I sometimes mine in a noob ship in nullsec. It can be exciting. Min/max isk/hr isn’t necessarily what this game is about.
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Well of course it is manipulation…most noobs recognise that and go along with it. Nobody’s being hoodwinked. I mean, with practically every game one is paying for an ‘experience’. Noobs don’t expect to rule the entire universe within a week. The problem is that the experience doesn’t actually arrive fast enough…at least not in the early stages. It certainly speeds up significantly at around the stage I am at ( a few months in )…but I’ve encountered a number of noobs under a month old who wonder ‘what is the point of Eve ?’ and who quietly disappear.
I’ve done my bit to help a few struggling noobs…I think most of us have. But there has to be a better introduction to the game…one that would hold on to more people who would find the game fascinating if they could just ‘get somewhere’ at an earlier stage.
Okay, but that has nothing to do with every property on the hotel board having hotels on it, to continue your analogy.
That’s a different issue and can’t be solved by continuing to frame ‘the issue’ as noobs need to catch up. What you’re describing isn’t a need to catch up, but your perception of both a need and what you need to be able to do stuff. There is a reason I emphasize the your perception, yes. Just giving noobs these skills, or even 20mil worth of SP won’t ‘catch up’ noobs. It’ll hurt them by giving them access to stuff FAR outside their means that will be even more of a kick to the gut when they lose it.
I don’t necessarily agree with removing all these skills for reasons outlined by others, but let’s pick one that does make some sense, altering drones. If you can launch 5 drones on your first day, but still have no idea how they work, you’re only set up to lose more drones. Having a limit of 2-3 drones, learning how they work, and having scenarios tailored to being able to use only a few drones helps you learn how to use them, thereby reducing your risk of losing all 5 drones when you get to 5 drones. Theoretically, anyway, people still manage magic. The fitting skills can be bothersome, yes, but as others have pointed out, the cheap, newbro mods take just about nothing to fit, and cost very little to replace when, not if, you lose them. Having access to T2 guns on day one just means you’re going to lose a million isk per gun per loss plus the rest of the ship and fit, instead of 2 million isk for your entire incursus.
And then there’s an ENTIRE case of worms about whether newbros should be pushed to mining at all. Mining is a god awful atrocious… thing… in Eve online, basically unchanged for almost 20 years now. You can get infinitely better gameplay by downloading the first app in whatever google or apple playstore you open on your phone. Mining has a place in Eve, I’m just not convinced it should be what newbros are pushed toward. I mean, salvaging is better gameplay than mining, and salvaging is pretty bad, too.
So, coming back to the your perception, bit. From where you;re sitting, it looks like you need to train all these things to do all these things just so you can ‘play’ the game at all, or at all 'competitively. Then you’re also comparing it to the L4/L5 stuff designed for players with 40+mil SP. You’re not supposed to try and compete with 3 year old players right away. But because of poor design/development choices, you get handed a venture and told to go sit right next to the orca/retriever fleet and given the impression you have to compete with that. So CCP offers you a pack to buy a poorly fit, poorly chosen ship for 20 bucks so you “can compete” with that dudebro and his orca/reti alts(still can’t), and now CCP has taken from you the week you’d be mining in the venture and watching those retrievers get ganked one by one because retrievers are gank prone, where ventures tend to get left alone and have that cool little warp core strength so they can warp out quickly if need be.
As to your question of what is the point of Eve, the point of Eve is to do your spaceship things in the sandbox. It’s kind of like minecraft that way in that the game isn’t designed to give you a set story and plot, but rather the tools to go make your own. In regards of ‘how to fix’ that, CCP can spend from here until the end of time ‘fixing the NPE’ and they will never get it right, and this time not even because they’re incompetent. This time, and only on this one occasion, it’ll be because the NPE cannot replace player corporations, no matter how much CCP wishes it could. The point of Eve is to get in with other people who want to build a space empire with you - or destroy someone else’s space empire with you - and go do that, and for that, the best thing CCP could ever do is scrap this obsession with the NPE and instead adopt a model that pushes newbros hard into player corps, and likewise encourages player corps to recruit newbros.
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No, sorry, Eve is not like Monopoly. Eve is like Eve. Your analogy fails because there’s plenty of space that has changed hands, corps and alliances come and gone, since the days of BoB and SirMolle. Who presumedly would still be kings of nullsec on account of “first” and your self-gratifying pseudo-intellectualism of a very bad Monopoly analogy.
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Well of course it is all about perception. That is the key issue. The irony being that a noob lacks precisely the experience required to see the game ‘correctly’. That is what should really be ‘fixed’…but I don’t see how to fix it. Unlike in the game itself, one cant really inject noobs with loads of ‘experience’ and have them suddenly say ’ ah yes…it all makes sense now’. Only actual experience will do that…so the secondary problem then becomes how to get noobs to stick around long enough to get that experience.
