EVE New Citizens Q&A

I just did the new player tutorial a month or so ago and agree with the OP. Some of the missions are very glitchy and forced me to take longer than it should. Or they provide very limited information.

I admit tutorials are hard to get right as every time you update it, you need a Eve virgin to test it right. I wonder how many tutorial developers have used their family as guinea pigs in testing :p

I agree that a text-light version of the tutorials could be useful, but new players need the guidance to ease them over the 'learning cliff' that EvE presents in the early stages. The 'streamlined' New Player Experience takes you through the basics and leaves you with a suitable set of starting skills and modules for almost any playstyle.

This is cause you bought and used the L.E.B. I, you could have used the civilian gun you got when you started the account for the tutorial mission, so in the end Aura is quite accurate on this comment. (all tutorial missions can be done with civilian modules, after that they are useless).

In general good guide to help others out who are stuck with the tutorials / career guides though. Keep up the good work.

As previously stated, new players now start with a rookie ship which has no modules of any sort. The LEB 1 is provided by Aura together with a supply of ammo.

A civilian gun can be useful if you just want something to draw aggro.

Perhaps we as a community need to put together a series of tutorial videos to walk people through the extremely complex world of simply fitting a ship and launching into space.

Exactly like that!

I think you get ammo later in the mission when you are in space.

I actually had an idea that seemed like it would help a lot, but it might take a chunk of developer time to make. It would admittedly look pretty cool, and communicate a lot of visceral things about the world that are hard to explain in text.

You start the game. You are in first person, and automatically follow an agent who explains (in voice and subtitle) the basic idea of the capsule.

As you're walking, you pass a couple of mirrors and see your character walking, which creates immersion and sinks in the idea of a first person viewpoint where you won't see the back of your own biological head. You are told that you will be boarding a capsule, and you will be piloting it to your first ship, which is "barely adequate, but it will get you by for now".

You are led to a capsule and your viewpoint descends into the interior. You sink into the seat you saw on the way in, then there is a running water noise. Then you see the capsule fluid flow in, rising above your eyes to the top of the viewpoint, then darkness for a moment.

Then, your ship's UI interface (armor, shields, structure, capacitor, etc) lights up in an animated powerup sequence. You see some text about a camera drone connection being established, connecting, synching output scroll up, then dissapear to be replaced with an image. For the first second, the image is garbage-filled and staticky, but it immediately becomes clear - now, you see your first "normal" view of the game - the sight, viewed from your camera drone, of your capsule leaving the starbase at the beginning of the tutorial, already with instructions to warp and board your first rookie ship.


Anyways, about the existing tutorials, i have two issues.

One, the agents are very vague on what specific skills they will be teaching over their mission sequence. If they said in their intro something like "I'm going to be teaching you how to use drones, how to use webbing and scrambling equipment to keep enemies from escaping, how to avoid damage with speed and mobility, and how to make your ship faster with afterburners", I wouldn't be stumbling around at a loss of what skills I might need to buy on the market.

Two, the missions where you get things are too often arranged in ways where of the components you need to make it happen - the skill, the fitting, and if applicable, the ammunition - you get them in a way that feels haphazard. "I just got a machine gun.. but I intuitively recognize that I might need ammunition for it." If the mission, when giving the weapon, said something like "You'll need some ammunition, so the first thing we need to do is get you some bullets," then it wouldn't have the erratic feel it currently does.

I will add that at points I would get things and not have the skill to use them. IIRC, one of the Basic Combat missions offhandedly tells you to also fit a Small Armor Repairer I. At no point do you get the skill Repair Systems in conjunction with this request, and it was worded as if I did not have a choice. You MUST MOUNT THIS MODULE, even though you don't know how to and we can't be bothered to give you the skill to use it!

That is actually a side point as well. They give me Civilian Drones and tell me to use those drones to shoot a rat. The way it is worded made me think they wanted me to shoot the rat with those specific drones.. and I already had acquired some drones earlier. (off of looting a mission rat.) Thus I had to stop and ask on the Rookie Help channel whether it would cause problems for me to use a Hobgoblin I instead of a Civilian drone. This is actually not the only example of the text reading like that. Could the wording be looked at to make sure that it is in the sense of "You need to use a module that does X. If you don't have one already, here is a Civilian version." instead of "Use this Civilian module to do X."

I don't know if Im just a bad player, but I found the exploration probing really really hard and frustrating. I had to give up a number of times and come back to it later to complete the missions. I don't know if this was due to a lack of player skill or actual character skill points in probing and exploration. Does it get any easier when you have better probing skills? The tutorial kind of left a bad taste in my mouth in regards to doing exploration as a career and moving into Wormholes.

I wanted to express my sentiments on the tutorial process as well since my girlfriend and I just started playing Eve and ran into these same walls in the tutorial process. Especially about the reference to "rooms" being jump stations. That made absolutely no sense to either of us and we are both MMO veterans.

I really think CCP needs to bring in some outsiders to sit down and go through their tutorials to discover the pitfalls and correct them. It must be really hard as developers of this game because they know it inside and out and speak the Eve language fluently. To a new player it is already a daunting game in terms of depth, but when you complicate that with things like not explaining terminology, it becomes very "inside-baseball" and hard for n00bs to overcome.

CCP really needs to invest some time in this. I went to the rookie chat channel and just couldn't believe the amount of traffic in there from people just trying to figure out the basics when most of that could be mitigated with a better tutorial system.

I know a lot of this is easier said than done, but I really want to like Eve and want it to succeed. It's the most beautiful MMO out there and has some serious potential and that's hindered by the overwhelming learning curve that could be addressed given some serious time and thought.

I will keep chugging and see how far I get...