CCP Rise went on the EVE-O forums and expanded on the current status of the New Player Experience (NPE)
We’ve seen many posts this week on starting skills and the NPE as a whole (especially on reddit 🙂 so I thought you might like a small status update on these things.
Let’s do it as a kind of FAQ format and if I miss something major let me know.
Q: ‘Opportunities are bad, they’ve made the NPE much worse’
A: As you know, we did a lot of testing on this system and would not have pushed it out to 100% of new players if it was doing damage. That said, it isn’t doing enormously better than the old tutorial and we think there is still lots of room for improvement. We have an iteration plan already in place which we will begin testing within the next couple weeks.Q: ‘Can we send new players to career agents since that’s what veteran players are recommending anyway’
A: Yes. This is one of the changes on our plan to try and test very shortly. We will probably have an Opportunity to go to career agents somewhere early in the Opportunity path.Q: ‘Starting skills are a huge barrier, can we give a lot more to new players’
A: Yes. But this is not a simple change. You guys seem fairly agreed that the small amount of starting skills, combined with a high amount of ‘must have’ support and requirement skills, leads to some really icky barriers to participation for new players. We are inclined to agree and we are in the process of laying out a plan to address the problem. Nothing is set in stone yet but it seems likely that we will try and move new players towards starting with significantly more SP. Maybe between 1 and 2 million. It also seems likely that we will probably avoid any major skill reworks or skill removals. As this plan solidifies you will hear more from us.Q: ‘Attributes aren’t very interesting, you should remove them’
A: Again, we agree. Team Size Matters discussed removing them on the o7 show (or some other public venue) awhile back and it’s still something we are very interested in. We need to figure out a good way to handle all the learning implants in the game though, which is actually a difficult problem. If any of you have awesome ideas for how to handle it don’t hesitate to make suggestions.Each topic probably deserves more detail but I think waiting until things are slated for release to go deeper probably makes sense.
One last note: even if we aren’t actively posting in these discussions on reddit or elsewhere, we are avid readers of community content and it helps us enormously to see your discussions (don’t take that as a ‘CCP PLS’ posts are awesome though :P)
o/
