EVE General Discussion

First, kudos to CCP for all the new NPE and UI improvements you've made over the last few years. It's been an amazing journey and I'm super excited to see what you have for us in the future. The game now is so much better than the game I played when I first started.

But... I'm still concerned. I don't play much, but I do maintain multiple accounts so that I can watch the evolution of the game I so want to love. CCP, you've been working on the NPE and it has been improving with each iteration. But, it's not the first few hours I'm concerned with, it's the first few weeks. It's what happens afterwards.

My issue is with player progression and their ability to find suitably challenging and rewarding content outside of missions. I've brought friends into this game -- just about every one I know -- at one point or the other. And they were fine as long as I was giving them the guided tour. But I couldn't always be around.

For them, they would try various kinds of content. They understood missions. They did the tutorials and the SoE arc. They even understood mining. It was easy to discover suitably challenging and rewarding content in all those things. The problem happened when they tried to step outside of that. Missions have good, but not great progression. It's easy to understand that once level 1 missions become easy, you can move on to level 2 missions. You get better equipment, improve related skills and the whole thing makes sense and is challenging, even if it is a bit repetitive. But when you move out of missions to other PvE content. When you start scanning down dungeons, the whole thing gets a whole lot messier.

There's very little information around most of the anomalies in this game. Until you memorize the difficulties, it's a crap shoot as to what content is going be too easy and what content is going to get you killed before you down your first rat. Risk is fine in a game, blind risk is frustrating. There's a reason that games throughout history use match making to put you with challenges that are right for you. Too easy, it's boring. Too hard, it's frustrating.

I've been waiting years now for CCP to fix this fundamental problem with EVE. I'm ready to tell all of my friends that EVE is different -- that they won't get bored and frustrated this time. But, the game's not there yet. So much stuff has improved and so much stuff is where it needs to be, but this one thing needs to get fixed before I subject EVE on my friends again. And, frankly, before I come back full time myself.

But, in the mean time, I will keep my accounts active and vigorously follow all the little improvements happening, hoping that EVE will become a game I can love without reservations. And a game I can happily drag all my friends to knowing they'll love it just as much as I will.

- Q

Make some mortal enemies, everything in eve is better with mortal enemies.

I think there's a fundamental flaw in the argument here. I'm not suggesting that you have a level and that you do content that matches that level. That's a fine system and hand-holding and not what I'm looking for. What I'm looking for is for the game to give me relative difficulty consistently. It doesn't do that well. DED sites have it and missions have it. And bounties tell half a story. But I would wager that, without looking, most new players couldn't tell me the relative difficulty of anomalies. Or the relative difficult of anomalies to DED sites to missions. Learning your personal limits is important, but decisions should be informed. And I think the relative success with new players demonstrates that.

As an addendum, I would state that in my mind, hand holding is more along the lines of WoW where it says, hey, go here and grab 10 of these and kill 5 mobs. That's a perfectly reasonable type of play, but not what I'm suggesting. I'm still suggesting a type of play where you, the player, make all the decisions about where to go and what to do. You just get to know what you're getting in to.

I do have to agree that the tutorial in this game are pretty poor. all the best information I got on playing this game came from other players. Ive contemplated that new players do need more guidance before they are thrusted into the rest of the EVE universe. Many of my friends stopped playing because they got killed within the first day of playing because they didn't fully understand the limits of the game.

The main issue is that EVE is all about risk vs reward and in this manner it tends to be very unforgiving even to new players. I feel most of these players need a greater amount of guidance and catering to prior to being allowed to fly off and get ganked because they don't understand security status or WH space and what not. its a difficult balance to achieve.

Thank you for being respectful. I hear you that there's some wonderful content out there where the selling point is that you have no idea how hard it is. PvP fills that whole wonderfully. And there should be some PvE content that does the same. But EVE is capable of targeting both audiences. I think there should be some content, especially PvP, where you just don't know what you're about to get into. And there should be content -- a lot of PvE -- where you do know what you're in for. And that PvE content should have a progression so that I can always find something challenging and rewarding in a relatively short period of time.

I remember a lot of the time I would have, maybe an hour to play. The only real content I could do in an hour, reliably, was missions. Tracking down dungeons, organizing runs, wasn't feasible in such a short period of time. Finding good PvP content was, likewise, difficult and not particularly rewarding. For EVE to expand, it needs to cater not just to it's legacy audience, but other audiences as well. I'm not saying that your play style shouldn't be addressed. It's just that others should be too and there's room for that.

Just this:

Yes seriously CCP, how can you expect people to EXPLORE things if they do EXPLORATION. It should totally tell you what to expect... in detail... maybe even fit the ship for you because modules are confusing and people may quit because of that.

Or you're a giant ****. One of the two.

Thanks for the comment. I've found that the game relies far too much on someone finding a benefactor early on who will walk them through things and explain things. I imagine for every one of you who gets lucky and finds a nice person to help them, there are a dozen who aren't lucky and just walk away.

Most successful MMOs don't require you to live in a different website to be able to play the game effectively. EVE seems to be the exception. Sure sites like Wowhead exist, but it's primarily to get you through something tricky. Not for something basic. Imagine if you were someone who didn't have the time to obsess over the game. If you only had a few hours a week to play, then EVE wouldn't be compatible. And, yes, Evelopedia was both woefully out of date, which is sad given how infrequently PvE content gets added to this game.

There seems to be this expectation that it's okay for EVE to require your total commitment from the outset. It's really the only way to be successful. That, somehow, you should know intuitively that you should never risk more than afford to replace. I remember my first wormhole experience where I got stuck with no real way back and ended up having to pod myself to get home losing some expensive implants. I didn't know that could happen so easily. And I love the idea and implementation of wormholes in EVE. But so little of this game is actually intuitive, which I think people who have been playing a long time forget.

Anyways, thanks again for your comment.

- Q

I've done my fair share of missions and I know the pain of boredom that comes from EVE PvE. I'm not talking about the variation of content. That's a separate issue that's been talked about to death, CCP is aware of it and has plans for it. I'm talking about understanding the relative difficulty of content. Many games manage to communicate this to players and to do so without destroying the fun of exploration or discovery.