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Fitting Guides: One of the biggest problems is ship fitting. You look at how Newbies fit their Ship you can see that they will have an uphill battle to complete the simplest Missions that would give them little trouble otherwise. Their are so many Modules in this game that should not go on their Starter fits, more importantly mods like 50mm Armor or small shield extenders that have little use crammed on their lol fits that will get them killed before they realize not to touch them again. Things like direction in tanking are important to learn from the start but their is no road map shown unless they look for one.

Frigates and Cruisers: The CSM Minutes said you are looking to buff them and this is a good thing especially in the areas of fitting and utility. Noobs have few Core skills and Ships like Battlecruisers are very forgiving of this in fitting and Capacitor and outside the new players price range for a couple of weeks and outside their casual price range for 1-3 Months. Smaller Ships getting a similar level of Utility will go along way. Destroyers are a good example of this.

Core Skills and Modules: Giving them a few Core Skills off the start is not a bad thing. A few thousand SP in the right place that they don't know to train would make a world of difference. Also you can lower some basic T1 Mod Requirements to be usable from the get go to give more starting options.

Starter ISK: A bit of Cash in the hands of a New Player won't hurt them to stay in the game. Say 100-500k is a good start and maybe a 25-40ish % buff in the Tiny Ships like Frigates and Destroyer Bounty won't effect EVE at large but will boost young EVE Players earning power. A lot of new Players take to the belts to rat and the occasional Cruiser in 0.6 and a little more common then that in 0.5 with a rare Battlecruiser once and a while would not hurt their progression.

T1 Mining Barges: They are Gank Magnets to a Solo Dessie and even Belt Rats in a new Players hands. Give them a bit more buffer, fitting, cap and 2-3 extra Mids is a good start. Take the Mining Bonus Cruisers away from Cal / Min and focus them on Logi Stuff. Then Free up the Procurer by lowering skill requirements and giving it a 25m3 Drone Bay. That and the earlier buffs should help a Newbie survive Belt Rats and fit the ship.

Drones: I would say give them 5 off the starting gate. These things are a big deal for their first Mission Cruiser and with all the core skills you have set out it takes a while to train them up. Make the Drones Skill a 10% Damage thing and cut their base stats by that much.

Small / Medium Meta Mods: Meta 4 Battleship Guns range from a little less to a little more then T2 Mods. Meta 3-4 Medium Guns can cost up to ten million. This is outside the new players reach as is Battleship Guns. By the time they can fit T2 Guns they should have just enough money to afford Meta 4 Small / Medium Guns on their Ship. A drop rate increase to lower the price of some of the more expensive Guns would be a welcome change to new players. Especially since these Guns help a lot with fitting.

Basically give liberal boosts to the bottom of the pyramid and fight lol fits by giving players an early understanding of Basic Ship fitting.

Now that CCP Dropbear is on this team, what is going to happen with the Arek'Jaalan project?

Please buff the starter/noob ship so it can do level 1 missions.
Boring as they are, they still beat solo mining when you've lost all your ships

The user interface is very complex. In order to play the game new players have to learn quite a few things at once. While some basics need to be covered there is more advanced knowledge that should be added on later on when the player asks for it. Obviously the player needs to be aware of the option to learn more about a certain aspect. For example, the overview is a big deal and while you can start off with the very basics a new player should be made aware that there is more to discover.

I am thinking that dropping on overlay full of wall of text is not the way to go. Nobody likes to read a manual before playing a game. It's supposed to be fun. Maybe instead add a colored tutorial icon next to minimize buttons. That way the user can see that there is tutorial content available. When he has the time he might click it (for example while flying autopilot in a courier mission). Then some kind of interactive tutorial should start. Independent of system currently in - more like arrows pointing at buttons on a transparent overlay layer while they are explained with voice over. So yeah ... IMO the wall of text aurora box is not the best solution in order to keep players interested.

There are a lot of things wrong with EvE from a new player perspective. Even once you pass the tutorial stage.

Missions are the worst thing ever, they give new players a false sense of security. The new player has been around a couple months, has a battlecruiser or whatever, is able to do some lvl4's solo, he thinks he's pretty awesome. Walks into a pvp fight thinking he knows his ship and the mechanics behind how to play it only to hit with a bait and switch. The entire way the game has taught him to play it is wrong. That is a pretty serious blow to morale.

As for the tutorial itself. I recently played through it in January on a brand new character. Better than I had at the end of '06... but also falls far short. The problem is, it teaches you the absolute worst parts of EvE.