But yes, perception is the primary issue. There’s no point telling a new person ’ you shouldn’t have that perception of the game’…if something about the game itself, or some missing info, or the fact that something takes too long to understand, leads them to have it.
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You may have the wrong or a different perception of the game, but if you stick around long enough you can see that for yourself.
Players with all kinds of gaming backgrounds come to this game, so it’s not surprising to see that there are many different perceptions of the game, especially for new players who haven’t seen much of the game yet. But even players who have been around for longer have different perceptions, if only because EVE has many different playstyles.
There’s also plenty of space unoccupied.
Time to set Altara to ignore just as I did with Cilla. It’s just unbridled stupidity coupled with an astounding lack of understanding.
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CCP made it shorter than it was and players decided to stick around less!
It simply doesn’t work like you think it does. Like I mentioned above, taking time to progress breaks the game down into smaller more understandable chunks. Eve is a hugely complex game. Fast tracking the skill training means having to learn quicker. It means making bigger mistakes sooner.
Noobs have several choices of practice areas. They can stick to noob systems or just play on the test server.
Oh please do ! Your own unbridled snarkiness, bad temper, and bitter vet syndrome lead to you having less that zero of any constructive nature to actually say.
You cry too much.
Nobody likes a crybaby.
You invent what other people are doing too much.
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Properties don’t change hands in Monopoly ? I think you’ll find they do. Players even go bankrupt in Monopoly, just like corps in Eve.
Lot of competing ideas ideas are being thrown around in this thread, not just one.
Anyway, assertiveness is not just buying in, or grinding.
Assertiveness starts with the highly underrated question: what do I get?
Many would say: skillpoints are not important.
I would answer: if you only have very few points yet and you know what skills you’re injecting in, you’ll get a better game. Then I’d suggest to game the system.
Nor is patience the same thing as a job.
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Never said those were the same thing.
I did imply that both patience and “working hard” aren’t worth much, without assertiveness.
What most players are doing in MMOs, including EVE, is very silly when you permit the outside perspective. This is why I said EVE “is a game, not a job”.
I reckon that’s part of the reason why kids are dropping MMOs in favor of other genres.
Wow … a whole month… my god, stop the world …A month is nothing and you are demanding to become an uber miner in a month. What next, a Titan in three months (so you can catch up) … Your demands become endless. This is a game of patience and you have demonstrated none.
You have basically said, “The noob experience is one of if I cannot be uber and kill everyone in one month that’s bad game design.” It’s not. Time based skill point acquisition rewards loyalty. Allowing noobs to catch up within one month, would be cause for a riot to the veteran, who has played for over a decade.
Vets have turned the other cheek so many times, allowing 1m skill points to be given to new players, allowing 20m skill points to be bought, just when does the insatiable demands of the “underprivileged” end?
The game has been around for 216 months and you have just said; if it can’t be conquered in one month, its a bad game. Your sense of entitlement is profound.
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Well since this thread got resurrected i may as well say something since i didn’t see it first time around. It’s an interesting suggestion and i am somewhat on the fence but more likely to come down on the don’t change it side of things. But there are bigger things at play here than just vets vs noobs.
Ive made some posts before on the whole “CCP have dug themselves into a hole with the time based skill system” as in my opinion the average gamer expects to be able to start the game and “Max Level” in a matter of weeks. If you look at something like the elder scrolls online it doesn’t take much time at all for a player to grind to L50 and get enough champion points to wear the top tier gear. And most games are like that. So when a player used to this encounters eves system…….it creates friction. And in particular the whole “catching up” thing comes into play.
Ever new player is going to see the time to skill as a huge disadvantage. And a gap that can never be closed. The reality is that the gap isn’t is bad as any of us think and we learn that as we progress. But its not explained in anyway and dumb things happen as a result.
Specifically on the skills and in relation to Drones V. There was a discussion where players were basically suggesting that the Tristan was useless without Drones V. It’s not. Certainly not for a new player who will be using it to likely run L1 and L2 missions. A L1 can be run comfortable with 3 drones. And by the time you unlock l2 missions you can launch a flight of 4. And by the time you unlock L3’s you have 5 and are looking at a bigger ship anyway. That said i do like the suggestion that drones should be replaced with a damage per level boost with base damage reduced to compensate and the ability to launch 5 drones is universal.
