Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Easy fix. Go find a newbie to help get started. If every older player did this the numbers would drop.

I would have to agree with the OP. In order for CCP to be able to continue to provide great content for the regular players as well as new players the new players need to be retained longer than a month.

I would have to say that Mini Incursions involving groups of new pilots would allow for rookies to get to know each other and learn the mechanics of the environment where each Mini-Incursion would take place in a different system within 20 jumps of the rookies starting HQ. There would be a mini-incursion for each type of regular mission such as mining, security, courier, etc. that would be created around the Sansha Incursion style of play. The Mini-Incursions wouldn't be as hard as the regular Incursions and would also not just be centered around Sansha but would in fact be centered around the local system Pirate NPC.

Once finished with each set of incursions you would receive a new implant that would be one step above the lowest level of implant as well as new skill books and keys to unlock events later on in the game that you would never be able to unlock running normal missions.

Great idea OP....making certain that CCP is able to retain its customers after the first month so even better content will be provided to the rest of Eve.

What is with this all everyone should do pvp. If everyone did pvp, you would a) had to pay for accounts, b) pay for plex, c) make eve spawn ships for you. Even most hard core pvp player needs ISK. And ISK is not generated by pvp.

The original idea was not about "farming ISK with PvE, so please make PvE more entertaining". ISK is not a problem.

Losing new players is a problem. New players, that will probably go into active team PvP later on. No new players - no new blood in PvP area. And apparently new players start with PvE, not with PvP. For different reasons.

So we keep "go play WOW or join team pvp game" attitude and see game stagnating without new ppl comming or we understand new players and make life more interesting for them. So they stay in game and join 1337 PvP players as some of posters in this thread.

Fixed that for you.

(Seriously, which part of 'Multiplayer' are you struggling with?)

And yet statistics shows, that most new players want to try to play solo first. I believe if we make the game more interesting for them they will stay in game and join multiplayer activity later. Now we just lose them.

yes to randomization but no to scaling rats, too easy to farm by warping in a bunch of alts then warp them out leaving a marauder eating the munchies

I found something interesting actually on this topic reading through some CCP CSM discussions.
That early on in the history of EVE they did trial more random missions but players didn't like it because 'random' is bad. As sometimes they felt punished by the RNG, and a bad RNG streak really hurt.

This means you don't want to make missions more 'random' but more 'diverse'.

For example, take a step back from the hard coded NPC's, to soft coded NPCs. Sansha NPC's would all use Amarr, Caldari or Sansha ships. Since those are the racial skills behind the Sansha pirate ships. And they wouldn't be named according to what they have fitted on them. They would use a bunch of pre designed fittings that might not perfectly match PG or CPU use, but would at least match the number of slots and approximate fittings. And the bounty would not be visible initially, instead only being delivered after a ship is killed based on it's value (including hull), and modified by the skill of the NPC's affecting it's stats.

This then makes things less predictable, but doesn't 'punish' you for bad RNG, since you get paid according to the value of the ship. Not the same pay for something four times as hard.

You then also have to redesign missions to not be based on 'save the damsel' scripts. but more generic tasks. Everyone knows the classic 'patrol' mission, and for all it's boring often, the reality is when done well it can be good. The main issue is that it always happens in the same terrain. Which means you have to both make the deadspace pockets be varied & kit-set built so they can be generated on the fly, and you have to make the terrain matter and influence the fight.

Once you have these things, you then have a diverse range of fights the player will face without being random. Since if you know you are going against Sansha you know the range of ships they draw from, and what their main weapons & ewar are from the lore. And the mission 'start' however you use it (I would change up how agents work also myself, but they work for now) can give some information or clues on the terrain.

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Scaling up based on fleet however, is a terrible idea since it's so open to abuses.
If you want to encourage fleets, create five optional objectives inside a 'mission' that you can't do all at once & that vanish soon after any of the objectives are met. That pay out well. Then there is a reason to extra ships.
And make sure you don't lose money by sharing, but make additional money. That's why people don't normally fleet, is it's very rare to make additional money or even the same, almost always you lose money.

The lightest I can see going effectively is t2 fit cruisers, and even then these will have massive issues in vanguards because of the contest mechanics. They would likely only be allowed in the HS "island" fleets where contests are extremely rare and pilots are at a premium.


Well, if the actual suggestion is followed fairly closely, i.e. something incursion like but on a smaller scale, it is one of the few highly social aspects of PVE. On most days (barring mom drama, which is player driven in 90% of cases, spawn location and timer driven in only a few) there will be upwards of 300 real people running incursions. Yes, this will be inflated to look like 450 or 600 toons, because there is a lot of multiboxing in incursions, but even the boxers are somewhat social and usually co-operate with fully single toon (or booster alts + 1 on grid) fleets if you offer them a mutually beneficial deal.

Wait, wait, wait...

So, you are quoting the statistics that show that almost all new players go straight into PVE, then about half quit, then maybe 10% go on to group activities. That means that 4 out of 5 players who actually stay in the game stick to solo PVE activities for the whole of their game time.

So, getting more players into PVE is not going to get them into group content later, is it.

Best possible fix is to make the group activities more attractive and easier to get into. Make it all more intuitive.