Assembly Hall

As a New Player Coordinator for Pandemic Horde. (NBI) I find that the skillets for any Alphas that want to try and live in null Strongly disfavor any player that Chooses to play Amarr, and to some extent Galente.

The Galente characters have strong ratting potential being able to fly the Vexor, but lack many offensive PvP capabilities. Amarrian pilots are in an even worse shape. Nully in general does not show a strong favoritism for armor doctrines for ships of under BS size.

While PH can and will try to work around these limitations, and unfortunately i don't know exactly what could be done to help this situation I just wanted to bring it to attention.

(new player here)


Press "F" for instant action. That's not what EVE is or what it should strive to be. If I want action, I join a corporation that shoots down players or I do a security mission. That's as far as it should go (I'm having this "dungeon finder" of other MMOs in mind since "raids" was mentioned below that part). The MMOs that have that and offer their players instant action don't last, they never do...because all the fundamentals are missing. Gathering your ships to start a raid, instead of warping to some place, is part of the experience and really important, regardless of whether the player notices this or not. EVE doesn't have to appeal to everyone and that is ok.
If you worry about new players, look into reaching the people out there. Define your target groups and actively try to get these people...or make yourself at least known. As a general gamer interested in sci-fi games, I would know about Homeworld Remastered, Elite: Dangerous and Star Citizen, certainly not about EVE because it is only rarely in the media and when it is, it's about a story that happened and which seems so distant to the reader. Getting articles about an ingame-event which actively involves new players + cheaper first few months would have been great (mostly too late at this point thanks to F2P). Doing something like this once a year, preferably shortly before the winter season when people rather stay inside, might have been a good idea.
Apart from that, numbers are also lower because MMOs in general are in a decline. Communities on the internet have shifted and now there are hubs like reddit, facebook etc. "Infiltrating" groups associated with sci-fi and RPing on these media and advertising your product there could be worth a try. Magazines have been in heavy decline for years and where are people going to read about your product? It's these hubs and media coverage that doesn't immediately show this game's hardcore side like the coverage of the stories that I mentioned. And obviously don't just stick to English/international places, different countries with different hubs are worth catering to. VK (Russia), Nico² (Japan), Sina Weibo/Youku (China) + streaming sites. Breaking into the large Korean market could be worth it (they have Afreeca for streaming)...or the Brazilian one (they actually do play a lot of PC games since consoles are still expensive + 200 million people isn't nothing). India might be worth something as well in a couple of years. What I'm basically saying, potential does exist - the gaming market is constantly getting bigger and bigger but most of that is concentrated in areas where they are getting better and better access. WoW is losing numbers too but their mistake is making the game easier and easier (to appeal to new, lazy players which doesn't work, as stated above) while trying to live on its legacy. EVE has a huge advantage since we can write our own stories, so it should definitely survive WoW.


I agree with this...or rather, it is somewhat hard for new players to find into the game. This game is overwhelming and you have the forum, the rookie help channel and the wiki to get answers. That isn't necessarily enough though. The forum is a good place for guides and such but usually I have several questions and a new one pops into my mind but I won't ask everything(well, rather anything) here because I don't want to spam a thread...just imagine if everyone did that. Apart from that, these days not everyone uses forums. The rookie help channel is usually overcrowded (even with the "apparent lack" of new players), so it's hard to get your answers or only read every fifth line since that one is addressed to you. I find myself mostly googling and getting the appropriate answer from both wikis and forums. Not everyone does that though and it also doesn't help you decide what you want to do. In that case, you need someone to talk to and corporations would be one such an idea. The ones you start in, for instance, could be used to help the players more individually as it shares the load. (Speaking for myself, I actually want to know what outfits best to use for X ship or what ships are good for this and that and etc, talking to someone experienced who knows about PVP (or PvE for other people) You can't do that in the rookie channel since the answers aren't short.) The tutorial missions are great to see what you do in each but after that, you usually want answers about how much money each category brings, what you can do where and how to progress from your current point. The problem here is the different languages as people would probably all write in a single chat...unless it's possible to add several ones for starter corporations. And from there you could go out into the wide, wide universe.

