EVE General Discussion

I learned to pvp doing can flipping in hisec. I can't believe CCP is nerfing can flipping. It was so much fun as a noob! I can't imagine dragging one of my friends into lowsec and trying to tell them to listen to everything I say, it sucks if your new. It was low entry level griefing and great fun.

From a newbie's point of view, the skill system offers two things:

1. Access to new ships. Ships in EVE grant different roles, and progressing in the ship lineups is what advancing your character is all about, for newbies. This is what's exciting.

2. Access to modules, and increased performance for the ships via bonuses. This, if you think about it, is similar to the Talent Trees in other MMO's - oh now you can spec for ECM, or you can remote repair, or you can go faster, tank more, shoot better. While this is the meat of the game, in terms of how to get the best performance out of your ship and win fights, training for these minutiae is what bores and frustrates a new player.

There are a million support skills, for every little tiny thing, and honestly you need ALL of them. Who doesn't train all of Navigation, all of the armor or shield skills, all of the weapons support skills for their weapon, and so on? There are so many skills, it's confusing, and it takes forever.

What to do?

Suggestions (some of these may already be implemented; I haven't played in a while):

1. Adjust the global SP/minute rate to keep it proportional to tech level progression and/or ship rebalances, so that EVE is closer to other MMO's where it takes 4-6, 9 months tops to get to the ships that the majority of the playerbase considers "average" (battleships? T2 cruisers? whatever).

2a. Adjust the ranks of skills so that support takes less time to train and the ship skills are the only things that limit a newbie's progression in terms of time.

2b. Or, have ships offer bonuses to specific support skills training time: if you're flying around in an ECM frigate then you get double training speed for electronic warfare skills, navigation skills, small turret skills, what have you. That way the newbie is enticed to try various ships to see how they work, while training faster for the support skills for them. And if they train Caldari Cruiser and buy a Caracal, then discover that they don't have the support skills to fit it worth a damn, well, the training bonuses will help them rectify that issue, while also educating them about what skills they should get.

3. Set up a system so newbies can buy and train skillpacks. For example, we should be able to advise a newbie to "go buy the probing package and train it" or "go buy and train the small projectiles package" and each package should deliver all the necessary skills for being able to probe people or to use small autocannons with good support skills for said autocannons. You already have certifications, this would be similar, but focused on roles rather than the current skill groupings.

4. Let people respec their skills (perhaps limited to the support skills). I would be willing to take a 10% loss of total skillpoints to reallocate; it's like a few uncloned deaths, not a huge deal for newbies. But if they make a mistake, an advisor can tell them to respec and tell them how, and they won't have to start over (which is a huge frustration).

5. Create support for charity escrows, where veterans can donate ISK and true newbies can take out ISK in the small quantities that they need 10mil 50mil whatever. We have no way of detecting alts vs. really newbies, but CCP you have automated ways of checking the accounts; tie that into a charity system.

6. People love story arcs, as evidenced by the plethora of recent, extremely popular, story RPG's (single player, multiplayer) released in the last few years. CCP should hire some writers and code themselves a mission generator tool. They don't even have to change the NPCs or ratting mechanics - if there's a reason why Lai Dai recruits initially to do a mission, and then the story progresses and there's betrayal and whatnot, and there's a story arc associated with that particular corporation as you progress from agent to agent, and the player defeats increasingly evil and increasingly powerful enemies for a reason, PVE'ers will eat that stuff up like it's icecream. Not even voice-acted, text in the mission journal and at the gates is sufficient. It would be, IMO, a good improvement to PVE to attract many new players. Give titles as rewards, medals, ranks, exotic dancers, etc, and it would be pretty good.

7. Consider doing module tiericide when you're done with the ship tiericide. We have have how many meta levels? And how many are useless, or too close in performance to lower levels? A few, IMO. People use T2 modules as soon as they can; I'm not sure if there's need for so many T1 meta levels.

Yeah... I only played my first few days, then I just set skills for month or two before I ever really played.

I wish I had gotten into FW right away... its noob pvp friendly or whatever. My first low/nullsec attempts werent really fun at all.

Bowling alleys? you serious?

Unfulfilling PVE and it's basic necessity to inject cash into the average players wallet is always going to be one of Eve's biggest banes.

I don't know who told them that PVE rats have to behave exactly like crappy versions of PVP ships but it's stupid as hell. I'm sure someone's going to say something dumb like "The rat abilities in PVE prepare you for the PVP arena" and I'm going to respond "Only in the same way putting on a pair of shoes prepares you for learning how to ice skate, they both involve feet afterall!"

Incursions were a well meaning attempt to fix this but ultimately you still run into the issue of making Red +'s blow up. Not to mention they were formulaic and boring. I know they were attempting to "Mimic" what players do to eachother, but I suppose they have just never played the game.

And mining should be an active mini game. Not "Hit button go watch oprah". Honestly I could see several ways to make mining more fun than ratting and running missions are right now and that's just sad as hell.

yah fors people to pvp thats good one many fail. If the want pvp go to red vs blue if not stay at high sec or if you got balls go to low sec/zero sec let them choice what path the want not you.

I think ccp droped the ball with WIS it would have given the new player so much to do while waiting for some skill points also most ppl come to eve are used to avatar game styles WIS would have made a nice transition period provideing there was enough content

i think voice coms also if new player joins corp try get them on coms asap have laugh

I'm just going to leave this here.

Happy holiday season! Hm. Not sure what the New Eden holidays are but I want to be ecumenical in my greetings!

The content of this thread is being posted multiple times over numerous other posts. I am locking this thread and all others because they are essentially being spammed everywhere and spamming the same thing, no matter what, is a violation of the forum rules.