Assembly Hall

It isn't about "patience". There are a few skills that are really very hard to communicate, and there is a lack of attempt to even do it.

There is a real problem with tutorial agents being able to be driven away. No new player should be able to get their tutorial agent to stop talking to them in any way but by finishing the tutorial. FIX THIS PLEASE.

There is a problem with skill books in the tutorial being given in confusing ways. One communication channel, all relevant skill books up front.

That said, exploration is a headache. The tutorials explain it poorly. They should just link to the video of the tutorial, maybe in the browser.

The more common scams should probably be explained. You don't have to ban them or do anything special, just have some agent explain how a small selection of market scams work. Maybe this should be done by a new agent, a criminal agent who teaches about the very basic common techniques of how to travel and survive in low security space, how can flipping and looting work, not to overspend on a ship, how to scam in the market, war-declarations on new corps, and so on. Honestly, learning the mechanics of some of the scams can give a lot of insights into how the game is to play normally; it's very useful educational material.

Finding a corp. This is actually hard. I heard in rookie chat from someone who had been kicked out of a corp for sitting and reading help guides and such. Apparently she looked suspicious because she didn't think to dock in station to do it. Seriously, this isn't "spy" behavior, and the corp in question lives in high-sec anyways.

There is no guidance on low sec and null-sec. Everyone gets the impression that both are terrifying places that one shouldn't enter until they have an ancient character and the best battleship ISK can buy.

Nowhere do I see any lines of communication where more experienced characters can talk to the rookies.

All you need is finding a good experienced player who is willing to be your Mentor.
Then you need access to a Voice Server like Ventrilo or Teamspeak and start talking with him. He wil invite you to his corp or give you advice to join a friendly corp.
Then he probably give you some isk to buy skillbooks and give advice whenever you need it.

So if you are a noob, go and ask people, join Help channels, find friends, join a corp with some experienced players. Show that you are able to read and understand guides, they are tons of all sorts of guides available. Read that.

Then start playing the game. Spend some real money and sell a plex or two, dont avoid loosing your ships at all costs, take some risks and learn playing the game by doing.

If you then still dont like, eve is not for you. Then stop playing and find Battlefield 3 or Kitty Online.
Also look for www.uosigena.de and make yourself a character or play wow.

If you cant find a Mentor, send email to me. I might be able to support some new players for a while. But dont expect ttoo much. I am busy learning the game and reading guides. Still.. after so many years playing.

I recently got a friend to subscribe to EvE, but I don't think he'll stay. He hears about all the neat things going on ingame and got to see some of the stuff I do too. He likes what he sees an wants to do the same, but I see the excitement and enthusiasm melt away from his face when he learns he can't do anything except run missions and mine. He doesn't like to hear that he can't do this or that because his skillpoints are too low.

I'm doing the best I can to encourage and mentor him, but I'm afraid it's just not enough. He's already fallen into the habit of setting skills in the queue and not logging in. He's told me that he feels like a fifth wheel when we play together. That his actions have no impact one way or another. Eventually he's going to ask himself why he's paying for a game that takes far too long to do anything an he'll just unsub.

The new player experience needs drastic improvement. It needs to give new players more options and things they can actually do with such low SP. And yes I still believe CCPs nerf to starting SP was a mistake. They reduced the amount of starting SP by 94%.

One thing that comes up time and again is getting noobs into player corps.
Most small player corps won't touch them which only leaves the larger alliances with specific noob corps.
I don't think the root of the problem is the player corps, I'm sure there are loads of small corps that would love to expand, but they have no way of telling wether a so called "noob" is actaully a noob or a veteran alt looking to scam their corp or assess them as a potential target for a war dec.

Not sure how you can fix the latter, but you could go some way towards it by altering the basic corp setup. Possible enhancements colud include a specific "Probationer" role and/or a "Probationers Hanger". This would make restricting access to corp stuff much easier, and possibly encourage smaller corps to take on noobs and provide mentoring.

While I think that the Current Tutorial Is working fine - It still needs a lot of work to help facilitate the "NPE".