Also something which could help with player retention: Overview of (public) chat channels. Create an ingame-overview with all the public channels available, under different categories, with the current numbers of chatters displayed. (I believe) Most of the channels are player-generated, so make the creators administrators and let it work like an IRC-channel. This buffs the social aspect of the game, creates bonds and that helps in keeping players in the game (well, with F2P they could just use that, instead of subscribing). This also helps with the downtime when you are piloting through several systems. Basically, these channels make it possible to connect to a completely different player which otherwise I would probably never meet (unless I would also play in the same corporation/alliance or fly through similar space). After one month of non-usage of a channel, these could be auto-deleted to make the name available again.

(Well, reaching character limit...I haven't read past page 6, so some issues might be addressed later in the document.)

Anyone understood the point with the NPC belt miners?

to add more life to the game. it is mostly visual with some fun game play mechanics behind it. gives players more stuff to do instead of just looking at lasers.

This just means the lower value spawns will become more abundant!

Then again … be careful what you wish for :D

There are gazillion ways to nerf everything: cynos, capships, citadels. The challenge is to find a solution that would generate content rather than deny it. If traveling gets too easy, capital hunters will never bother - content denied. But if capship pilots feel it's too dangerous, they never login their caps - content denied again. So it's a tricky one. The risk vs reward should feel just about right for both parties.

Delayed tethering seems way too harsh. You get scrambled and you're done: no tethering, no docking. Guaranteed death unless you get reinforcements really really fast. Why do I even want to light cyno on a citadel then? Lighting it on a spot seems a lot safer.

I have another idea, which may work. Citadels will give free tethering only to a proper ship size (that can dock). You can still get tethering for a larger ship if you activate a special module on that ship. On top of that, this module may or may not provide a boost to your ship's mass to help it against bumpers. You cannot safe-logoff with any module active, same for this case. Basically, want a safe travel - build proper citadels. Otherwise, you only have a "panic button". If tackled, push it and get reinforcements. You will have a fight on your citadel, which gives you advantage. Lose that fight - lose the capship too. Sounds fair for me.

Because god-forbid you show up a little bit early and risk a short wait to gain control of the grid, complete the objective, etc, when you could just time it to show up at the last minute, and then rage on the forums that the timers are too short, right?

You have a rich experience of leading fleets at 4 am, do you?

Having wormholes collapsing behind you should be part of life in wormhole space. I wonder if there's opportunity for wormholes which can fit only a handful of ships (i.e.: a fixed number of transits, rather than mass-based limits), wormholes which collapse a short time after the first transit, and "trap door" wormholes which can no longer be entered from the "other end" once they have been used (signature X444 since 4 is an unlucky number for the Chinese)? For trap doors, I'd prefer to see the transiting ship dumped in a random location, since kill-boxing a "trap door" exit node would be far too easy.

These might catch inexperienced wormhole spelunkers by surprise, but surely there needs to be room in the game for expensive mistakes?



If nullsec, why not lowsec too? Add a station facility or deployable infrastructure which can generate aforementioned one-way wormholes (fluxing, trapdoor, otherwise) so that they can not be used as reliable means to bypass dangerous space (being the logistics routes that your enemy knows of). The intent here being to open up opportunities for exploration/roaming activity without making routine transit easier.

The cost are/can be hard on a small corp of a only a few members. Me personally, I am okay with cost. One of the worst features I find in New Eden is how easy it is for people to make corporations. We need fewer one man corps and more small corps -20 to 100 members.
The issue is the corp controls suck dinosaur nuggets - yet so much is tied to the piece of shat structures in space that CCP can't give us the Corp/Alliance control system we should have. So we sit and rot in these small corps of less than 20 people (most are alts) and ***** because we can't compete with, on a individual level with the large and mega-corps that have a lot more man power and finance option.

So in the long run I am happy for the feedback you provide, but we need to adapt to the changes and most won't survive the changes. So make some friends, merge corps and go from there.

Right now, I have the system worked out for managing the numbers, I just need to get more people to join my corp.
Yet, I am also not going to kid myself with keeping a small corp. If I can't get the numbers I am looking for by the new year (or close to), I will happily close my corp and join a larger one. I am just waiting on CCP to upgrade their corp/alliance controls and inventory management systems.

I hope this didn't come across harsh. I had no intention for it to if it did.