There is a mindset that i just cant relate to that focuses solely on what players want to fly (or in their heads should be able to fly). Instead of what happens in my head which is always about how i can make the most of what i can fly. And to my mind its related to the fallacy that bigger or blingyer is better. Again this probably comes from other games where the gear you role around in at day 1 will never be used again…….whereas in eve that Tristan or Heron or Venture will always have a use no matter how many skills you have. Case in point rage posts from a 2 week old pilot who lost a poorly fit Raven and “quit”. What the hell were they even doing in that ship anyway. Next month ill be 2 years old and i don’t even think i can sit in one.
Maybe this is partly as a result of the ship tree looking like a progression………when it maybe, probably, actually, definitely isn’t?
And to mention Cilly for a second simple because they hold themselves up as the voice of the new player and as such someone we should be listening to. That Hecate is being mentioned again in this thread. I remember (before Xmas i think) when you asked about advice for running combat atoms in high and told me what ships you had in your hanger and mentioned the Hecate. And when you mentioned that ship I responded and said it would be ideal for quickly dealing with hideaways and refuges to max chances of getting escalations. And the response was “yeah……but i cant fly it”. Then why on earth do you have it.
It’s a prime example of focussing on what could be as opposed to focussing on what you have and maximising the potential of that. And sometimes when we focus purely on a single ship we want to fly we end up gimping ourselves because we dont benefit from any synergies.
An example of that is that I really really really want to fly a Loki. But as a capsuleer that started Gallente, lives in Amarr space and focussed solely on exploration for a long period of time that made no sense in my big picture. I had zero skills in any minmater ships or weaponry. And training for that would not have complemented anything else i could fly. So instead I went for the legion………Not my first choice but I’m coming to like it. It was a long train but at every step of the way i got a benefit. Because every level of Amarr cruiser made my Stratios better boosting the resists. Training Lasers and their variants improved my Stratios DPS. The driver wasn’t “ooooooo blingy ship i must have”. It was “how do i improve what i currently fly and open up other opportunities.”
I think my approach is the right one for EVE. But i think modern gaming culture……hell even modern culture in general rewards low attention, quick dopamine hits and we are all being slowly conditioned towards that norm. And as such as an offering on the gaming market Eve wont be that appealing……as lots of attention and being able to plan isnt always an attractive proposition. And i cant see how that gets combatted without dumbing things down.
It’s undoubtedly a problem and while i see a benefit to making some chore skills go away I’m not convinced its the right thing. Where do we stop. I mean these are the skills we see as a problem today. Which ones are the problem tomorrow? How long till someone says “you know training into T1 ships is just a waste. New players should be able to fly all the empire base ships (frigate, destroyer, cruiser, battle cruiser and battleship) out of the gate and training should only effect your efficiency with them and getting to sit in a faction or T2”. At the end of the day what’s the difference between the inconvenience of not being able to fit T2 guns due to powergrid issues and the inconvenience of not being able to sit in a battleship. It’s all just inconvenience at the end of the day.
Important problem. It needs to be addressed. But i dont think deleting skills is the answer.
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It’s easy: you make the path towards the top more enjoyable. No need to dumb things down.
This may come as a surprise to some dedicated EVE players here, but in other RPGs and MMOs, players actually enjoy the PvE grind itself! Crazy, maybe, but not as insane as what we are doing.
Level 2 missions in that Atron won’t cut though. Mining and PI definitely won’t cut it.
With the fundamental difference that in those other RPG’s the grind is the mechanism by which you level up. What you are describing as enjoyment in a lot of cases is acceptance because players understand that the grind is how you progress. You grind more……you progress more.
For new players in Eve the grind is removed fro the skill system enough for many to question the why. Sure you can use all the isk you earn to buy an injector to speed it up but is that making a meaningful difference.
At the end of the day. In EVE there is no end to the train. I mean can you put a time on how long it takes to max all skills? I cant. Whereas in games EVE is competing with that time to max can be weeks…….
It doesn’t matter how enjoyable or not EVE’s grind is…………if there is no limit to it then its always going to be a problem.
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On the contrary…I’ve stated the perceptions a new player has. Whether those perceptions are right or wrong is not the point, and people keep missing that. I noticed this all the more on setting up my second account a few days ago…that the entire experience felt completely different because I already knew a certain amount.
A new player does not like to feel that they don’t know anything…even though they don’t. I’ve seen 10 day old noobs in Rookie Help give ‘advice’ to others ( some of it wrong )…and probably out of a sense of ‘look…I know something’. That’s what really happens with noobs. If my documenting of my noob experience here is full of ’ you are wrong about that !’ from others…I should actually be commended for being the one noob brave enough to publicly show just how it goes. Most people will just hide in the background and then emerge later as if they’d been an expert all along. You seldom get to see the painful process of actually getting there.
stop crying