EVE Information Portal

Above all else, make sure it works and flows logically.

The last time I tried the tutorial, I was given an item to use on my ship for one of the early missions (non-civilian shield booster I believe), but not given the skill to use it yet, nor had anything been explained about skills at the time.

Like the learning curve graph, the importance of "getting it right" is steeper for Eve too because it is so dauntingly large with so much to learn from a newbie's perspective.

Bottom feeders won't stop lol, they totally get that it causes people to ragequit EvE - that is just one of the many reasons they do it, because sadly, in life, these sorts of people exist. But in real life there are counters to these sorts of people.

The problem in EvE with NPE griefing, is there is no real way to fight back against it, by a well meaning player base.

Ironically in EvE, the very 'NPC Police' set to protect players in this way, are actually the guys who shoot more new players than baiters ever do, because of new players lack of understanding of aggression mechanics. Frankly, the Concord IQ test must be like box of chocolates given how the whole way concord in EvE works. To me it makes EvE feel very un-realistic in that sense and they should be smarter and more fluid, with less clear cut mechanics in the baiters favour. In other words, occasionally Concord gets all gun trigger happy, and wipes out every thing shooting each other, just to be... you know... sure.

It is also incredibly confusing for a new player to understand that a simple container will open them up to a world of hurt, given that the very game starts off by getting players to loot destroyed ships and containers from dead ships - it is the first damn thing you teach them!

Other MMO's also encourage players to party up and play together. Fleeting up in EvE is both difficult for new players to understand and doing so in EvE is practically a one way ticket to a new ship and clone.

The players who prey on new players are experts at understanding all of these things and how aggression works in EvE. They are extremely hard to bait themselves, and fly such cheap ships that even when destroyed with a successful bait they just keep going. As such there is no easy way for the more well meaning players to fight back against these sorts of players.

There are different approaches to help address this:

1. Simplest of all - quickly educate new users about mechanics and scams like this FAR sooner. In game videos would be great.
2. Let the player base police these systems more effectively. A concord type rank is more than long over due and I am sure there are several ways this could be made to work.
3. Change the Concord mechanics around Starter Systems or Stations so they engage and destroy any type of player aggression unless there is a War-Dec in place i.e shoot both the aggressor and defender.

One thing that should* be relatively easy to implement, and has the potential to seriously increase the ease in which new players are integrated into the Ways of EVE is to create a help/rookie channel per NPC corp where players from actual player corps can participate in.

If you want to help new players in an NPC corp now, you run into a number of problems, not the least of which are ending up in the NPC corp you intend to without endless corphopping, tying up an alt slot or a main/useful character in a NPC corp, and credibility issues given the immense amount of verbal griefing of other "day-old-alts" and/or "professional NPC-corp campers" when you actually try to do something useful regarding newbie questions.

Rookie/help channel has several severe problems that make it virtually impossible to give serious advice because it simply scrolls so damn fast with all the lol-advice and other shenanigans people get up to in there, mods notwithstanding.
Especially people who are not fluent in english can simply forget those channels as any form of useful information.

Having NPC corp specific "public" help channels has a number of advantages compared to the current setup:

• You place the help channel right where starting players end up to begin with, spreading the total amount of people using the help channel over the various NPC corps, thus drastically reducing scroll rate and legibility.


• It allows experienced players willing to go through the effort of teaching newbies the basics a way to do so without having to effectively throw away an alt spot, because they can simply log into the NPC corp help channel of choice.


• Since most new players tend to stick to their own racial ships at the start, an NPC corp help channel can have much more focus on a specific races' challenges than a general help channel.


• It allows for an improved integration of new players into the player-driven corporations, since recruiters can scout out potential and assess suitability during their help/advice sessions in their channel of choice.

Of course, the old saw how Every Feature Can Be Abused goes doubly for a game like EVE, and people will find "ingenious" ways to do so.
I think , however, that with decentralisation, and the current options for blocking/flagging as you would apply to a channel dedicated to player help, this idea should be mostly self-regulatory.

As far as implementation goes, this idea builds on the existing chat system, only requiring a number of new channels with public settings to be set up for the various NPC corps, with MOTD/flagging/other permissions equal to the current NPC corp and help channels.
The actual effort of setting this up should* be minimal and implementation can be done as a mini-update.

* barring Murphy's Law and the vagaries of the actual codebase of EVE.

Just wanted to point out - that changing the module/item names the way they have been - IS dumbing down the game.

You've done it repeatedly in the past. Taking away the games complexity to simple it up - takes away some of it's richness as well. Getting rid of Learning Skills was one such mistake. People who invested their time and effort in building a solid basis for their future gaming - not only increased the speed of their training - they got themselves a chance to learn the game before they went off - doing just what they wanted to do - geting their asses in big fat expensive ships they had no idea how to use. How many people listen to the advice of those veterans who tell them to - get to Level IV missions as fast as you can - try that - and end up losing everything they have because they went to far to fast - and then quit? The great thing about the Learning skills - wasn't the speed of training they gave you - it was that early era of playing the game on a low level - learning how things worked - learning how to play - instead of getting blown up in their battle cruisers just as fast as they can get into them.