The military agents teaches you how to run misions, which as I've already pointed out, suck.

The advanced military agent doesn't teach you PVP,, nor does it teach you wormholes, or incursions(which all pve content should be switched over to some form of, and completely bin the current system except where it can be adapted over or used to enhance.). Instead it teaches you more about missions.

The industrial agent teaches you how to build things, but it doesn't teach you how to acquire materials or how to figure out the margins on the blueprint it gave you. The parts that are vitally important to having any sort of career in EvE dealing with industry. BTW, those tools need help. It can take an hour or more to add up the cost of a single BPO to figure out what is worth building yourself and what is worth buying off the market. Wouldn't just help new players, but ALL players.

The scanning agent does way too much telling and not nearly enough showing. "Go to this type of site for this, that for that.". Then a simple warp in, grab a generic turn in item, and leave. It doesn't actually show you what a data chip is, or how to use them. It just says players use them for invention.

Which brings us to R&D, it doesn't explain R&D and Invention at all, except for very minor mentions.

Mining, the less said about it the better. It does a passable job with mining.

Then we hit what I see as the real problem. Ships, Fittings, and Tactics.

The normal doctrine on a basic level for combat goes like this:

Tacklers point the Bad Guys.
DPS pounds the Bad Guys.
Logi reps the Good Guys.
and EWAR makes everyone rage quit.

A newbie sees those four sentences and should be completely and utterly lost.

What is a tackler? What are desirable characteristics for a tackler? What sort of ship should they fly? Is there a general rule of thumb on fitting a tackle ship? Are there any basic things they should do that aren't readily apparent to make their lives easier?

What is DPS? Wait, there are 3 kinds? Short range, long range, and missiles each with their own trade offs? Why would I want to bring one over the other? Resistance hole what? What sort of ship is best at each? Is there a general rule of thumb for fitting? Tank/Gank??? Are there any basic tricks that make my life easier?

Logistics?

EWAR? They what? That's a **** thing to do...

I'm not saying there should be an all inclusive tutorial to combat. But EvE is a combat game. CCP sells it as a combat game. But it is completely disingenuous to newbies that you can finish the tutorial and have no idea of the very basics of combat mechanics. Worse yet, currently the tutorial leads newbies to believe combat works within the framework presented inside itself, when it most definitely doesn't. Everyone wants more ships to PEW? Well actually explain PVP to newbies instead of throwing them of the deep end without a single idea of how it really works. As it currently stands, the game is one big griefer tossing helpless newbs to chainsaw wielding narcissists and then laughing at them when everything taught to them purposely doesn't work because its setup for a different set of rules, and no one has explained the new rules to them.

i know people who still are confused... :D

I've always wanted to talk about this. I even did the career missions in order to see how the character start evolved and i noticed many flaws and a bad approach.

1. First of all the game in principle is a large complex cohesion of coexisting forces. By that notion splitting tutorials in careers is just wrong.

2. Too much bla bla to little facts:
-Character creation gives absolutely no hard info of the difference in races / factions : Cold hard facts/stats, people love stats. With Tool-tips to info's

Like
Gallente (The Greenish Armor with Balsters) - **Close/Midrange (High dmg /short to medium range) - Mostly Armor tank (Armor does not self regenerate)
Caldari (The Blueish Shields with Missiles)
Amar (Yellow Armor/Shield with Lazorz)
Minmatar(Brownish Scrap-metals Shield/Armor - Projectile Weapons)

Picking a bloodline - > Actual fact of what it changes if it does anything. (You get this and this and this skill -> info button to skill info)

People that create a char for the first time have no idea what they are picking. Just like in proper games you have melee/range/magic. There is a easily identifiable difference so must eve have something that is explained properly and people can visualize the difference.

3.I suggest you create a flow line to guide people trough the flow of professions so they can comprehend how things work and how they are interlinked.

For example:

Industrial branch demo: Make them mine -> make them refine -> make them research-> make them produce something -> make them use it -> make them reprocess it -> make them invent something -> make them use the reprocessing to build what they invented.

Explain all alone the way the connections and details of what each step is and how it is linked in the world.

4. Use a proper overlay, u got the screen, pop up stuff all over the place where it is needed to explain things, its a space sim people don't intuitively know what is going on. Show them a solar system, show them where they are and how they move trough that space and what stuff means, planets etc. Use a instance freeze, pause what is going on to explain things, in a battle stuff happens quickly and there are many things to consider you are able to design a mission instance that pauses popups appear that tell people this is the shield here you are dieing, you need to do this, click here > click here this will activate your weapon here -> this will fire your weapon there -> This is the shield of the enemy going down -> so on and so forth.

