EVE General Discussion

I do agree with this.

However keep in mind there are players who enter EVE and simply do not know this stuff even exists. For them to begin tinkering they have to care to tinker in the first place, and the first things you do in EVE are outright terrible.

I believe the focus should be put on marketing the possibilities of the sandbox; exposing the player stories essentially.

When I entered EVE I did not know a single thing about it. I had not read any of the articles about the giant space fights or the great heists. I only knew two things: You fly spaceships and you can die anywhere. Took me months to even realize there was metagaming on a large scale. Sure, if I did research on the game I would have figured it out, but it wasn't reasonable to waste time researching some boring underwater spaceship game when it was just one of many games I was trying out at the time. Thankfully the ice interdiction introduced me to actual EVE. Having to keep myself safe I decided to try and collect intel on the people killing barges in my system. Once I started reading about strategies for that I started reading more and the rest is history.

The NPE should focus on making sure players realize all the possibilities of the sandbox, specifically from a social standpoint. Much like advertising to the right people, they should make the NPE itself inclusive of that too. If it was up to me I'd have an interface for new players which is essentially multiple video clips showing the history of EVE. The griefers, the gankers, the scammers, the giant alliances, even CCP F ups. They could split the clips into groups: "Careers" or things of that sort to entice players to actually watch such a thing. Once they see the potential, the ones that will actually stay long will figure it out for themselves.

Sorry chap, I believe you misread that. It's not that griefers drive away new players, it's that one specific form of griefing (which he advocates the removal of) poisons the newbie experience on accident and as an unintended consequence makes being a newbie harder than it should.

In addition, you're taking one tiny thing out of context of a much larger column, wherein he discusses that the new player experience in EVE is the worst in the industry. And he's right. Outside of knowing people who already played EVE, I would have never gotten into it. The new player experience is absolute garbage.

What???

Creation and destruction here are completely in balance.. Ship dies, ship built.

Players have a ship destroyed, insurance company replaces from stock, With a Ship, not Isk, stock is replenished by buying from manufacturer, manufacturer is happy, miners who mine the ore from the ore fields, are happy, player goes out and explores, fights, and meets people, happy player, CCP retains customer and invests in EVE, rinse and repeat........

Is that understandable?

EDIT Oh, missed a bit, because the player is NOT raging and upset with losing a ship that will be replaced anyway, griefers not happy, the tears no longer flow from noobs.

Tough.

The game is not about making Noob Griefers happy.

See, this is what everyone is saying about you not understanding the consequences.

Its not this half of the transaction that is completely FUBAR. Its when people said "well, that completely effs up T1 manufacturers", and you said "Well, they can sell to NPC buy orders".

If there were NPC buy orders for player-built items, it functionally creates a massive isk faucet, since people would mine, manufacture T1 crap-items of the most materially-efficient type, and offload immediately to the NPC buys, trashing those mined materials for instant isk. When players buy off other players, the isk is simply circulating within the system, whereas your system introduces massive torrents of it from NPC's as part of the buy order. Add to the fact that no manufacturer with a brain would build anything else and fight 0.01 isk games for a week in Jita when they can sell instantly to an NPC buy order, and that material value would be hard-floored at the price someone can turn it in to frigates and insta-sell to buy orders. It would catastrophically crash the market in its entirety.

I can see where you think this makes sense, with references to "stock" - but unless you expect when your newbie loses a ship, he has to wait for an automated buy order with his name on to complete (which is all manner of insane), there is no way to cap the "stock", so manufacturers will be stuffing it full at 100 times the speed anything leaves it (and as pointed out, they will do the most materially-efficient build, so lets say Atrons are the best material-to-buy-order, there will be thousands dumped in to your stock a day, and not a single Rifter or Merlin). Anything else requires manual micro-management by a real person, and frankly, that aint happening.

First, to deal with some of the things which have come up in the thread...

This, here? this is entirely false...


