CCP recently announced, with the upcoming Vanguard Expansion, they are changing the starting skill points each player receives with the aim of improving the New Player Experience (NPE). You can read details of the skill point tweak here. Will higher starting skill points really improve retention rate? What other impacts might this change have?
Introduction
To understand the NPE we need to start from marketing side of the game. Common opinion is that the EVE universe is vast and rich, thus understanding all of it in a mere trial month is simply impossible. Every new player will have a specific vision about what the game is. Based on that subjective opinion they will make a decision as to whether or not they want to stay. Let’s take closer look at CCP’s promotional material from the past to date.
EVE was advertised very differently in the past than in recent times. How different? Well it is hard to put in words, so lets look on old and new introduction cinematics. I consider these a great comparison because:
1. That is what CCP is trying to say to new players on their first login to the game.
2. The narration and tone is so different and shows the development of CCP’s presentation of EVE over the years.
Here is the current EVE intro video:
And here is the old:
Notice how different the pace of both videos are? While the Origin carries fast tempo and dynamics, the old one is slow, even sluggish. When the new one focuses on lore of EVE (which is nice) the old one puts heavy emphasis on what EVE is really about, personal goals of a player, the paths he can pick. The last thing we should notice is the vibe and “climate”. The original offers a sci-fi action movie vibe, suggesting lots of cool action in which You can participate. In comparison, the old one is dark, grim and dystopian, playing on players’ personal ambitions and selfishness.
Which leads us to a conclusion: CCP started to promoting their game as a dynamic, action-packed universe instead of a cyberpunk dystopia, where our primary goal is to simply survive and prosper. That change of ideas is reflected in the SP granted to new pilots quite well.
Even wondered why you picked the history of your character and school? Was it purely for RP reasons? No, it is an artifact of the past, when choices of bloodline, history and race determined starting skills and bonuses. CCP withdrew from that idea however, when players complained that it is bad approach, since newbies have no idea what is good and what is bad and they shouldn’t be forced so early into decisions they may regret later. There was also a strong problem with race distribution, since the 2 most picked races were Achura and Civire. To make things worse, in that time frame pilots had “learning skills”, skills that improved attributes as you trained them. As You can imagine, every newbie was advised to skill them first, instead of something that would help them do anything.
Its hard not to think about it, when CCP is tweaking around SP of new players again. Personally I think, character based starter skills was a great concept which should be reintroduced. Why? Because when players choose to play as Vherokior drifter (no, not the borg one), he should be pointed in the direction of scanning and hauling. Leaving him without such early specialties because “he should find out his own niche!” is silly. Many vets with 3+ years of active game play haven’t figured out their own niches, so how can we expect a newbie will get it during the trial period? Instead, guide him towards an early specialty, which in my opinion is good and improves retention rate. I am no longer -just- a rookie; I am a Khanid cyberknight rookie, that wishes to proceed with his military career by completing basic missions and growing into ever-larger ships (as it may seem silly from a vet’s perspective, its very important for newbie to have ANY personal goal).
However, everybody can agree that removing learning skills was a good move. They were creating artificial barrier; a binary system within which you either maxed out your SP gain or not. The problem transitioned into Cybernetics and +3/4/5 attributes implants which convinced players to act like a hermit crab living in his highsec dominion to keep his implant safe.
To summarize, the current course of game development in terms of NPE is quite the opposite of the old one. Early EVE forced new players to “suck it up”, get a proper race/bloodline/history/school mix, even if that demanded doing a new character, skilling up his learning skills and generally was not actually using him. Many players would say that this hardcore approach was good and how it should be. I disagree because we need to realize the difference between interesting mechanics and artificial barriers. It is okay that we rid ourselves of annoying mechanics like learning skills and medical clones, but it is also worrying we resign from things like the faction standing needs of jump-clones and high-sec POS-es; this waters down our game. We need to approach such changes with a great caution and think objectively; do we dislike this feature because it is hard/complicated/against our interest, or dull and pointless? Getting rid of the second is good, getting the rid of the first destroys the game.
NPE vs Skill Points
How exactly does more starting SP improve the NPE? We will start from problems that rookies have with skills.
1. Almost every module needs at least one skill at level 1, which leads to frustrating moments of “I need to do 5 jumps to get that Propulsion Jamming skill and then wait 15 minutes to train it”.