Now - of course - all the impatient little players out there, oh so eager to get into their battle cruisers - hated that. But then so do teenagers (which many of them are) who hate their parents forcing them to do things right instead of slap dashing their way through things. So - how many of these impatient people quit because they got impatient with the learning skills? Well how many of them were going to quit anyway?

I'm not advocating bringint the Learning Skills back - that is never going to happen - but I use that as an example of the things you've done in the past which simpled up the game and dumbed it down.

Getting rid of all the racial attributes was another example. It made the back story to your character meaningless.


So - don't be telling me you're not trying to simplfy the game or dumb it down.

And - don't insult our intelligence with the wasted band width that was that stupid graph. It wasn't information - it was a ******* commercial. Articles aimed at people who are already playing the game - are no place for commercials.



Your big problem here is that you can't have it both ways.

Either you've got a complex game for people who relish a challenge - or the pablum that passes for gaming on the popular game sites. Most people want games played on Easy Mode - if you want a mass audiance - then ruin your game, make it just like the others and watch it fail since the other games do pablum better than you.

Accept that this is always going to be a niche game - and make it the best niche game you can.

People who play EVE will pride themselves in playing a rich, complex, difficult game - and stick with it - whereas those wanting Easy Mode are going to quit the first time they get bullied by some ganker anyway.

There's really not much you can do about that.


Now - none of the above is to say that you can't make the game better than it is.

The Player Guide for one thing has improved in some ways - but could still benefit from some form of Table of Contents rather than just a serach engine. A pure wiki approach isn't a good one as it requires that the player already know the correct entry of specific search terms in order to find the relevant sections of the guide. Each article should have a category it fits under and be able to link BACK from itself to the category or sub-category it fits in - so that players reading it can back up and find similar articles.

Also - fixing the forums so that you can post links to the player guide that won't choke on the BBS code that is in there would help too. Not to mention that of external articles on other sites.

Also - the forums now allow you to make posts of much greater length - and yet - if you take the time to write one - you are going to lose everything you've writen if you don't make a copy of it before you try to post it or preview it. I can't think of anything more frustrating than the first time someone constructs a thoughtful, detailed post - only to have it vanish - when they went to preview it. That is simply unacceptable. At least with the old forums - you stood a chance of going back a page and recovering your text.

A player should NEVER have to go to an outside search engine just to do a search on topics contained in either the past or present forums.


These are fundamental failures of your games documentation - and yet many of them are long standing. Simply providing reliable, comprehensive documentation that is readily accesible in game might do wonders for your player retention.

To achieve this - you must devote more money to not merely preparing your documentation - but maintaining it each and every time there is a change to the code. No documentation - means - no acceptance of code for implementation - and yes - after several decades of software development - I understand what that means. MONEY - and lots of it. Accepting the efforts of vounteers is helpful - but you can't be dependent on it. Volunteerism is inconsistent and unreliable. You have to have dedicated people whose full time job it is to keep watch over the documentation and make sure it is easily accesible, current and correct.

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I'm not sure this is a good idea.

When I sit and update my market orders, I keep my eyes on the UoC corp chat so that I can help out new players. This is possible because there's enough people to have a good stream of chatter, but not so many people that it's a secondary Jita Local. If there's too many people then questions and answers will scroll way off the screen before they're of use to anyone.

On the rare occasion that I do catch a nubbin I pretty much always hold them for a moment, tell them that they're in dangerous space and should be more careful, and then let them go. This leads to quite a few good things (wow, I could have died / lowsec is kinda cool / maybe that person can teach me stuff) and, I think, encourages newer players to stay in Eve and engage in PvP.

That's a much better accomplishment than adding a dual-tanked, rocket/ac/railgun rifter to your killboard.

Point being, there are some things that CCP can do to help the new players out, but we, the experienced, bitter vets of Eve need to do our part too.

Please for the love of god, OVERHAUL MINING!!!!!

99.9% of very new players mine as a source of income while they train up skills to do other stuff. Many people that I have talked to including my own friends have said they would stay if mining was more fun. I'm not saying dedicate an entire expansion to it, but it NEEDS improvement. Not only will it improve NPE, but curb botters and increase interest in the profession.

Please acknowledge this CCP, mining is one of the most boring things in the game at the moment and is one of the first things a new player does.....

Every attribute on every module ship and item explain itself no matter how mudane it may be

Volume
How much space this object occupies.

Wait you got 5k isk and an Agent?

Sorry for the slow reply rate, it has been a hectic weekend to say the least. Working through all the posts currently and have to say its great to see very good discussions going on :)



Goal setting is a major aspect we are looking at. In the long run we would like the professions/personas to run all the way into the game, so if someone does want to be a bounty hunter, they would get some sort of info on this type of career.



I know exactly what you mean, Dark Souls did this very effectively and whilst it is one approach, I am not sure that is the best course of action for EVE at the moment.



Sounds good, I'll keep an eye on it and seems there is moar walls to go through there ;)



This is another thing we are looking into, giving players some starting points regarding ships and fitting. But worry not, we will not be giving them specific and highly specialized fits.



One of the problems in the beginning is the absence of sense of progression and if we keep the player in the same ship for the first 10 hours, its kinda like playing your standard fantasy MMO where you keep the same gear for hours when you start. Having said that, the current 'here is a new ship' rate could use some balancing and we have plans to address the sense of progression beyond giving new ships at a fast speed.