EVE Information Portal

Perhaps if you had some baseline fittings for PvE and PvP in Corp Fitting for noob-corps, that would help them get started.
One thing I had trouble with early on is that without access to EFT (which EVE itself does not make you get), you have no idea how to fit a ship other than adding guns and some kind of tank and maybe a couple of other modules you found while missioning.

Basically, the sort of half-decent fits you'd get if you asked in the help channels or in your noob corp channel. Only a handful, and either only those that are of use to new players such as a PvE fit for each race's frigs, dessies and cruisers; a solo PvP fit or two, a basic cruiser mining fit, a hauler fit, the sort of stuff you wouldn't need a corp to do - or also include fits that would require groups to be useful but make it clear this is for groups (go join a corp).

Another reason this would be useful is if you have some example fits - you could have AURA take you step by step through these example fits and explain *why* that module is there and what it does.

You also probably should just admit that at least for the time being, EFT is by far the best way to fit your ship, and point the newbies strongly towards it.

Hah-HAH! Eat ctrl-v, evil forums!

Having run the tutorials a couple times now that there's a good reason to use the alt slots, a couple of things struck me as REALLY needing some thought-

Sometimes you get a civvy module to learn how to use a salvager, or a webifier, or some such. Other times, you're told to use (though you may not actually have to) a real one but you don't have the skill and if it's your first agent you don't have the isk to buy the skill. From a "EVE shouldn't be easy" standpoint this makes sense, but from an actual instructional standpoint it is absolutely terrible, at least the way it is handled currently. Then every so often Aura just dumps random skillbooks in your lap, which you may or may not be able to use (not *really* random, but it feels that way... it looks like it is based on a simple count of missions or something, not what you're currently doing in the missions). These should all be moved into the tutorial rewards IMO.

Also, partly to reduce frustration and partly to get people thinking about how training *really* works, make sure they get skillbooks early enough to train level 1 before giving them the mission where they'll need that for a module. Explain *why* they're getting the book, and why they should train it right now, and oh by the way here's this skill queue thing Aura might have mentioned, this is why it's *really* interesting.

In general, the order in which you get books and modules are rewards/pre-mission gifts needs to be re-examined and made more relevant to what the agent is asking them to do. The agents should also *all* foreshadow their arcs a good bit to make sure that a new player who works through an agent in one sitting isn't going to be waiting on skills or stopping and doing non-tutorial work just to afford a module the've been told to buy. If they go out and get blown up and have to work to buy another, sure, but you shouldn't be able to run into a large stopping point as easily as it seems you can today.

Conversely...

Stop putting people in high-end frigates and destroyers on day 1 or 2. MAYBE give them a Bantam (or racial equivalent) once they're done all of the tutorials. In the meantime, keep them in the noobship. It's a tutorial, not Crazy Bob's Spaceship Giveaway, let the player choose what ships they want to train for/save for after they're done. Yes, its nice to give players a few freebie ships to lose, but the system already HAS freebie ships, which are perfectly sufficient for demonstrating what goes on in the tutorials. Starting players off able to hop into their race's best T1 frigate (and 30 minutes from the destroyer or hauler, and not far from a cruiser) is just one more factor keeping the T1s from seeing any real use. No, focusing the tutorials on the noobships won't suddenly make the lower-tier frigates more useful, but when they hopefully ARE made more useful and something to be looked forward to again, players won't be getting pushed past all that anyway.

Industry tutorial... should require you to make the items, preferably with a guaranteed production slot. It should also include a research component, again with a guaranteed slot so it can be completed in less than two months. Give them the BP, have them start the research, then send them on the "mine me some trit" mission. Make the BP available when they get back, have them start production, send them on another errand. Some stuff might have to be "faked" to guarantee the slots and make sure they don't try to do a million levels of PE or something, but they should see how ME levels impact a BP, how PE levels impact a BP, etc. The "or you can be a trader by buying stuff on the market" parts can be some of the "filler" for while their research is supposedly happening and while their "Generic Widget Mk III" production is running.

To address the fitting/PvP/other stuff that might not work with a noobship concerns (along with "needs specific training before you can do it" non-combat and non-ship activities like invention), perhaps create a full set of "advanced" tutorials and specifically tell players to go out and experiment for a week, and have the agents list up-front the skill-sets you'll need for pre-reqs of the skills/modules that agent will require them to use (kind of like reasearch agents but helpful, instead of rude). These can be the really in-depth learning arcs, should be accessable within a week of skill training assuming the player is specializing towards the agent's topic, and should probably have enough in them to *last* a week (so a trial account can get to and through one, maybe two, specialized "tutorial."). Yes, 2-6 weeks is a long "new player experience" but it gives the ability to present a much richer background to subjects that you really shouldn't cover in week 1 anyway. In the combat arcs, this is where they'd learn fits, work with the not-noobship frigates, learn some of the common ideas of PVP, what EWAR does, what tackle does, what logi does, how different weapons systems work, how advanced market concepts work, how to figure out your margin on a manufacturing job, etc.

I'm sure what I'm about to say has already been said and repeated but it cannot hurt to say it one more time.

As the chief of training operations in my corporation it often falls to me to teach and train new recruits, and since 99% of our recruits come from real life friends (for corp security reasons) this means that the majority of these new recruits are brand spanking new players.

One of the biggest complaints I hear from new players is about the time it realistically takes to get into anything of any real use. With the exception of using frigates in some sort of ECCM or Tackler role there isn't much new pilots can do for an active Wormhole Corp like ours for at least two or three weeks, and that's with a very specific training plan.

