EVE General Discussion

There's a few good reasons that new players are limited as to their ship selection, the least of which are cost and skills/experience (not SP, but actual knowledge about the ships and their capabilities).

Eve is very much like learning to drive in this respect. 99% of people don't get into an expensive and powerful sports car the day after passing the driving test, they generally start off in some cheap second hand econoshitbox and slowly work their way up to the sports car as their skills and experience increase. The small percentage that do get into a powerful sports car immediately after passing a driving test often end up making expensive and possibly fatal mistakes because they have neither the skills or the experience to drive it.

By that metric it's not worth learning anything at all, after all you may not enjoy it even after investing time into it.

Nothing is certain in this life, if it was life would be boring.

General experience is part of the learning curve, the more you have of it, the more you should know.

If you're after a game where you can get the "best" gear in a short time with little effort you are going to be sorely disappointed with Eve, there are games out there that cater to this, Eve is not one of them. Going by your posting this may well be true of yourself, as such you probably won't be here in six months, and nothing of any worth will have been lost.

I'm calling preemptive dibs on your stuff.

edited, the original post was a little harsh.

You're missing the big picture. Eve is a big picture game. Eve is not a moba or action-RPG or dogfighting-sim. PvP in eve is as much about the long game as it is about those few seconds when you've both webbed and scrammed each other till someone dies.

Setting up your character - big picture.
Making isk to buy ships - medium picture.
Fitting a specific ship for a single pvp session - medium picture.
Hunting for targets - small picture.
Actually shooting people - very very small picture.

And the above is just for a solo pvp player. You also have small gang players, null sov players, industrial players, explorers, WH, logistics. There is so much more to Eve than solo pvp. If all you want is 'fair' 1v1 fights then you cut out a HUGE part of eve. For most other areas of the game the big picture gets even bigger.

The big picture in eve means you don't just get to play with the big boys on an even footing from the start.

Eve is also what you make it though. If you want fairly new player friendly pvp I would recommend looking for groups that cater to that. Look up RvB. Join E-Uni and 1v1 other members in pre-set fights. You might not get to fight anyone you want where ever you want, but you have the power in Eve to pick your fights. Look for places that will cater to your play style and time commitments, they ARE out there.

That's a good way to think of it, and this does mean that there is a meaningful decision about advancing a tier or going to a new class of ship. This is my first time playing a game with purely passive skill gain, so the inability to directly affect progression will take some time to adjust to.

Yeah, if you think the game isn't fun in general, do get out before you earn more sp because that won't help you. On the other hand, I do think it's fun so maybe just leave highsec and see where the content is. You might like it.

Some new players do. Not all. Personally, I don't see myself having more fun now that I have 7M. I've been having the same amount of fun as I did when I had 1M. If anything, bigger ships are a tad irritating to fly. I've given cruisers a try three times now, and then shelved them. They are just so boring and bulky when you are coming from frigates (I dare not even imagine what it would be like to fly BCs and BSs!!)

Also the quick, rapid train where you see 5-6 skills getting trained every day and your ship's peformance improving on a daily basis is way more fun than waiting days for a single skill to train up!

The skill with skills is knowing how to priorities effectively.

ftfy

Result: 400k+ new subs, for a little while anyway while PLEX prices go up to 10B and the game economy is driven into hyperinflation.

Totally agreed, although some corps use the SP requirement as a filter and are often willing to drop it for people they think will be a good fit regardless of whether or not they're newbies. It's always worth having a chat with a recruiter before applying.

I think what many fear is that CCP won't balance it properly or won't do it for the right reasons. An example of the right reasons would when they changed the starting attributes of new characters while removing learning skills and the initial 2x speed boost up to 1.5M SP. That change was welcomed by many a bittervet and newbie alike because learning skills were both pretty much essential, and took up way too much time.

Another fear, and it relates to the point that Aerasia made about "dumbing down the game", is that if it isn't balanced or for good reason it sets a precedent that may mean more of the same when the same topic comes up a few years down the line. Some people are always going to want easier access to what they see as endgame content, "elite gear" and the like.

I can't speak for others, but in my opinion that's what other MMOs are for, Eve is not that kind of game

Personally I have no problem with giving newbies a little more SP in the form of focussed basic skills such as those handed out in the old tutorials, or listed as essentials by some of the better skill plans that are available in order to give them a couple of weeks head start, any more than that would require balancing against something else.

CCP need to improve the NPE at the same time, looking at NCQA the new opportunities system is vague as hell. The usual advice to newbies is to do the old tutorials and then retry opportunities with a little knowledge behind them. I haven't tried opportunities so I'm going to ignore it for the purposes of the rest of the post.

The old NPE pushes people to PvE with the exception of mentioning FW in passing, it doesn't let newbies know that they are going to be futzed with and that many activities considered to be greifing elsewhere are allowed.

An NPE that better prepares newbies, with knowledge, for the virtual shark infested waters outside of the starter systems benefits everybody.

Where did CCP say they were going to do this?
I know this character is in Doomheim, but anyone else have a link to what he was talking about?

Actually, I don't think a 2M SP starting boost is a particularly bad idea.