EVE General Discussion

You know, that's the thing actually...

Providing newcomers with links to overview packs, fitting, skill planning and navigation utilities and good recruitment board does way more than a few days worth of SP. Those days won't be a waste with people who knows what said newb can do, without them newb still won't know what to do with SP.

So maybe it's time to provide those default with client? I know that it's somewhat pointless to make devs implement something that is already made by community as opposed to things only devs can do, but shower of internet links and installation programs is the last thing people who want to immerse into the game want.

Or at least frontpage them in your launcher ffs.

Although I can agree that either lifting insubstantial skill requirements from some T1M0 modules or providing up to like an hour worth of SP in the field of choice (not to make it much easier to start, but to serve an initial pointer "train this, you'll need it!") may be an option. It's a matter of designing good starting packages of modules/skills though.

I actually disagree with you.

So how did you become an effective fleet tackler, joined a corp. knew people in the game already that advised you what to train?

You don't sound like a new player to me implying that only vets think it's a good idea so they can make alts. Either that or you're just repeating what others have said to you.

The starting sp is low I think it should be around the million mark or just below. A higher starting sp will allow players to get into the game a bit quicker. I see that only as a good thing and it's not instant gratification as some would have you believe.

Biggest concern for me though is equipment progress, T1, T2, T3 and officer mods especially as the game has a skill learning progression system as well as. Kind of reminds me of WoW, only difference is, in this game the armour are ships. Look what a mess WoW became because of equipment progression. Personally I don't think equipment progression (tiers) are the way to go.


Edit:

Maybe the million mark is a bit high considering I managed to train with the free 50k sp;
Drones 3 and 4, light drones 1 and 2, medium drones 1 and 2, drone durability 1 and drone navigation 1 and 1/3 of 2.


So something like 50k sp to start with and 450k given as a reward to use as you like for doing the missions of the 5 career agents. That way at least new players will have some idea what they want to use them on. As for alts, there's an opt out option so you can just get the sp to use at your own risk.

i dont believe a new player became an effective fleet tackler in a few days with 0 knowledge of the game.

i dont think skillpoints will make any difference to new players who dont know what the skillpoints are for, more information would be better

cyno alts, ganking alts

The only people I see complaining on the forums about new player SP are older players. That's a fairly easy observation to make.
CCP, as a player who has been in eve for less than 3 months, please do not change anything. New players do not have an inherent right to be as good as older players who have invested the time and money.

Edit:
Your comparison to wow is just completely backwards. The issue with wow and other games is that they have gone the "new players can pay to win" route.
Why would you not like the tier system? It allows you to work towards improvements and specialise what type of ship role you fill.

To me it sounds like you need a different game. Try candy crush.

Edit 2:
I find it ironic that it's someone who has clearly just started an alt that is arguing "new players" should have more starting SP. Just reinforces my argument really.

Not sure if it's been suggested or not, but I think that when a new character is made, when choosing things like military or miners that said character should be put into a ship relevant. An amarr military pilot should be given a T1 fitted cruiser and then an indepth tutorial about why it's fitted like that, explain what each module does, and then suggest what they should train for next. And a miner should have a procurer fitted and have some basic refining skills that should also have an indepth tutorial about how that works. I believe that new chars should start with about 1-2 million sp that's allocated for them based on what career path they have chosen, as starting off with 55k is crap and finding out you need to train for like 2-3 months to be able to play properly is really bad. They should also automatically have a faster training time for a limited period to allow chars to be able to use T2 mods sooner etc.

I had a RL friend that tried EVE and he couldnt get his head around it all because he felt like he was thrown in the deep end, and quit playing because he tried to do missions and died. A lot of the time i had to buy him ships and fit it for him because it was so unclear how to fit it properly and didn't understand how to tank a ship, what modules he should be using for that ship and why this ship uses different mods to another ship. He soon gave up because it was too much of a headache for him, he ended up with a half fitted cormorant with lasers, shield and armor mods. I did laugh when he showed me the fit, but it was because he couldnt use a lot of mods and didn't know what to train for. Oh and for good measure he got suicide ganked while trying to move system to do a mission, so he had nothing till I would be online to help him out. EVE is so unfriendly to new players and raising the amount of sp they start off with is a good start, but way more needs to be done, I had help from a RL friend when i first started playing EVE years ago and I'm only been playing because of that, otherwise I would have given up because it was pretty difficult to learn everything.