One section that I love about the tutorial is the "Tutorial is now done. Now go join a Player Corp!" The section that I hate is that it stops at showing the Newbie where to get into a suitable Newbie Corp.

Perhaps an idea worth talking about is allowing large Player Corps Opt Into a "Corps You Should Join" List at the end of the tutorial page? Granted, we can control and regulate the quality of the corp Opted into this list by having "like/dislike" button that the player base uses next to the Corp Info.

All CCP has to do is limit the slots allowed into the "Newbie Corp List" and provide a platform for Player Corps to apply/resign from their position. A programmable script should be able to do that.

Player-base regulates the quality and when the corp hits a certain ratio of "dislikes", it's automatically dropped from the "Newbie Corp List".

I haven't been long enough to be able to come up with a concept based on "Vet-Status" Experience.
Just thinking out loud without much re-considering, could be a bad idea for all I know. Gotta go to work soon after this.

What do you guys think?

I'm afraid the fault is yours, for telling him all that he can do is mission and mine. (I agree that he should complete all the tutorial missions, including knowing how to mine).

Use a buddy invite to start a new account and get yourself a 51 day free alt. Train up a new character alongside him and do stuff with him, on his level. Of course he feels like a fifth wheel if he's sitting in a Kestrel watching you blap stuff with your Tengu.

Within a few days, a week at the absolute most, he can be flying a useful T1 frigate, going out and having some fun. Buy a couple of dozen T1-fit frigates for the pair of you and try a few "consensual PvP" frigate fights within corp (if there are some other very new players who can join in, so much the better) so he gets an idea of the basics, then graduate to messing about in lo-sec or even maybe a bit of suicide ganking. It sounds like your friend is keen to play, but he just needs letting off the leash you've (with the best of intentions) put around his neck.

EDIT: I started off with ~60k SP and no learning skills. Your friend starts off with ~60k SP and the equivalent of all learning skills to V. He's skilling at double speed compared to what I was at that stage (actually more than double, when you take remaps into account). He'll make it if he wants to. If he doesn't it won't be skill training that makes him fail, but people telling him the skills he's trained are meaningless.

One of the best learning experiences I had was corp combat competitions in all T1 frig fits. I would recommend it to everybody who is trying to get people into the actual game (as opposed to the game's introduction that is PvE).

Also, there's nothing wrong with missioning in a Tengu while they're in a frigate so long as they're doing something useful like webbing/killing frigates etc. It gives an introduction to the various roles required in any fleet that often get forgotten when people have skilled up to fly something bigger.

there's plenty of stuff newbie can do if they just figure out how

other than that those ~other forum posts~ were obviously by guys who just simply don't like games like eve.

99% of time you spin ship in station or do some other trivial stuff or just simply do something else than eve while waiting for something to happen, unless you're person who likes to make things happen, of course. there's very little anyone can do about peoples preferences and mindset.

i've been dealing a lot with these types who log in go like "is anything happening" and after 3 seconds they log out. i can figure eve is very difficult place for these guys.

I think one issue is the shortness of the free trials. I think it takes more than 14 or 21 days for most people to "get into" Eve enough to want to stay, unless perhaps you have a good mentor. It's certainly too short a time to be able to finance yourself by paying with PLEX. How about a "noob PLEX" which allows a single 30-day extension for say 25 or 50M ISK (but still leaves you in trial status)?

Unfortunately that's the harsh reality of EvEs current NPE.

Back in the day before CCP nerfed newbie SP, new characters were able to jump into most activities on their first day. Nowadays new characters can't really do anything except mission run and mine. Believe me, I've checked. The starting skills are a joke and don't allow a newbie to do anything.

My main wrote a blog about this in response to the new dev blog The Ease of EVE at http://cyprusblack.blogspot.com/2012/02/woe-unto-new-players-of-eve.html

New players can't probe, salvage, repair their own ship, repair other ships, ectronic warfare, tackle, haul, manufacture, trade, explore, run a corp, participate in PI, fly some basic T1 frigates of their own race, or do much of anything except mission run and mine. Not with the SP they start with.

This is the sad state that CCPs nerf to starting SP left new players in.