for you?" I asked my friends.
"Well for decent damage you'll need a Battleship" was the answer. This will take a long, long time.
"I'll do anything. Just give me a task in which I can help you. Maybe you need a healer?" I asked desperately.
The answer was: "That's called Logistics my friend, and we can talk about that in like 50-100 days of skill training"
"I could codebreak for you?"
"Ok, so you hide somewhere until we've killed everything, then you jump into the system and loot everything"
"Nice ... job."

THE HECK? That's not - at all - motivating for a rookie.

I love challenges, I accept grinding standing as necessary, but please, PLEASE give rookie players SOME way to be of use in normal-mode day-to-day operations without WAITING for days and weeks. It's ok if I need to grind, it's ok if I need to learn. But those are all things under my control. If I'm smart, I'll learn fast. If I'm dedicated, I'll grind fast. But there's nothing I can do about skill training time (except attributes and implants, which I already have). I pay - real money - to wait for skills so I can finally do something in this game.

Maybe invent a supporting role, like, dock on a larger ship transformer-style and serve as autonomous weapon for it :-D
Or, for the first month after the character is created, let me "overcharge" skill training so I can get a decent fitting at the expense of learning skills at half the normal rate for the next month. Because, it's not about being as strong as people who have played for years. It's about being a benefit to friends, even if only a small one.

I know that most players are tired of skill-training discussions, and I'm probably not the first rookie to whine here (although I didn't find another thread), but seeing that EVE is a game where most people start out by knowing friends who already play the game, I think it's worth thinking about a way to make them capable of playing with their friends in a decent - at least self-controllable - amount of time.

Just the opinion of a random rookie ...

Step one: Get in a frigate.
Step two: Fight or run missions.
If friends call you useless, Step three: get better friends.

I've been playing this game for years and still can't fly battleships. Your friends are fools.

My friends are no fools, it's just that I'd die instantly in a frigate when doing stuff with them.
Step one and Step two show exactly the issue I'm experiencing.
As a new player, you can easily obtain a frigate and fight/run missions. However, it's hard to join any multiplayer activity.

As I said, I'm not talking about rookie difficulty (which is fine), I'm talking about synergy and opportunity to play with friends as a beginner. Hence, my (not thought-out but idea-explaining) proposal about "docking" my own ship on a friendly Battleship to help out a little. I'd even gladly serve as a drone for one of the bigger ships in the fleet :-D

Thank you for your ideas Sheynan, I will see how feasible those options are. And yea, they're often mission-running :-(
I joined them in sleeper-killing in wormholes, but my dps was not worth mentioning.

So yea, the idea still stands that it would be nice to find a way to let rookies play with their friends. Something like some kind of sidekick mode or smth like that :-)

@ShiroOokami that sounds like a beautiful plan, I'm just worried that I'll explode the moment someone targetlocks me. Sleepers have random aggro :-/

Let me stop you right there. Frigs are ESSENTIAL for PvP and some PvE. I've never met a gang that wouldn't accept someone because "eww, you're flying a frig."

If you "friends" think that frigates are useless, they ARE fools.

fake edit: I see that you mentioned wormholes. Yea... frigates can't tank the sleepers in wormholes. BUT they can provide eyes and ears to the rest of the gang from the other end of the system or wormhole. It's boring work... but it's essential.
Hell... if you learn how to probe well you can become IMMENSELY useful in tracking down sites and hunting targets. Compared to other skill sets, probing is quite a quick and easy train.

False. Tackler frigates flown by newbies are a key part of many fleets or gangs. They just buffed a whole class of ships to make you really good at this.

Might I suggest taking the PVP Basics class with agony unleashed for your frig gang pvp training. Just goggle them, you should find it. Good fun, requires no pre knowledge and can help you in other parts of the game outside PVP.

As for the OP's original point I happen to agree. New players often tell me they feel horribly insignificant compared to their friends, corp mates, and even mentors. What the answer is to this I don't know, personally I feel that a piece of that inadequacy stems from the number of side skills that detract from the way new players want to train. For example if a new player wants to fly a drake, they need the prerecs and a bunch of core skills to make it be even worth flying. So one way you could get new players up to speed is to remove/combined those skills that most of us have trained, example the core competency elite group. I don't think that this is the answer but it could be a good place to start looking.