2. Rookies have to wait to join their “vet-bros”, since their SP doesn’t support any “proper ship/fit”.
3. Getting lots of skillbooks can be expensive for rookies without friends.
Providing 400k of SP instead of 50k and with them covering almost every fitting requirement sounds like a good solution. To be honest, it is a step in the right direction. It’s not perfect, but it is the easiest, cheapest and quickest solution CCP could have provided. However, it also generates several problems, which I will cover later in this article. But now, lets focus on alternatives.
1. Remove skill requirements from basic meta 0 modules.
Module Tiercide was a great opportunity to do so, and it would solve newbies problems right away. They would only need specific skills when they want to focus on something, rather when they want to try it out. It wouldn’t address the problem of “SP too low to join a fleet”, but mostly because it isn’t in fact a problem.
2. Give rookies level 0 skills related to fitting modules etc.
That way, they still have to train into something, but they don’t receive any direct book above “yay I don’t have to fly 5 jumps for a skill book”. Some may say that it doesn’t fix the problem of “I have to wait 2 hours before fitting out my ship” but… EVE is a game where you sometimes wait months or even years before you can properly fly some ships. We should introduce newbies to that fact, rather than hide it and try to “shield them” from that.
These 2 solutions would also address newbies’ SP problems without the drawbacks that come from a flat SP boost. However, they are more demanding and CCP may not have enough manpower right now to approach the issue this way. Thus, we can consider Vanguard’s solution as a compromise, which is better than not addressing the problem at all.
But the most important question has yet to be asked; does the change improve the “fun” a rookie experiences and the games retention rate? Well, sadly, my answer to that question is no. The problem of “oh my god, I have to wait 30 minutes to fit that module” will evolve into “oh my god, I have to wait 7 days to fit that T2 module”. If you are not into planning and waiting, this problem will always haunt you, not because CCP doesn’t like you, but because EVE was designed that way, and that can’t change without redesigning the whole game. All that this feature would do is lower the barriers to entry and save newbies some of the hassle, which has its merits, but in terms of a NPE wouldn’t do much to really solve the underlying issues.
Skillpoints and Alt-ing
CODE. for sure cherish that change because it allows them to field gank Catalysts on newbie accounts far faster than before. Superb turret skills (Gunnery on IV, Racial Turrets on III, support skills on II with Surgical Strike and Trajectory Analysis being sole level I skills) allows for fitting proper gank setups just a day or two after creating a new character. That is a serious buff to the ganking crews, but, it’s not everything. It also emphasizes alt creation since you get a return on your investment (usefulness) faster. Reminder: Recycling characters to avoid sec-status loss and payments is a violation of EULA!
These two things are boosted by that change much more directly, more so than the NPE. From my point of view, this is indeed a surreptitious buff to alt making in the guise of addressing new players’ problems. After Vanguard, creating additional characters would be more tempting since it would demand less hassle and time before the fresh-faced alt becomes useful. I, myself, have already considered biomassing my second and third characters on my account so they could be free to build a proper probing character more quickly with the proposed additional SP.
Conclusion
After Rubicon’s waters have passed, there is no turning back. Many players have asked CCP for a new player SP boost and CCP agreed to deliver that. Vets raging that “it was not so easy back in my day!” is pointless, suggesting to alter the change is also probably in vain since CCP has officially announced the change, they are sure to follow through with it. What we CAN do is monitor the situation and provide constructive feedback on how to address the NPE without falling into vicious cycle of complying with every player whim.
Inevitably, we ask the question “What is going to be next?”. We have free med-clones, can install jump-clones on every station with med-bay that we can dock and now newbies receive more raw SP… I think, the attributes will be next on the list. They force remaps, implants and a “hermit crab” life-style on new players. Will we see new, exciting roles for them or will they just go away? Or maybe, CCP won’t touch that aspect of the game, which has much more to do with NPE than starting SP for sure.
All-in-all, my opinion is that lowering barriers and taking away problems from newbies won’t improve the game’s retention rate. Teaching them and guiding them to cope with these aspects of EVE, giving them that feeling of accomplishment and fulfillment is what will keep them in EVE. I don’t think this is a strictly bad change, just… misguided.
