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Hona’s Corner: New Player Experience

June 5, 2014

It’s commonly said that eve has a steep learning curve, a VERY steep learning curve. This graph from the New Player Experience keynote at fanfest demonstrates just how steep the learning curve can be:

According to this graph 90% of the new players don’t join the Eve community and instead choose to leave the game or fly missions solo or alone. To put this into perspective if we have 10,000 players join the game in a month, 1000 will stay to play the game. This is something CCP needs to address and from the looks of this Keynote it is something they are working on, but what exactly could be done to improve it?

Showing Newbies How To Play

Newbies when they join the game don’t know what direction to go in. The tutorial is extremely outdated and doesn’t show newbies how to do anything other than missions, it doesn’t get them involved in the community. The eve community is the thing that eve is known for, its open world gameplay and the interactive environment and this is exactly what newbies are pushed away from. One way to do this is mentors…

A lot of times it can be said that newbies are on a disadvantage against older players, SP wise and knowledge wise. The SP’s are something that the newbie will have to decide what he wants to skill into, but the real problem is the knowledge that new players can accumulate and the learning curve they go through. New Players often don’t know how to make their Isk. CCP needs to give new players the means to make Isk rather than grinding standings to get to Lv4s. It can easily take a month or more to get to this and that month can be boring and during this month they have no chance to compete with veteran players. So what can be done to address this?

Mentors

I feel that one way for new players to get introduced into the game is to give them a mentor. This is already done in the eve community by entities such as E-Uni but if CCP endorsed mentoring or gave people incentives to do so newer players could benefit greatly. Now if someone wants help they have to find someone who is willing to mentor them. While there are lots of people willing to do this they can be difficult to find with all the corporations out there, so what if new players could be assigned a mentor.

 

What I believe would work would be if players could sign up to be on the list to be a mentor in a specific area. When a new player joins they would be able to apply for a mentor in a certain area (PvE, PvP, Exploration, Industry) and then they would be randomly assigned a mentor in the area/s that they chose.

 

They would have this mentor for around 30 days during any time which they could switch mentors if they don’t like the mentor and at the end of the period they would be able to rate the mentor and if they rate them well, the mentor would get a reward (possible a PLEX or 300 million Isk). While this payment may seem like quite a lot it is after one month of mentoring and the mentoree has to rate the mentor as good. While veteran players may not find this extremely appealing, intermediate players such as those that have been in the game for about a year would and this would help CCP with the new player experience.

 

Assets

One of the best things about Eve in my opinion is that assets have value. And because something has value other things must lose or have no value, and this leads us to the ability of Eve to be meaningful. A new player could after joining lose a single frigate in a mission or a gank or a misunderstanding of the game mechanics. A lot of these losses can cause a newbie to quit immediately despite CCP being able and willing to reimburse them if they lost it due to a gank or misunderstanding. However most newbies don’t know what to do then so they quit; so I propose giving all players less than 30 days old AND still doing the tutorial/career missions (not SoE) giving them free t1 frigate hulls if they have no other ships (not including noob ships) and possible EXTREMELY basic fits. A lot of people would say that this would break the game but it wouldn’t really as trial players wouldn’t be able to get them and c’mon guys it’s like 350k ISK not exactly game breaking if it helps a large percentage of new players not quit. Honestly I believe this mechanic if implemented to be a very controversial one as it takes away a lesson that I am all for:

Risk, Reward, Value, and Self-Sufficiency

These 4 things I think are the core values of Eve. You must be able to gauge the first 3 to achieve the third and all are needed to enjoy the game unless you can buy 10 PLEX for every ship you theorycraft. You need to be able to see that in doing an activity you can handle the risk, reap the rewards, and understand the value of everything that you do in said activity. This is key to the people manipulating the market. Any good market trader would gauge the risk of investing in something against the reward and see if there is a good value involved for the time and effort put in and then does that trades become self-sufficient and able to make ISK.

These 4 concepts are of course used in PVP, imagine being the FC of a fleet and having to gauge if hotdropping that purple Nyx is worth your fleet possible being counter-dropped and if so is that a good value for the time. Once again these are core qualities any FC needs to be able to have on the fly. Mentioning all of these we forget something that is INCREDIBLY important and that is core to not only Eve but all other games and possibly life to that matter and that is:

Fun

Even if you could make billions of ISK with great value sitting in Jita all day and 0.1ing all day is it fun? No and that’s what keeps a lot of people from doing it as before even getting to consider the 4 traits above one must want to do that activity and a core thing that plays are role in that is “Is it fun”. The day Eve stops being fun or meaningful for you is the day you need to go cancel your subscription. Even people who trade grudgingly on the market have some motivation whether it be to fund their PVP alt or collect the most ISK like Glevon Goblin all of them have some motivation or they wouldn’t do it. Once again this is another area where new player experience could be fixed as a lot of times new players go straight for earning the most ISK and don’t play eve to have fun.

 

Have lots of fun playing and help out a noob-

Hona’ Chaginai