EVE New Citizens Q&A

I wish I had known who came up with that ridiculous "you are not allowed to impersonate anyone, even yourself" rule.

Scanning.

I only recently started playing eve (picked it up during the steam summer sale). In the tutorial missions, aside from the first one where you find the ship in space and get in it, the only thing I was confused about was scanning.

Everything about it was confusing as a new player. My first struggle was launching the probes. I kept launching the probes and thinking they had been lost and that I hadn't gotten a scanning window when doing it. I ended up buying 3 or 4 sets of core scanner probes before I had finally figured it out.

The next part was getting the probe scanner open. This part is very unclear and not really touched on in the tutorial. It's also so simple that searching for a solution on google wasn't really an option. Basically, the buttons and tutorial don't make it obvious how to bring up the d-scan/probe scan window.

Which brings me to directional scanning. I feel like a lot of the tutorial missions if you actually read them explain what's going on. The second mission in which you lose your ship basically explains what a bait is, for instance. No mission covers the importance of d-scan, mostly because rats don't show up on it.

My suggestion for a d-scan tutorial would simply be to modify the warp disruption mission. When you warp in, the pirate warps out. You then must use your long range d-scan at a 30 degree angle to find where he warped to. This teaches you about the tracking camera, d-scan's maximum range, and d-scan's angle feature.

Once you get to the acceleration gate the pirate warps to, he uses it. The d-scan then teaches you how to do a short range scan to confirm the pirate is in the room as you expect. Once this is done, you can access the acceleration gate and go in to warp disrupt him, completing the mission. Basically, the mission could mimic a fw plexer...

The starter missions to a good job showing how the various tools available work. "Here's what probes do, here's what a salvager does, here's what you do when your ship esplodes". The starter missions don't show you what to do with that info. Just a little more depth to them could go a long way. They teach you about warp diruptors and webs and how to use them, but not why you use them. The missions involving each module are basically "fit this, and go use it" but they never explain why.

Big Ships are pretty terrible at killing Small ships

By far the most important thing I would have wanted to know was more about the character creation area. Once you're in the game later you can learn that it doesn't really matter what race you pick or even what your character looks like (since you can always redesign it or remap your skills or whatever) but in the beginning you're forced to make these decisions without any ability to research them or know what their repercussions are. Example: the one thing you can never, EVER change is your character name, so be SURE that it's the one you want.

Also, to be extremely wary about scammers and gankers. More info should be posted that these are considered legal forms of gameplay, and give tutorials and examples of tactics used by each. It's all too easy for a newb to think an ad posted in Jita must have to be real if it's allowed to be posted (and you don't know any better). And I can remember my first time mining when I got provoked by a can flipper and tried to fight back and was blown up, or being killed by station guns after I attacked somebody for just locking me up and not knowing anything about aggression or criminal flagging. You always hear "fly safe" and "don't fly anything you can't afford to lose", but how often does CCP tell you "trust no one".

Make it a little more obvious that there's no way (yet) to really do anything with your full character, or to be able to fly your ship first-person style. It took me forever before I realized there was no way to change the camera angle to inside the ship.

Finally, include many, many more warning boxes (suppressible of course) at any step where someone could do something stupid. New players may not realize just how strict CCP is on reimbursement policies regarding legitimate gameplay mechanics, and that there are no "take-backsies" when you screw up - even if you're new. Warn new players better and more frequently that their actions are often irreversible.

The mechanic changes between HS, LS, Null and WH space.

Getting trapped in a warp bubble while warping around with new corp mates through null to get to owned space and losing a cruiser you probably shouldn't have been flying three weeks into a trial really sucks for new players.

I think a big part of this is the tutorial tends to give you a mix of items, both directly and from looting the mission enemies. As a new player doesn't have much ISK to throw around it's reasonable to assume you should be using whatever items you can get for free (hell, I do this on purpose when I go and do the other faction's career agents, for the heck of it). Which often results in making a more difficult fit than necessary if you don't know what you should be using for that ship, or that you should fit weapons with the same range.

I agree with a lot here. Pardon my extensive quote:

Yes, same here. And to relate it to the topic question: these important game mechanics are never touched on in the tutorials/career missions.

I guess so, but that's more a personal preference thing. You figure out pretty quick that the zoom scroll works "backwards" and then you get used to it.
+1
I actually think that's fine. You can't fit everything into the tutorials, or they'd be infinitely long.
Yes to both of these. Fortunately, my corp mates set me straight before I went around in empire space cheerfully ignoring WTs.

One thing I think would be nice might be advanced tutorials, designed for characters who have spent some time playing: things like PI, incursions, logistics, market trading, avoiding gatecamps, etc. where a character with a month under his belt could go back and learn some of the intermediate level stuff. Like level 2 missions, but for tutorials...

I have to say that my experience with GM's are very different from yours, apparently. I don't know what was deleted, but I think the help screens do a reasonable job of telling even newbies what can and can't be asked for, and I have always had fairly quick, fairly straight answers, as well as help when help was due. That is NOT the biggest challenge for a new player.

Sure, until I play any other game in existence and get used to scrolling the correct way again.

Oh I forgot about that! Contracts in general were a complete mystery to me up until a month or so ago when I had a T2 BPC I had to figure out how to sell. No discussion of them in the tutorials as far as I know.