Player Features and Ideas Discussion

First off, I want to state that SP is not necessarily needed to be effective in certain parts of Eve, such as fleet PvP. Newbros in Atrons is what Brave was built on, and it's not uncommon to see newbies tackle big kills and play an integral part in some of the most fun kills in Eve. However, there are many things in Eve that become much more fun when there is some SP invested.

I recently had a friend start playing Eve, and he went through all the tutorials and joined a small corp and he learned a lot about the game, but he claimed he wasn't able to do a whole lot after the tutorials. He wanted to try out all the playstyles in Eve, but because of his lack of SP, he couldn't just get up and go do them. He had to wait a couple hours to train for it, and then was able to go out, but most of his early eve experience has been waiting so he can go do what he wants to do, and for a new player, that may be off putting.

While waiting and planning are a large reality of Eve, the first two weeks shouldn't be waiting for stuff to train so a newbie can play Eve for the last half of his remaining trial period.

I propose that for the first character on each new account, the tutorials should give a small amount of unallocated SP that the newbro can place into whatever skills he wants. It wouldn't be a huge amount, I originally was thinking about 500k SP across the 5 tutorial concentrations.

The delivery system for the SP is already somewhat in place, as CCP has been able to gift unallocated SP to all players on occasion before. Although I'm no developer, I don't believe it would be too much work to implement this.

I don't believe that this small gift of SP at the very beginning of someone's Eve career will take away from the harsh universe of New Eden, but I do believe it could make it more fun for some of our newest players and help keep them from being turned off by the wait.

Thanks for reading guys, I appreciate any feedback/suggestions.

too abusable if it is significant enough to matter as there are 12 sets of tutorial agents, and too little to matter to a newbie for the SP if you balance it around someone not being too good if you run all 12 sets of tutorial agents.

Less than 1m sp, but far more than they used to back in the day, and about 14 days from sitting in an assault frigate if one assumes a very unlikely perfect remap and then focused train.

There's a sticky on the front page of F&I to discuss this topic.

Reported for redundancy.

Also CCP specifically SPECIFICALLY stated this is NOT what they want.

They do NOT want a "do a thing get a reward" setup for the newbros since even doesnt do that anywhere else

While I don't really agree with the OP's idea of free SP as I can think of how it can be abused already (sm hybrid's and Gal destroyer anyone?) I do think new players need more "something" in the beginning.

Starting with more skills, covering a wider range of activities possible in EVE would be a better option IMO. They should be able to do pretty much everything at the beginning from mining or and gas, to tackling, to scanning, to PI, to small ship construction, so they can get a feel for the largest number of experiences possible in EVE. This will help them with the most critical part of acquiring SP: knowing what to train for by knowing what you like doing.

Honestly the real Issue I see is that you need to invest months of training time to fit an actual ship, not to mention I have actually been in destroyer fleets what half the guys in it could actually couldn't overheat.

I have to say that when I started playing (not too long ago, by no means could I be considered a bittervet) there was absolutely no SP wall, It took me longer to learn what the skills did in game terms than it did to train most combat skills needed up to level III. I was in level IV missions alongside a corpmate in an incursus within 3 days of starting (great fun even though I didn't do much in the missions in reality!).

Most important to my mind is introducing new players to corps who will actually help them develop their character and game style. You really can't try things like manufacture, invention, PI etc at a level that will show you what each career is really about without a reasonable skill investment. However when you've trained the relevant PI skills (for instance) to level IV and you gather enough stuff to make your first tower from scratch you get a great sense of achievement.

It really comes down to getting new players involved with other players early. SP is rarely an issue in my mind.

Grind the isk or buy plex. There you go. Or, go play WoW and leave this game. Do the latter, please.

Even adding suggested training qeues to the start of each of the tutorials would be quite useful, or directing them to the mastery system so they can see what it takes to get that 2-3 mastery level, which is what CCP thinks it takes to use a ship well in most situations.