Missions are only so useful as a training tool, and before we're really comfortable bringing them into any of our holdings we like to see them at least in a Battlecruiser, usually a Drake for its relative ease of fitting and it's durability compared to other ships in its class.

Perhaps if there was some way to accelerate basic fitting skills training? Such as follow a certain training quest line and you get certain ranks in basic fitting skills automatically?

Also I find that a lot of my new pilots have a very hard time understanding what to fit on what ship and why.

It would be nice if as a new player you automatically came with some simple but relatively optimized tech 1 fittings for the basic ships, frigates and cruisers of all races, or at least the ones they are flying.

Teach pilots basic keyboard shortcuts.

Lastly it might be nice if when we look at variations of modules they were listed top down in order of meta type instead of having to hunt and peck through all their info sheets. As it is makes it difficult for me, much less a new player to spot!

Thanks for reading my two cents!

So you don't have plan and want us tell you what the **** to do? Got it!

Nerf titans and supercapital logistic ships plx.

Ohh... shortcuts. I totally forgot about that... *DEFINITELY* whatever you do, add a TON more about that. And about how the overview REALLY works, not just to add LCOs and then... that's it.

About accelerating basic fitting training...

I'd have to disagree, fairly strongly in fact. That it's 3+ weeks before a new character is generally useful to your corp *is* a problem, but I think it would be MUCH better for the game to change the impact of what you can do BEFORE you're in a BC, not make it easier to skip ahead. That's somewhat a discussion for a bunch of other topics, but assuming sub-BC combat (T1 frigates with solid but basic fits especially) were at least worthy of the title "stepping stone" (or better yet, being appropriately formidable in their own right) would you still feel the need to catapult players directly to the 2nd-largest general combat class (skipping two "major" classes and destroyers)? Likewise with sub-Exhumer/Orca mining/hauling?

Issues with some groups having inflated/unimaginitive ideas about "useful" aside, it does take far too long before a new player can feel like they're contributing these days- the "best" stuff has become so overwhelmingly good that even the last round of "best" can have trouble finding acceptance, let alone the old "basic." I just don't agree that the answer should be "skip everyone past the basic stuff, then."

Over the course of the last year, I've had four RL friends, who used the 3 week trial and here is a summary of the things they didn't like and ultimately made them leave EVE after the trial time even though they had RL buddies complete with a small corp available for support:

*The tutorials display too much text at once. More audio comments, more visual feedback and more time and visual aids on the usage of the overview would have been good.

*At the time there were too many bugs in the tutorial system. Last year I've heard on two or three seperate occasions of tutorials missions that couldn't be properly completed or were reacting to the players actions in a strange way.

*Tutorials and mission briefings have no visual distinction between "fluff" and "crunch" meaning people had a hard time figuring out what part of the text (which were too long to read anyway) contained vital information and what part was just story. This was perceived as especially frustrating.

*There is very little help from the game to plan your skill queue as a beginner. Much too often us veterans came up with a nice cheap tech1 fitting or some new activity only to find out, that the newbie characters needed another 6-72 hours training time. Far too often I was not able to do a certain activity with a newbie because he either was several hours away from completing the skill or the necessary ship/equipment was not available for trials anyway.

*There is too much vital information stowed away in the wiki or 3rd party webpages/products. Especially the de facto need for an external fitting tool was a big turn off for my friends.

*A tutorial on the general structure of the market window, its categories and the naming conventions of modules would have been much appreciated.

*Skill training during the first few days/weeks is too slow! When you want to introduce a friend to EVE you basically have only one weekend to make a pitch. Eve should offer some serious sense of achievement for the first dozen or two dozen hours of gameplay. While the slow skillpoint accumulation over time is great for the regular user, it is very frustrating and feels like an artificial handbreak if you want to get things going with your buddies.

*There was a general sense, that in theory EVE might offer interesting gameplay choices, but none of them were available for testing during trial, which kind of defeated the purpose of the trial for anyone who is not interested in missions or mining.

*There was the notion, that EVE forces people to pay attention to menial tasks that offer no actual fun and could easily be automated. One example among many others was the need to manually trigger a reload and manually start shooting again afterwards.

*The GUI is outdated.


So this is, what friends who have tried out EVE and were not happy about it have told me.

I've had three different friends accept buddy invites to play Eve. All of them should have been easy customers for CCP to pick up, as they had me helping them along, smoothing over Eve's rough spots, and giving them direction. None of them played Eve for more than a month. The single biggest problem with Eve is there isn't always something to do when you log in. They got distracted by other games and started spending more time in other games before they got particularly attached to Eve.

The fix you need to make to NPE is the same fix you need to make to Eve. Inject more life into 0.0 and lowsec. Give characters fresh out of their trial period a niche in 0.0. Connect a nullsec alliance's wealth and war materiel production to 0.0 pilots in space, making jumps from gate-to-gate, generally being both engage-able and defend-able. Make it so when I log in, everyone is who isn't AFK or reshipping is out in space, because there's something to do out there.

Fix bugged game mechanics that allow things like can flipping, suicide ganking and trade window scamming. This is a real issue for newbies because at the beggining it's very hard to get stuff and too easy to loose it. Make it clear where it's safe and where it's not.

This again... as it is pretty much the key for new players not to hit brick wall if they don't choose the PvP path and be happy with it.

That could have been done by a 2 day old char. And 800B would be a nice start into the game, would it not?