EVE General Discussion

The biggest issue with the new player experience is that they are getting into a game that has been out for over ten years and not only are you competing with people who not only have a huge SP advantage, but a huge experience advantage.

There needs to be a bigger incentive and education to bring new players out of highsec and NPC corps. The few that do or try, are often held back by the most basic core skills which essentially waste months of your time.

I always thought that something along the lines of advanced tutorials in lowsec that could grant new accounts a small SP boost on completion would be a great idea if implemented correctly. A simple 2M boost would take a huge burden off any new player and open up so many doors.

Close, but actually other way around.

It's the ones who leave that safe harbour and try things on their own that are not being held back by wasting months of time on non-essential skills. Rather, they learn what they're actually capable of doing with what they've got instead of waiting for some imagined “sufficient” condition to be fulfilled… which will inevitably slip further and further into the future.

Those that manage to hook up with older players and who have to solve problems on the fly without brute-forcing them by just spending more time will quickly acquire a far more useful mix of SP and experience than their held-back and poorly guided contemporaries. They also learn not to wait for that “sufficient” condition, since they've already figured out that they can just go out and try and have fun, so the ability requirement slippage never occurs either.

Unlikely. Most new payers, being new, would waste them on particularly pointless things and would probably be even farther behind — both in ability and understanding — than if they learned how the skill system actually works and how to squeeze utility out of your SP. It would also benefit older players far more than new ones since 2M offers a ton of utility for a single-purpose alt.

EVE is marketed as a game where you can be the villain. The fault of NPE isn't that it doesn't present the opportunity to be the villain.. no PVE experience can substitute for content generated by players.

What I think you're saying is that the NPE is outdated, and largely irrelevant to most of the fun things people can do in the game.

Is the NPE a test? Players that figure out it sucks and goes to find adventure amongst other players will survive. Those who think NPE is an accurate picture of the game get bored to death. Is an NPE like this the *intent* of CCP?




One big flaw in NPE, in my opinion, is how the player gets a *better* experience of tutorial or game mechanics lessons outside of EVE than inside it. Why are tutorials on YouTube much better than the ones in EVE? Why do I have to fish through websites to find rules behind basic mechanics?

I'll ask the same question. Is the poor documentation and tutorials a test? The smarter player will know to look stuff up in Eve Uni Wiki, YouTube, etc. instead of inside the game.. is that CCP's way of separating the thresh from the grain? Is the fact that the Explo tutorial really teaches you nothing about Explo some kind of crucible?

I think the Overview is not one of these problems. Yes, better information about it is found *outside* the game, but the setup is relatively simple and newbies successfully do it every day.

I think you misunderstood what I was trying to say. Let's forget the people who only intend to bear in HS for a moment, I'm referring to the newer players who are actually willing to go out and explore the game; after all, those are the only new players worth keeping anyway.

Obviously not everyone is the same and some may experience an easier time than others in finding corps/people. My suggestion was intended towards those who spent a couple of weeks playing the game and are familiar with the basics and ready to take the dive. I can't help but feel that a lot of newer players want to go and explore, but feel 'held back' from accomplishing anything on their own.

I'm going to use my exploration example because I think it's the best thing for any new player because you learn so many useful skills from it, other than PVP of course. So you have Joe, Joe has played for a couple of weeks and has a basic idea of what he's doing. He can go do an Epic Arc/tutorial/whatever you want to call it in lowsec and collect a small amount of free SPs that he is allowed to invest in certain core skills which is a motivating factor for him to go out and further explore the game, by giving him a small motivating push in the right direction.

I understand that ultimately, the player who does this on his own and immediately finds himself an appropriate corp is the optimal solution, but unfortunately you cannot realistically expect everyone to do just that. While many will quit regardless realizing that this is not for them, others are given the push they needed and a small reward to let them get a few basic skills to pursue their interests while exposing them to what the game really is about.

As for alt-abuse, it would have to be restricted to a few categories such as exploration/tanking/navigation so you don't encounter myriads of new Catalyst alts, as an example. Either way, it's difficult to implement correctly, but I do believe that it would help in retaining some of the quitters.