One proper run trough these will give experience and knowledge to any player and a grasp of what he wants to do.

5. Tutorials will be optional- they can also be tiered - beginner - advanced - expert.
Give them temporary skills to make stuff they usually can't. Explain formulas show graphs its a math intensive game most people understand them others will not hence they will be shown on advanced info hover buttons.

6. There is also something i remembered about timely response if a player takes too long to get to the next step have a popup that gives further hints. Example (5 minutes have passed since tutorial told him to go there) - "Hello there! I see you have difficulties reaching our rendezvous point. Let me give you a hand, you need to -> click here to do .... -> and here to do .... -> then you select the ... in order to .... -> then click here.... -> you have now reached .....

Eve is complex and massive. There is never an easy way to explain complex things. But showing people one of each mechanic, and how they interlink will open the eyes to the infinite possibilities.

The EVE FNG blog had a series reviewing the NPE last year, you might want to have a look at it: http://evefng.blogspot.com/2011/09/new-player-wrap-up.html

Just dont make it quicker to gain sp in general please. i dont play eve to grind skills or xp.

Being a newbie to EVE I think the tutorials are pretty good. My other account which is 20 days old has gone through the whole of the starting tutorials. So I guess the tutorials that I have done are as up to date as they're going to be. Things I remember:

The Advanced Military Tutorials.

They are all pretty simple to complete you get given ships, which you lose it tells you you're going to lose them so do not worry about this. It teaches us about insurance, about updating our clone, it teaches us about weapons. Its pretty good, but, the last mission is and it might just be me, a pain to complete. If I remember correctly you're given a ship to use thats a pretty decent ship Tech 1 Destroyer I think, but I believe it requires Frigates to be trained to level 3. To train them to level 3 I believe it takes 8 hours. So its a bit of a pain having to wait 8 hours to be able to complete the final mission for 8 hours. I personally found this mission very difficult in any ship I have had available.

The first time I did it I lost my Coercer due to being Warp Scrambled whilst the tutorial warned me this could happen I could not get hold of a Warp Core Stabiliser in the station I was in and knowing what little I know of EVE I was worried flying to another system I did not know would get me blown up and anything I bought would be lost. Silly I know but its the little newbie worrys like that that are an issue for players like me, fitting the ship is hard to understand too, do I need to fit 4 Laser turrets can I get away with 2 or one. The pirates in that last mission hit hard and on a second attempt I had to take one down, warp out come back, take another down, warp out, come back for the last and I think that took a couple of attempts to get right. I know you guys at CCP dont want to dumb down the game and thats great, I got fed up in other MMO's dumbing stuff down, some developers seem to be wanting to make games a one button press = win type of game. However being the starting tutorials would it be such a bad thing to dumb them down a little, or maybe even give us a wingman that just uses healing technologies to help us out when we're getting our ships destroyed. I know losing ships is part of EVE the advanced Military Arc does a good job teaching us that. But for a newbie its still pretty sad to see that beautiful ship you just gave us blowing up :)

Exploration Tutorials.

I love exploration its what I want to do in EVE I really enjoyed it. Probes are hard to understand, until you visit youtube and watch the CCP Probe tutorial. Then it makes sense, but I see a lot of issues in the Rookie channel that people struggle with. I watched the video and picked it up straight away, I am not great at it yet, but I can now find things. Would it not be possible to create a rewatchable in game cutscene of that tutorial video that auto playes once the player selects the Exploration tutorials. That video is perfect and if I can learn how to scan from it, anyone can. Other than that I found the exploration tutorials to be fine as they are.

Trade Tutorials.

They are again pretty good, they explain what to do what needs to be done, the biggest issue I found and its a personal annoyance more than anything is that at certain points you have to create things like a space ship. It takes time of course to make one and there is a bonus reward if you complete within a certain timeframe. However because some of them take time to make if I started the mission an hour before I need to log off for the night, I will miss out on my bonus because I might not get online for 19 hours or so. Its really just a personal niggle for me I guess.

All in all the tutorials are excellent as long as one listens, reads and pays attention to what is required. Some things are confusing but then what isnt. I am working through them all again so if I notice anything major that I believe could be improved I will make a note of them. But the way things are at the moment they're not at all bad from when I first tried EVE many years ago, got lost in an hour and never logged in again :) I am thoroughly enjoying my time in this game now. So much so I purchased a subscription.

Sorry for the long winded reply by the way, I never know when to shut up.