I cannot see a way that this can possibly be a good idea. Long ago, shuttles were sold by NPC sell orders, they sold for 500ISK each and you could buy them in almost any station; which of course was very convenient when you bought a new ship, you could pick up a cheap shuttle, go and pick up your new ship and leave the shuttle behind...
The problem was that shuttles are built from Tritanium, so whenever there were few enough miners (or loot refiners) to push the Trit price above a certain level the clever bought thousands of shuttles, reprocessed them and profitted.
The NPC sell orders created an artificial ceiling for Tritanium (and there were IIRC other things which capped some of the other mins).
NPC buy orders which follow the same process would, of course, create an artificial floor for the related materials...
So let's imagine a form of NPC buy order which makes this impossible... Perhaps an NPC order pops up whenever Pend. Insurance give away a ship? Well assuming that the orders are not being sniped immediately by hawk-eyed traders (let's not assume bots) because they are higher than the market average you run the risk of an undersupply - more ships spawned by Pend. than are being sold to them, do they run out? If not then you have an oversupply of destroyers (for example) in the rest of the market...

And that's not even considering the clever... I'm sure there are ways I'm not thinking of which would result in near infinite ISK.

Regardless of how you look at it you have a (possibly) balanced mineral faucet and mineral sink, and then an ISK faucet which is in no way balanced to the ISK sink it's linked to.

Also, given how many ships you can quickly acquire through the career agents, I'm really not sure it's even necessary.



On to the main subject...

I have always tried to keep up with what the NPE was all about, it's not always been easy to do so though the accessibility of the career agents was a boon from that perspective (and, of course, it's difficult to try to get back to the newbie mindset, where everything you do is either explained in text or entirely opaque).
The CD Key in my Collectors Edition recently gave me the first opportunity I've had in a very long while to go right back to the ground floor, to access the very first missions properly, the Rookie Help channel and so forth.

The very first thing I woud suggest is something which has disappeared from the tutorial since I first ran it. In those days one of the first things Aura told you to do (and I think she actually told you to do it rather than putting up a little text box but it was a long time ago...) was to choose a chat channel (you only had local, corp and Rookie Help at the time and all were reasonably sensible) and say hello.

Why is this important?
It's very easy to become insulated from the other players in the game when you're desperately concentrating on what's happening to your ship, watching those white bars turn red (either on your HUD or your locked target) or whatever else you're doing takes a lot of concentration when it's all new to you. And the longer it takes you to make contact with those other players the more difficult it becomes.
If practically the first thing you do is type "The game's telling me to say hi, so hello everyone." into a reasonably populous chat channel and you quickly get "LOL"s and hellos back; not only have you broken your chat cherry but you've also received positive reinforcement for the behaviour. And who knew that talking to people would be important in an MMO?

I would support the suggestion that it's too easy to miss some of the really important missions - not so much the "Here's a Condor (we say is) full of explosives, now go and lose it"; but certainly the "Here's a Tristan, go and kill some stuff and don't come back until you've lost it". That mission itself is somewhat heavy-handed about it but I like the concept and I think that everyone should have run something like it in their career agent arcs, not just the people who want to be combat pilots.
I would suggest a slightly lighter touch, going from one mercenary frigate who can barely scratch an Amarr's shields to five, crazy sensor damping, cruisers and three spider drones in one hit is a little too Deus Ex Machina - perhaps one frigate to five frigates (one or two of which have webs) to another five and a couple of spider drones, and then roll in the cruisers a couple at a time... the mission should not be survivable but you should be able to boast about how many you killed before they blew you up.
Perhaps the mining version requires you to mine a contested rock full of very valuable minerals, with the people contesting it calling in reinforcements to see off the claim jumper...
And I believe that, if it is possible, these missions should not start out with "Here's a ship" but that the mission objectives and rewards should be obfuscated. That when you lose your ship you get told to report back to your agent and he/she is very sympathetic about your loss and provides you with the real reward, the replacement ship and an appropriate fitting.


I don't believe that new players should be brought out of the universe, to a newbie ark where they can be kept isolated from the world, but I do think there are some things which could benefit from changes...cont.

HAMMERTIME ?

Goonswarm/CFC don't grief.

I feel 'drive' away isn't the right wording.

Tie them up, throw them in the trunk and send the car off a cliff with a brick on the gas is more accurate.

Removed some off topic posts.

Yes, we do. But this isn't clear to a noob. I had no idea about starter systems until about six months after I began. Since they are already there, why not make it clearer? And why not tweak them to better achieve the objective of a reasonably safe orientation ground?