A couple of thoughts for getting new players in

Communications Center General Discussion
147

Corporations are a mess right now. They need a design pass, but eve does not exactly support their existence in a healthy way.

Take for example stations. In most games, it takes a considerable amount of effort to build a station. this is highly important for the corporation, and community, as this is one of the best forms of content to unify, and help people have purpose in a corporation.

It may be better for eve, to look at changing corporations so they can opt out of pvp entirely but still build stations. The reason is, the purpose and unity that comes with it, but this pve corp style should come at a cost, like isk fee’s (maybe the corp will cost 5m/toon per month).

Corporations have no value, no substance between you have no reason to interact with them. They are people that live together, but are not family. similarly, its like trying to compare a corporation with people, to a corporation that is a family.

We are social creatures by nature, and we seen to fill the disconnects our society has with corporations. Thus, designing the games war dec around stations is a bad idea, because it removes one of, if not the most significant form of communal progression.

when we talk about the inactivity of corps, it is largely due to this disconnect.

When we define “activity” as “interaction” we change the way we develop our games, and when we make that interaction personal, deep, and friendly, we better the lives of our players.

When it comes to feature upgrades in eve’s system for the recruitment side of things, it may also be better to add some more upgrades to the gui.

For example “looking for corp in region: …” is a good option. or “sort corps by current region or near by region”.

additionally, the idea of players posting on a board, with a sec of variables that can be demonstrated in the gui, which results in a “list” to the gui (like corporations have a list) that corporations can search through would be good.

more importantly, you can take this a step further a patch later and end up with a new, innovative recruitment process where both players and corporations are matched to each other, demonstrating to each their match rate. These sorts of changes to that system will help hone in on the corporate building process more significantly.

Lastly,

we should probably talk about changes the corporation itself. some smaller features, like “auto kick on __ days” or “auto promote” options would be a great move in making corp management better.

148

+1 to both of these. I particularly like the idea of using things like the Activity Tracker and mining ledger to derive some input for corp stats. Other things like member turnover could be really helpful as well.

1 Like
149

That would be a good start. I remember soon after I started, I looked at corps, spent some time on the filters, and decided that a lot of them were :ox::poop: .
Too many areas of operation for too few members is a clear warning sign.
It certainly wasn’t through the corp finder that I found the corps I have joined. (Paper Cats doen’t count for obvious reasons)

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150

Eve is not a PvP Game, and its Not a PvE Game.
The players are either pve, or pvp focused.
The majority of them are not pvp focused.

Your advocating for a change that will absolutely kill the games population rates.

151

Yes!

Activity tracker can tell us how much m3 a month a corp mines. How many rats they kill a month. How many pvp kills…and i never thought of turnover but it’s good. And on average how many folks are on at whatever time of the week.

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152

As i said in the past, to many options = spam.

We may want to have a conversation about out right creating new corporation types.
For example, non profits are war-exempt, which are ment to be pve based, but require large amounts of isk to maintain (monthly fee’s of 5m/toon).

Then from here we can set the filter on corp searches to a type, which wil hone in on the corp more.

The problem is, most corps just check mark everything and then you cant really pick something. Its partly the UI designers fault for not making the options more “isolated” from the others (like having small gangs, and piracy in their own sections).

another option is to make the time bars base off when people login, and have some special checks to see if they are active (or maybe make an inactivity, logout timer). this way when you check the time-zone active on recruitment flyers, you actually see when people are on, and this is even more important for the ceo to know, rather then to guess.

I think most of those issues (honesty of what a corp does or when it operates) is best solved with more restrictions and limitations on choice of what a corporation does, or switching some of these options to being automatic in nature handled by the server.

153

Yeah, I think some level of abstraction and anonymization would be needed to maintain opec for the corp, but this would all really help match players up with appropriate corps.

The turnover thing I think it a helpful metric of how healthy and stable the corp (and in particular its leadership) is. High level of turnover? You might be hooking up with a psychopath :smile:

Next thing you know, we’ll have to start Glassdoor for EVE!

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154

LOL, if you don’t already know what you’ve done, then there’s no point in me telling you!

Genius! :slight_smile:

Regards,
Cypr3ss.

155

I realized maybe a lot of the flyer stuff should become automatic, to make it easier.

Ie we can conver to something like

image

156

We can always promise new players some free cake.
If you wonder how we are going to get cake to the new players, then you have not played long enough.

157

The cake is a lie!

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158

Load it into a projectile shell, a missile,onto a drone or draw it with a laser on their ships?

''Sorry bro your ship couldn’t handle the sweetness, that’s why you exploded ‘’

159

Maybe have to have a certain level (per active player) of x to make a claim. If you want to claim to be a Null PvP corp, you have to have a certain amount of people flying in null killing (or getting killed).
No visibility of exactly how active but you have to have the activity to be able to tick something.

160

I’ll just kill my alts.I’m a nullsec corp now?!

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161

Sure, if you are flying in space and killing your alts in null then sure. you can tick being a nullsec PvP corp.
Because that means that both you and your alts are in space in nullsec shooting or being shot and others can interfere. Sounds legit.

162

I know I can’t trust that particular poster.

One consequence of that is that it makes sense to treat anything that looks like a “timewaster attack” as one - e.g. don’t react directly to open questions or open requests.

His opening request was for me to list & explain the points that I had criticized. From a post that claimed some really stupid things, including that all new players are “less bright” than all existing players, and that every effort CCP has made with the NPE has had a negative effect in retention. Some of the craziest “victim blaming” and self-aggrandizing (embiggening?) tropes from the bittervet narrative.

As per the post you quoted, an actual discussion with someone who says such things is pointless.

In contrast, if a sane poster (there are several active right now) made the same request I’d do exactly as asked. But of course they’d never make such bizarre claims.

165

I’ll agree with you here. So many times when I’ve shown EVE to people, and when they see the UI, they immediatly say something along the lines of “Oh wow that seems like a daunting game I could never play that”

It’s possible that my UI layout just looks busy because I like to have all info on screen but… Still. :sweat_smile: The UI could use bit more sci-fi and bit less MS Office, but the functionality should stay the same. Little eyecandy and illusion goes a long way!

166

Hun Tra

I think there are two cases:

  • New player, just downloaded a client
  • A demo by an experienced player

I think the first is a real problem, but it sounds like you’ve done live demos?

I’m not surprised EVE doesn’t demo well. A non-player will see a lot of clutter, and focus on the nice graphics (backgrounds, stations, gates, etc). But most of the nice-looking stuff is static: they’ll find it uninteresting quite fast. The dynamic stuff is overly complicated and impenetrable at first - not demo-friendly.

Maybe CCP should start by design a couple of beginner-friendly demos, and create “mission spaces” that can be spawned anywhere on demand for them. They don’t need a scenario, ships, etc - just an interesting place where you can do interesting things in a frigate.
:
:
(** Please - nobody explain that whatever CCP do will be exploited. We know. CCP knows. It’s on them to figure out how to stop players from ruining new-player-centric features)

167

Blah blah blah

Here I see you write about how you are all IMBA, and how today’s gamers lazy and stupid … but I have not seen any reason why someone new to come into the game and give 15$ a month CCP…

You few, you happy few in very small pond called Eve

168

No one is required to come to the game out of the blue and pay a $15/mo subscription. This is what Alpha Clones are for.

1 Like