Back when I started in 2008, new players already got a skillpoint package depending on the choice of school they made on character creation. I believe it was somewhere along the lines of 600k sp or something. Depending on the school however and on what one found worth doing in eve, those packages were sometimes rather useless.

To be honest, I don't know how what new player SP look like these days, but last time I made a new char, I got like almost no SP, but a significant learning boost, which meant that I could put my skills where I needed them, and I was on 600k SP in no time. On top of that, I didn't have to sink hundreds of thousands of SP into learning skills, like I had to when I first started. Fitting Requirements for many mods dropped as well.

As I see it, new players have it much easier than they did way back when already. Plus: If everyone starts out with the core skills trained already, why would one need the core skills at all? Instead of giving everyone Mechanics V, Mechanics could be removed from the game completely. That would however just take away more of the complexity, Eve is known and loved for. Eve has lost a lot already, and gained nothing in return, in terms of complexity.

cyno alts are very low sp trains, giving say 1mil sp would mean each account can create an instant 2 x cyno alts without having to activate any dual character training

Not only has it been suggested, it has been tried. It proved to not be a very good solution, same as almost every other attempt at making new characters “start ahead”.

As others have pointed out, the fundamental problem isn't SP — it's knowledge. That is where you have to start. This is a people-problem, not a stats or mechanics problem.

Throughout the history of EVE, the following starting positions have been attempted:
• 1 day worth of SP — led to complaints that you had to spend time training the basics.
• 2 weeks worth of SP — led to a proliferation of alts and players ending up with a lot of junk skills because they had no idea what their first-contact decisions actually amounted to.
• 1 month worth of SP trained in half a month — led to people sitting around doing nothing for that half month, because bashing out the “core skills” at max speed leaves you with a character that can't actually do anything yet; it only has a solid foundation for the future.
• 1 day worth of SP v2.0, now with more information and an overall expanded set of tools to allow for faster training.

Anything that replicates the second and third design is bound to also recreate the very undesirable side-effects of those designs — players ending up with junk SP and players not playing — and in both cases it'll happen for the same reason: because the first time you start the game, you have no idea what anything means and the “best”-case scenario is that you've found a list of “must-have” skills that you don't understand the value of yet. Without that knowledge, the new player can't make informed decisions so the “improvement” only helps older players making alts. The lack of knowledge about which skills offer what benefit and which benefit offers what advantage is further compounded by a larger lack of knowledge about how the skill system ties into overall gameplay. Core concepts such as the marginal return/exponential cost design; the limited applicability of SP; and the hard and low level limit are almost universally and completely counter to what new players have come to expect from other games. On top of this, there is the horrendous “all V” and “don't do X until Y” griefing that goes on in various newbie channels.

Once those knowledge gaps are filled in, it quickly becomes clear that the supposed SP gap is almost a myth, and even where it's true, it's largely inconsequential. This is what new players have to learn, almost more than anything. Understanding which skills are useful and “core” to some specific activity is good, but that still doesn't answer the question of what activity the new player might want to go for — going to deep down the “core skill” tree before having tried a bunch of different activities can be just as much a waste of time as the old problem of players doing nothing until they reach some perceived level of “enough” SP.

The current system offers a couple of things that simply must not be taken out: gradual choice; no early path lock-in; lots of options of things to try; lots of options of how to try it. Simply speeding up the process might actually ruin the necessary path of discovery, and handing out ready-made packages or just bulk SP still does not offer the insight required to make either option remotely useful.

And this is why giving "new" characters free SP to spend just means you'll have a lot of noobs flying missile ships and training lvl 5 lazers. If anything, all you post indicates is that some people might benefit from a better tutorial system than "go out mine this rock and come back" not free SP. Why is handing people T2 module use on a platter necessary? You don't NEED these skills to play or enjoy EvE and without having to build your way up into a rounded character what sense of growth or accomplishment is there? Every day I read chat and see some newer (not new) player talking about how in "x" days they'll finally be able to do "x" or fly "x." It isn't something they are complaining about. It's something they are excited about. A feeling that they've put in the time, they've learned how the system works and what they need and it's paying off. Eve doesn't need up up down down left right left right B A start. It's a game for the long term. It's not a game of instant gratification and no subscription based game should be.