At Fanfest this year, we were introduced to CCP Ghost in what started out as an unusual presentation which began with an image of the developer’s brain. His task is to remake the new player experience which has always been a famously bad part of the Eve Online experience. This is certainly something that needs to be done as the figures associated with it are (typically for Eve) mind-boggling. 1.5 million people tried Eve last year and over half of them dropped out within a couple of hours of, starting to play. The way CCP Ghost explained this phenomenon was using real life. Eve resembles real life in a huge number of ways from how you interact with other players to the intricate mechanics behind something like turret tracking. In the real world, it takes almost 20 years for an average person to be able to function fully within society. In Eve, many people only give it 2 hours.
The Extent of the Problem
Since I started playing in 2014, we have known two iterations of what confronts a potential Eve player. First, Aura, the weird AI lady who spewed walls of text at you and then waited for you to follow her exact commands. Now we have the opportunities system which while slightly more open to choice and the will of the player has its set of problems. With Aura, every player started in a station and was then given a set of missions to do to learn the basics of how to pilot a ship through the universe. An especially good part of this opening mission was when, having flown a few jumps over, the player arrived at a spot where every single ship from their chosen faction was visible from frigates up to battleships, indeed an impressive sight for someone sitting in the most basic ship it’s possible to sit in. Older players may not be aware of how the new system does things. Rather than spawning in a station, players arrive in space, already in their rookie ship and ready to blow things up, something that they are immediately encouraged to do by the presence of a handful of pirate ships flying towards them and the appropriate prompting of the tutorial.
This all looks splendid but as with lots of what CCP introduces, every cloud has a not so silver lining. The problem with opportunities is not the start but more in how it continues. Players complete a tutorial that they can follow, and most will as at no point does the game explains that you can make a choice as to what to do next. In a sandbox, this is probably a significant oversight as players simply won’t see a lot of what the game has to offer. The other issue that I quickly ran into was a lack of money. Most of you probably remember the career agents that Aura pointed you towards after she had finished her bit. These gave players a small amount of choice but also a ludicrous amount of ISK for what they were asking you to do, starting capital that could be reinvested to take on actual tasks in the real game. Opportunities provide no source of ISK and while the careers agents are still there finding them is a challenge. So what do most new players end up doing? Either mining or buying a PLEX neither of which are good for their long-term commitment to the game.
CCP Ghost mentioned using the fact that it is impossible to compare Eve to other games as Eve has a depth and scope like none other. Let’s take a moment to think about the amount of stuff that you can do; Industry, mining, hauling, station trading, online gambling, mission running, carrier ratting, and that doesn’t even begin to mention the huge variety of PvP that can happen. What Eve also has is a community, and again there is no easy way of giving someone a meaningful look at that in the short time that the developers have their attention. I’m not going to list all the incredible things that this community has done as I’d miss a memorial roam or a charity titan kill out somewhere along the way but if you’re reading this website you know about all of that already. In CCP Ghost’s words, ‘Eve is suffering under the weight of its awesomeness’.
So what can be done? I’ve spent the last 4 paragraphs trashing CCP’s attempts at a competent new player experience so what do I think they should do? Well surprisingly the suggestion that I’m going to use as my inspiration comes from the Eve subreddit, a community notorious for well thought out ‘interesting’ ideas. As we saw from the graph at the top of the page, most people keep playing if they integrate into the community. My idea is simply to let this community get involved in it. Imagine, you could have Elise Randolph explain who he is and why he’s so well known in a short video and then he could command you and your fleet of NPC’s as they fight with another group. Similarly, for a new player who wanted to try out solo PvP you could get someone like Mr. Hyde or Big Miker to lead a new player to a few small fights, against a group of similarly skilled NPC’s. Add in a few nice cinematic’s from the developers and someone might get excited about the prospect of getting into the proper game. I started playing because of the ‘This is Eve’ trailer that showed the community taking control rather than showing off what the developers had created and I think the same feeling of players being in control needs to be emphasized for as much of the tutorial as possible. Even something that seems boring but needs to be explained in the tutorial like the market could be made interesting and even exciting by stories of the Imperium (then known as the CFC) manipulating the prices of POS fuel to make a profit.
You might be wondering why you should care about the new player experience, after all, you’ve been playing for years and if you had to suffer through it everyone else should and if they can’t then they’re simply not cut out for Eve. Well, I’ll tell you why I care about it; every week lot’s of older players stop playing something which not much can be done about. New players are the lifeblood of the game and without a continued stream of them coming in the promise of Eve forever just cannot be fulfilled. In a market that is getting more and more user-friendly Eve has to evolve to continue to compete with the likes of World of Warcraft and other mainstream MMO’s or face destruction within years.
CCP Ghost’s presentation was certainly on point, and I look forward to seeing what he and his team come up with in the coming months.
