Assembly Hall

I was just thinking of something the NPC corps could use to make the game easier for new people to learn and something that could interact with existing or a new tutorial. I remember the CSM and CCP were both interested in this area so I decided to post it here.

Many professional corps have a fleet doctrine that tells people you need to be able to fly ship X with Y fittings. Well, the starter corps don't really have anything like that. Some players are smart enough to use the corp chat channel, which is a good resource for feedback, but others never visit it.

So I was thinking, on the fitting screen, why not add some basic ship templates that the NPC corps, where the tools and resources of a player corp aren't available, could have? The new players are losing out without this and it means every corp they go into has to train them on elementary fitting philosophy. In fact it doesn't even need to be limited to NPC corps either just to be safe.

So why not create some decent sample fits for some ships (maybe a pvp and pve version for each) using basic t1 items and base it on minimal skills and fitting req. The CSM could help CCP come up with those fits or put them up to public for suggestions and feedback. Make it available to everyone under a basic fits tab and as you are skilled up for more ship types, more fittings are unlocked for you. IE no cruisers are shown until you get cruiser 1 and when you do, that race's fits are unlocked in the module.

Then you allow players to browse the modules and be able to mouse over the fittings. This is a key point, each item fitted will have a little tool-tip telling players exactly why it is there. The hulkageddon hulk fit will feature a lot of tank and the tool tip will tell players that they are using tank in these slots so the ship will have a better chance of surviving until concord shows up or something like that. Maybe even add a few suggested skills like drone five for the lovely vexors. Then all you need to do is add a tutorial telling players about said feature. So when they get a dessy from the tut missions a destroyer fitting tutorial will come up and it will show the player a PvE fit, a PvP fit, and a salvage fit perhaps for the cats.

These wouldn't necessarily be current meta fits, but basic common sense fits that can help establish some sort of baseline to put newer players on the right track right away. For example, a new player wouldn't know not to mix tank. So none of the fits would have mixed tank and would specifically mention that mixing tank is bad. That way the new player can just plug and play until he's ready to improve his fitting skills as a player.