EVE General Discussion

Funny is it not how we get banned and goons rarely do.

Happened to me twice so far.......

At around this stage they should be looking for a corp that's focused on their interests and getting ready to really engage with the "multiplayer" facet of EVE.

The problem isn't the game has no appeal, its that once you start asking people to pay 120e before they can really play it (a year or so of subs and skill training) it loses that appeal.

Ask the Goons. They do it on a regular basis.

From what I've heard: you have him run the tutorials while the application goes through. You explain to him how clones work, and deathclone-jump him to your home system. You give him a link to a ready-made newbie overview and explain to him how to import it. You explain roughly what the settings do and how the tabs differ from each other (and you give him a link to the wiki explaining it). You then throw every rank-1 and -2 skillbook at him, with the ships and equipment to go with it, give him an idea what to train and in what order (while at the same time explaining the concept of prerequisites and how to read them off the info sheet when, inevitably, he'll try something in the wrong order). With his new frigate and small guns (im)properly fitted, you run of to explode somewhere.

What he gets out of it is a community and some instant action that ends in hilarious misfortune and a complete lack of the “come back in a year” stigma that makes people quit early or get into the game too late. What usefulness you get out of it is that you now have a new member that will log in tomorrow for more fun; who has figured out that asking question doesn't hurt, nor does the loss of a ship; and who might actually listen to further advice since the first things you said were reasonably sensible. One day, because you did all that stuff at the very beginning (at pretty much zero cost, for the miserly gits out there) that guy will get the infinipoint on that enemy titan; hear the rumour of the CSAA being ready to spit out a new ship; gate in the entire fleet when it is most needed; valiantly go green on his triage module to get the job done just in time.

The problem is, though, that we're not saying anything about instant usefulness (beyond the use of having N+1 members in your group). We're saying that it's 100% incorrect that it need take [random ridiculously long time] before you can do stuff in the game — something that holds true for anything you want to try your hand at except maybe capital ships (and there's an argument to be made why this is actually a good thing in that one case). We're saying that the whole “train to V before doing X” philosophy is toxic to new players, when the reality of the situation (courtesy of the brilliant skill system) is more along the lines of “if you want to try X, start to train to I and then see if it's something you like… it takes all of 15 minutes”. Incidentally, 15 minutes is a good amount of time to look through various wikis, blogs, and community websites to get a hang of what you're about to do…

We're also saying that, when properly cared for, a new player will only ever become more “useful” over time, but that will only happen if you make him understand that even from day 1, he can come along and play rather than sit and mope in some miserable Caldari Navy station and just watch the SP slowly tick by while waiting to get his CNR (or whatever he's been tricked into believing the ultimate ISK ship is these days).

Expansions that have always been, and will always be, FREE.

So seriously, whine more about free improvements to the product you're using.

Nope.

Expansions that we do indeed pay for the development for even with a PLEX.