Yeah, there would be a number of issues to work out before implementing such a thing. Even in the worst case, it wouldn't even have to be SP (although that would be a huge motivation to any new player), it could just be a decent sum of ISK that helps them mitigate some losses during their learning experience.

Simply a juicy incentive to lure new players out of their comfort zone and explore the game so less people fall victim to the mission running/mining endgame only to eventually quit out of sheer boredom. If they liked what they saw, they'll return and if not, they can always go back to HS.

I'm tired and I've been bittervet'ing all day on the wormhole forums, but how about "SP for milestones" type things to help drag new players out of their shells.

Bonus SP for killing something in losec, killing something in nullsec, your first podkill, your first expedition escalation. Your first player corp, your first alliance. Your first wormhole jump, your first radar can hack. Not huge amounts - maybe in the region of a few thousand for each - but enough to give new players who are willing to get out there and diversify some kind of minor benefit.

Naturally any system which offers a flat reward is going to benefit old players over new players (and I'm sure that all current players in the game will enjoy having an extra million SP, if it gets to be as much as that) but forget about that. Malcanis will always apply in EVE because of the non-scaling nature of progression. Focus instead of making it as positive as possible for new players and encouraging the nature of exploration in new players.

I would say that offering these achievements at benchmarks would be counter productive however. "Mine 10000 asteroids" is a grinding task, which should be avoided. "Mine an asteroid to completion" is a stepping stone on the path to mastering EVE, or at least exploring the opportunities that it offers.

That's fine, no one is saying every new player will be happy in null or low, but to many people, it offers a more engaging experience so at least showing new players a whole different world even exists in the first place is a good step, even if they hate it and don't return.

All lies he joined because he heard that he could endlessly grind missions and mine veld in hi-sec in perfect safety

My idea was to make them token for the effort and time involved, and to ensure that there were plenty of hoops to jump through.

I can't think that a suicide ganker would want to mine a roid, get podded, get into a cruiser/battlecruiser, etc: it's a lot of time investment for not a huge reward. Yet, at the same time, new players will do it because they're still exploring the game and finding out new things. It's to provide some incentive to discover the sandbox, rather than leaving it up to player initiatives to drive this discovery.

Each milestone to be worth maybe an hour's training. Maybe as much as two hours? Not huge amounts, but enough to be significant to a new player who wants to try out new things. Yes, you can instantly train that frigate 1 skill to see if you like gallente more than caldari, yes you can pick up small blasters 1 because you heard they were better than railguns, and yes you can pick up railguns when you discover that blasters are terrible.

Diversification, rather than being a chore that prevents play, becomes something that they learn early on: they can try out these areas of play without too many problems, and they can discover what kind of weapon systems they like and dislike and what type of ships they should be flying.

It becomes an enabling system, one that encourages the experimentation that succesful sandbox play requires. Use Mio's old infographic with "things to do in EVE" to have some ideas for the kind of things that you could do. Once players start doing things, they're probably going to end up continuing to do things. It's about giving them enough small stepping stones early on to get them hooked, so that the bigger stepping stones that lead up to the mountains of 60 day skills seem less intensive.

Given that Battlecruisers V is now a 120 day train instead of a 30 day train, I think giving these people a leg up could be sensible.

Once again...confused. WTH is he on about? For every person there's a reaction. CCP tailors game to everyone's first impression - pictures at seven? The tutorial not required to play EVE? What's the headline here?

Let me venture an observation. People come here from "other" games, in a hunt for "another game like the one I just left, only better." They find "EVE is like EVE," become disappointed and leave...(they rationalize this as "being bored with the game.") Let me guess. CCP should create some sort of introduction that appeals to people who have no mindset to appeal to in the first place?

You do have this other case, and this one doesn't engender any wall of text on the forum with words like "disappointment" or "boring". Player downloads EVE, gives it an honest shot, winds up playing for years. So....what's CCP supposed to do with THIS emergency? Personally, I'm happy to see CCP makes sense, and puts all these things in perspective, even though the vocal among us can't seem to do the same.

One real question - how many posts do we see that begin with: I downloaded EVE got bored and quit. But...I came back.
Now I'm here to stay.