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is there a Ship Spinning Opportunity? if not, will there be?

what about a pod express one? requirement is to get podded in lowsec

"The Masochist" ... open the POS management window

Excellent data in the comparison between the old vs. new systems.

Is there a cut off age for the NPE? I'd like to complete every "Opportunity" at least once on this char. The further expansion into Achievements is also greatly welcome.

Also, loving the Art associated with each activity/concept - Moar visuals for new players! (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

I disagree. Every noob reaches the point where they realise it is a sandbox and needs to find a direction. It can be useful for that. These can also be useful for bridging the gap where you are bored with your current game but not sure what to do next.

I have no issues with EVE taking 'achievement' systems from other games and modifying them. They are optional goals. EVE has lots of these now, they just aren't in the client, players set them themselves.

Lots of people have goals like 'acquire one trillion ISK' or 'FC a hotdrop that kills a capital ship' or 'Participate in a battle where a Titan is killed' or 'Win ten 1v3 fights where you are the solo player' or 'Get 9.5 faction standing with the Caldari State'.

The opportunity system just gives optional guidance to newbies looking for inspiration for their own goals.

I think the system should include some 'career goals' - things that might take a year or more to achieve, as long as it is very clear that this is just something you might choose to work toward but that you are free to ignore these options altogether.


Opportunities aimed at rookies (<7 day old new players) should have rewards that help those players. Opportunities aimed at people over 7 days old should not.

I like the opportunities in general though I don't like the point of game-defined achievements with numbers (that can scale). What I mean, "mine an asteriod", "get a solo kill in high/low/null" and an associated reward for first time completion is fine, "mine 10000 asteroids", "get 1000 solo kills" is not ok IMO, cause it drives people to mechanically hunt those achievements and ask for more, higher numbers instead of thinking about the mechanic and how to use it for own goals. Also opportunities should whenever possible refrain from setting the tools, hence "kill a pod" is fine where "kill a pod in a thrasher" is to restrictive in my opinion.

Don't like it, as it would become a must to get the achievement and rewards (as learning imps are today). Skillpoints are the single most valuable thing in EvE.

Very good - avoids completion problems while retaining new skill acquisition.

The concern I have over it is that it doesn't match anything else in Eve.

Training people to expect SP bonuses, then cutting them off, isn't exactly a good policy

I will not dive into those mind-science things or the love or hate for "achievements" or anything like that because the problems are much more fundamental, and I would like to keep this short because I could rant on about this for pages and pages.

I've been making trial accounts every now and then over many years now to test the changes on new player experience and was also helping out a little in the related starter corp chat, and afterwards sending my feedback to CCP. Now I have a permanent place for helping new players on a second account amidst the wonderful veterans of CAS, and based from what I see there and the questions answered, I see opportunities are more damaging than the other NPE. Your three statistics in that devblog are EXTREMELY vague.

1. More likely to have killed an NPC? This is super vague. One of the the things you ever do in the regular NPE is actually killing a pirate ship. Are you claiming that people drop out of the game BEFORE they even get there with the "old" NPE?


2. More likely to have used the market? I have two counter statistics for you: 100% of people asking for reimbursement for a skillbook they bought which they didn't need have done so because of opportunities. Why? Because the "old" NPE does not ASK to use the market. Players learn that with career agents. So this is a flawed statistic. And it's actually a pretty bad example, because it means that 25% of people using the opportunities did not even GET to use the market.
3. 100% more likely to have mined? Are you kidding me? The "old" NPE does not even FEATURE mining until you get to career agents. What does that statistic have to do with anything?

You are really pushing vague numbers here to make your opportunity system look good. But hey, I can ignore that, let me get to less assumptions but more useful things:

My opinion is you should not expand the opportunities beyond ANYTHING than the first look into the game, before you do the career agents. The moment you bring in opportunities OUTSIDE the first look and learning the ropes, you open the entire can of worms for mindless achievement hunting which makes people burn out more often than not. If you need to rely on achievement hunting to keep players in the game, then you are automatically agreeing the content of your game and it's availability is not up to par.

There should be NO rewards for opportunities. The actual reward is dipping your toe into the water and going to somewhere else to learn more: Career agents, helpful corporations, or just going straight into space and learn all the things yourself.

Some of your opportunities are flat out STUPID forceful handholding devices. "Add a contact". Why are you forcing socialization upon players? I see nothing but confusion and annoyance from people who are "target" of such a mindless task. Allow people to make contacts when THEY want. Not because they feel compelled to complete achievements.

The biggest problem with your New Player Experience never was the up-front Tutorial.

I actually rank that one as the least of 3 problems. Problem number 2 was the time-waste factor and redundancy of career agent missions which repeated the same parts for no reason while still lacking on other very important topics and mechanics.
But the BIGGEST problem is that you don't have anything that grabs the immediate attention, immersion and "WANT" of a player to keep going.
You HAD this, a long time ago. You HAD this awesome attention grab.

Her name was Aura

Whenever I tell new players about the old tutorial, where Aura was talking to you, and was telling the story how Aura was funny, hilarious and even wicked at times, they unanimously agree to want to have something like that.
Do you remember how Aura was talking about Implants and mentioned how a player has 10 implant slots and casually dropping how she had about three million (or something) implant slots?
Do you remember how Aura pondered to become a musician when her needs as complementary AI are no longer needed?
Do you remember how Aura laughs at the player as they get pod killed?
I do. And I miss it every time.

Aura had personality, was fun and useful. Now she is nothing but an icon with text. People do not even CONNECT Aura to the voice every time they hear "warp drive active". Isn't that sad? To me, it's like Aura is the guide that is always around, the watchful sentinel that is always there when space is cold and lonely. But I only know that because I've been long enough in the game to have EXPERIENCED it.

If you want your new player experience to be more interactive, intuitive, immersing AND useful, you need to play your top card again.
I understand how the voice-over lines have been cut down and not been replaced due to the huge amount of changes you did and how you continually scrapped and rebuild text. But guess what? That should not have stopped you from re-recording the lines.

Oh and;

Except this is not true. Instead of expanding, we're losing her voice and nothing to mention of any voice SKINS. (see what I did there?).

Bringing content is not enough. You need to bring the connection between the player and the world. Just one other example for this; your nice youtube scope news are wasted to a large number of players because they do not see or access them ingame. Scope news on billboards. Imagine that.

Why can't we have everything at once? It's better than ship spinning.

The achievs would be more suited to the Traditionalist and Social player types, which is entirely fine. They are a large part of the overall playerbase in Eve.

I see no ground for discontent.