Wormholes

Hey,

I thought I would share a blog I started, as an 'in character' look at my new player experience. As I've always been interested in exploration and this was was something that drew me to EVE, on this note I started with the exploration career and found a number of anomalies (pardon the pun) in the tutorials for new capsulees.

Hitchhikers Guide to New Eden

This is definitely something I think CCP needs to look at from my non-expert opinion.

A couple of key things I noticed (some based on what I've read in wiki guides etc) so far:

* Insurance - Even though you get an option to buy a certain level you don't have the isk to pay for it. I used most of my isk ifor just a basic insurance. I now don't use that ship any more.
* Probe scanning was surprisingly very easy. This part of the tutorial was quite easy follow and great way to learn.
* Gas mining, as a new pilot you are introduced to it but yet it seems I will NEVER be able to afford the skill book. 25 million isk but I only had 1 million at the end of the tutorial.
* The guides I have seen suggest that a cloak is mandatory especially for if you enter a wormhole. Cloaking is not touched on in the tutorial. Why is it recommended by player guides? Should CCP add it?

Materia Out!

A cloak is the best defense in wh's and since there's no local its the only place you can truly be covert. You can't shoot what you can't see.

Journal updated with my first excursion into wormhole space. I cant wait to have the skills to be able to reap some rewards. :)

A cloak is good protection versus bastards with combat probes and large smartbombs. It also stops this happening. But it doesn't always stop it happening, as this shows.

That's 3 people educated about cloaking and always moving while cloaked and not sitting 100m off a wormhole.

What kind of turtorial do you actually need, versus what you want? A tutorial which exposes new players to wwormholes would be unneccessarily complex and over-involved.

If you want a tutorial in-game to prepare people for wormhole dangers, it must inevitably get into the pros and cons of cloaking vs just MWDing around or aligning and running an AB, or not warping to a wormhole at 100 and hitting cloak and thinking you are safe. A tutorial is there to get you going, not ensure you know everything about the game and the higher-level play you can get into with experience, ISK and time.

There's also an argument to be made that, frankly, new players who get into wormholes should be taught lessons as outlined above, because they are ill equipped to deal with the rats, let alone the cloaky smartbombing proteii lurking the relic and data sites.

This may change with the addition of nullsec style data and relic sites, because unlike now, a week old noob could then possibly find their way in from hisec, and hack a can (maybe after 4-5 days training to beef up their hacking skills) without a rat.

Would it help them to have a cloak? No. They'd still possibly get combat probed by a proficient ninja prober and have a Proteus decloak and run bombs over them and they wake up in hisec with a 25M ISK donation (I'm a douche, but I help out the noobs) and a reminder to update their clone.

The other way of looking at it is that in a way it is crueller to give players knowledge that wormholes exist in a NPE tutorial, because then they know they exist and may think they have to check them out. Suddenly, Proteus, bankruptcy, disillusionment, quitting.

I don't see the NPE tutes as having a role to play in preparing players for wormholes.

The point about insurance is interesting - indeed, insurance helps players recover from the inevitable loss of ship to rats as they learn. Arguably, a toon <2 weeks old maybe should get free insurance or transferrable insurance so they can afford to insure ships they will swiftly grow out of. eg; your week one kestrel can be expensive to insure and then never dies, so it's a waste of ISK.

But also remember insurance is an ISK sink, but it's bizarre that newbros have to have their MUDflation dealt with at all compared to people quad escalating blue poo by the trillions. The drain on ISK in the economy from noobs insuring velators is negligible.

The issue of funding yourself as a newbro is an interesting one which i have considered recently, because this is a game where new players with new toons face significant hurdles, not just because they start playing a game alongside 11 year old >150M SP toons rolling multiple Titan alts, blah blah blah.

One facet is that, generally speaking, people do tend to put overly expensive modules in the new bro starter systems, which is a gigantic douche manoeuvre. Profiting on capacitor recharger I's by taking ISK from people who have almost no ISK at all? Great gameplay.

however, your point re: rigs is a bit off base. Generally rigs for frigates are quite cheap. Like, 25-55K for most frigate sized rigs which are not ACR's or CCC'. Here market forces are at play, keeping these rigs expensive relative to others because they are expensive. But resist rigs and the like are cheap - half an hour of blowing up belt rats will afford you enough ISK to afford these things.

But in a more general sense, yes, the ever-increasing costs and MUDflation can be an issue. Frigates used to cost as little as 25,000 ISK for a bantam, back before tiercide. Now it's a couple hundred grand. if you start out and can barely afford one frigate to blap belt rats, affording a meta-0 fit Punisher is hours of work (380K hull, 400K fitting).

This is a function, more or less, of hull prices, as meta-0 modules are fairly price stable. Therefore, the question isn't whether rigs are expensive, it's whether there are appropriate avenues for players to make enough ISK in the game quickly, via more than one route, such that it is not too challenging or too much of a grind.

Wormholes are not really what I'd consider appropriate content for people just starting out. Missions, mining, k-space exploration are alll good avenues. The latter requires more than simple toon skills and a quick look at the Aura journal for friendly agents. People getting in to exploration on day 3, well...that's just you, and people who have researched the balls out of the game.

Here we need to consider that you are not taking this as a complete noob. You know what you are doing, you've read player guides. You know there's more ISK to be made doing exploration, and you are taking the NPE and running it up against a wall and complaining because you can't do X, Y, Z.

This is entirely artificial.

Fair enough, but as I pointed out, the question you should be asking - and the CSM members you should be pitching this to - is;

1. For day 0 to day 14 characters, is available income generation defined entirely by toon skills, available missions, and available mining options, or it is defined more by tutorial contents and guidance?
2. If it is defined by mission rewards, (and please refer to the CSM minutes to see what's going on here in the near future) is it worth revisiting level 1 mission rewards such that, for example, rewards are appropriate for the low ISK level of Day 0-14 characters?
3. Are LP's and their value even touched in the tutes?
4. Can people even convert the crappy LP's earned from L1 and L2 missions into anything to monetise them? (answer is: no)
5. You discount belt and mission rat loot drops as an income source. Are level 1 mission rewards and loot tables appropriate to provide, for free, loot which the noob can loot and make money from, or modules they can loot and use themselves? i know when I made noob toons and ground them up from the floor for spying purposes, belt rat loot and mission loot was the fastest way of gaining ISK.

In short, i think you are doing a very large amount of useless work, chasing a white rabbit of wormhole and relic and data exploration down the NPE rabbit hole. You are finding that things are "impossible" because you are doing this from an artificial mode of behaviour. New players don't restrict themselves to affording rigs only from income generated from one particular mode of PVE. They go kill belt rats, do some missions, faff about looting frig wrecks, score a couple of meta-4 DCU's, make 12M ISK in an hour, fit a hull rep to their Kestrel, lose the kestrel, buy an Imicus, do a relic, make a million ISK, lose Imicus to gate camp, etc etc.

So, in essence, who cares if you, with your artificial railroaded thought experiement of a blog and character, suck at exploration, or if exploration isn't conducive to the NPE? Every other player will just give up, go back to doing what noobs do for the first month (level 1s, blah blah), then go into a wormhole and get murdered.

It's not a troll (if so touché trinket), he's just talking about a lot of things which you have yet to experience most likely (without wanting to sound condescending).

if eve has a learning curve like a cliff, then learning w-space is like starting out mountain climbing in the himalayas with no guides, food, training, or ropes... I would say the best thing a newbro can do is find a good (player run) corp to help them find their feet in w-space. personally, i doubt CCP has the time or resources to develop a meaningful NPE targeted specifically at wormholes.

my 5 cents, don't let this put you off though :)