EVE Information Portal

Why is it that every time the NPE comes up, we get a new set of tutorials and that's it? The tutorials are mediocre but not that terrible aside from a few specific issues.

The focus always falls on the first couple of days of playing Eve, but this isn't where the major problems arise. The current tutorial missions can be a bit confusing but they aren't the real NPE, nor the problem with it. The first day(s) of the game while you're working through the tutorial missions and newbie epic arc and have something to do aren't all that bad and present an accurate(if perhaps too honest) picture of Eve Online.

It's when those tutorials end that the problems arise. Week two through ten are where things are really rough. The game provides no guidance on what to do and the options available to players in this gap are laughable. They're complete wastes of time that earn so little that a new player is better off begging for isk. They learn the basics and decide what they want to train for but quickly realize that but nothing they can do right away is worth doing. During this period too many people end up just training skills rather than playing the game, waiting for the time when they'll be able to fly something worthwhile only to quit instead.

The problem with the NPE isn't the first few days, it's the first 60 days. Redoing those first few days again isn't going to help if that first 60 days isn't improved.

For the record I do agree with you though. As long as CCP continues to iterate upon this then I think its a solid start.

This. A lot.

There's a huge gamble hidden between the lines in this change. Since Opportunities will not be paying much if any ISK, they're going to leave the player at the end of the trial period without the basic ISK stock pile they need for a couple of starter ships, fittings, and skill books to fly them properly. It seems to me that the concept here is to drive players into a corp right off so that they'll have someone to beg for the ISK that they need just to keep from getting strangled in the crib. And I have no doubt one of the upcoming Opportunities is going to be "Find a corp!"

But there's a very real possibility that the change is just going to accelerate and emphasize the new player's feeling that he's going to be eternally SP- and ISK-poor and they'll say "Screw this, I'm outta here" instead since finding a first corp is hard.

Sugar, I'm glad to hear that this time period is on CCP's radar. Hopefully, the CSM is emphasizing this point. And hopefully, we'll be hearing from CCP about their plans in this area quite soon.

Another question: why is friends/family testing being done here instead of another round of external testing? If anything was ever begging for a test group that's never heard of EVE, this is it.

Do you have to start a new character to try out the NPE? I know Ive told my sister (who logs in very occasionally) that if she needs to, she can always re-run the tutorials. Will this new system be the same? You can try it out at any time, in case you want a refresher?

We have tried and tried to validate the myth that griefing has a pronounced affect on new players - we have failed. The strongest indicators for a new player staying with EVE are associated with social activity: joining corps, using market and contract systems, pvping, etc. Isolating players away from the actual sandbox seems very contrary to what we would like to accomplish.

What a great direction for the NPE, great work on the concept of Opportunities! Some thoughts:

-- Rewards should still be given, much like one is paid in the military to attend schools associated with one's specialty. Rather than viewing that negatively as a carrot that might cause players to go through material they doesn't interest them just to get the ISK, view it as an opportunity (yeah, I went there :P ) for them change their minds about a given topic (especially as you get into more career-specific things, which I assume will happen eventually) once they experience it. Encouraging people to try different things is never a bad idea in EVE!

-- With less hand-holding, there still needs to be contextual info about why sets of tasks are important to learn and how they fit into the bigger picture of life in New Eden. On both an opportunity and a task level, that may not always be as obvious as you might think. Some contextual info provides strong motivations to engage with learning and be thinking about how it will apply to one's aspirations in-game.

-- Hope to see probe scanning and other exploration related Opportunities in the queue sooner rather than later.

-- Is it the plan to eventually map opportunities into groupings relative to specific careers, once there's enough content to do that with?

-- Offering a few suggestions for the kinds of things that users might explore and find out on their own could be useful. Sometimes people don't realize the extent of freedom of choice that we have in New Eden and that you write your own story in the game by taking the initiative. Never hurts to remind them of that with relevant examples.

-- So glad you kept Aura around. She is the iconic voice of New Eden, long may she live.

-- Is there a plan--once you have a big catalog of Opportunities in place--to reference those in relevant Evelopedia topics?

With a recent focus on helping new bros and 20+ years of work in instructional design and training development, this NPE evolution is very exciting and looks like fun to work on. What are the best ways for players to help you guys with this effort once it hits TQ (or before)?

A note on the reward thing,
maybe don't give out like 100 million isk but give them books instead and hint to the noobies that they always will be keep buying new ones.

What could also be good for noobies to know is that EVE is not a one-time log-in shooter where you log on and kill monsters and log off again.
What they may or may not discover is that EVE is a very long time commitment, one the things I already knew a while before I installed the 450mb trial once upon a time ago.

And skills (books). Never not talk about skillbooks and maybe give noobies a one time payment of 25.000 isk for opening the training que and training Engineering to level 2 or injecting a new book, so they assosiate skill training as something that is always a good thing but it will take some time before they reach everything at the magic level V.

Speaking of, it should be noted that not everything does need to be at level V to be 'useful'. In the early days in EVE people train some levels of skillpoints to fit some module they want to try out.

Make them take a trip through highsec, let's say 7 systems long and tell them about the navigation skills along the way.

I remember that 7 jumps used to take like 2 hours because I would need to make several jumps of 4-5AU and then have to wait until my capacitor recharged to make another one

EVE was big back then.

Simple answer is no. The closest come, for now, to establishing cause is to simply ask using exit surveys or other similar feedback channels. Otherwise we are doing the best we can with correlation.

As a funny side note: one of the stronger indicators for whether or not someone sticks with EVE is whether or not they used combat drones during their first 30 days. Maybe using drones is just so awesome that they decide to sub right then and there?! Or maybe it's just correlation related to depth of engagement. You be the judge!

I like how it looks and the premise of it, scripted tutorials have always been bland.

With some adjustments, I smell an improved and more dynamic mission system.

I have been a huge fan of the new vision for the NPE since it was first announced by Rise et al at fanfest. I am glad to see it finally taking shape. I would really like to see the opportunity system branch into more advanced gameplay which would also help new players make isk--such as, opportunity goals for setting up PI on a planet, for doing research on a blueprint, for participating in an incursion, for joining faction war and running a "plex," for visiting a wormhole, for killing a sleeper in a wormhole, for running a lvl 1 or lvl 2 lvl 3 or lvl 4 mission, for having 10m isk in the wallet, and so on. It would also be nice, as other people suggested, for the system to have "social" goals, such as joining a fleet, starting a conversation with another player, getting a kill mail, and so on. It seems like this would be a good system for launching players into content that will get them through those difficult first 10-60 days while also never, by itself, giving new players rewards.

Also: Some friends have started the game and so I've been spending time lately in new player systems helping them and talking to other new players. I've noticed a lot of new players using / talking about the new anomalies (the mini respawning belts). Do you have any metrics on how widely these are being used? They seem very popular and I am glad to see iteration on the idea of mini-sites coming.

Finally...



What's wrong with getting help from others or being directed by the opportunities system to find a corporation? Presumably, corporations can help new players in more ways than just by giving them isk, but even that is not necessarily a bad thing... I mean, you of all players used to ask for isk on your blog lol