A newb's honest tutorial feedback

Issues, Workarounds & Localization General Issues
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I had the pleasure of chatting with a GM when they randomly messaged me in-game to see how everything was going as a new player. In general, I really like the game (3 days in) but have of course have the same concern that has likely been expressed countless times here: the learning curve is steeeeeep. I told this GM that the tutorial could use some work and they requested that I put my thoughts down in this forum. I’m hoping this is the right section to do so.

I want to clarify that by “tutorials” I mean the first few things they have you do when you first start out and all the basic career agent arcs. (is that the correct term?)

  1. The main thing that struck me is how little detailed guidance there actually is. The UI alone is crazy enough when first starting out, but the concepts and amount of context menus are overwhelming to say the least. When a tutorial asks me to do some thing, I would expect it shows me what it’s talking about. For instance, the exploration agent asked me to uses my sensory overlay to probe the area for data sites. My instinct was “hey look at that list on right of my screen, it says data site right there. I should go to it”. My second thought was, “i doubt it’s that easy. it feels like I should be doing something more to find it”. It’s here that I believe the game should have a lot more of those little blue floating textboxes that point to what i’m supposed to click with a little blurb as to why. I had to go find that quest on youtube and watch a video for the correct buttons and menus. I decided to continue watching the video and it showed me how to use the probes and the procedure for scanning. This should 100% be the tutorial’s job. It should tell me how to launch, positioning, scanning, repositioning, scaling, etc.

While I don’t want everything to be handed on a silver platter, I do feel as though these basics are important to someone who literally doesn’t know any of the buttons. On the other hand, If I’m expected to be more self-sufficient and use outside sources to figure out basic, intermediate, and of course advanced game mechanics, then the game should point me to those outside resources (or at least hint at them cheekily).

  1. I would like to know more about my ship(s). What exactly are all these gauges, why do i care, what can i install, what are the limitations (cpu and cap), etc. There are a bunch of modules that the tutorials give you and then proceeds to explain some and others it doesn’t really, not to mention the insane amount of modules and whatnot on the market, and you can start to see why a newb such as myself would not really be able to know what is important and start to feel overwhelmed. Again, the little blue floating textboxes would work wonders. I get that having too many of these could get tedious and annoying, but dole them out one at a time with brief overviews and I think people will feel a lot more comfortable.

A simple example would be guns and ammo. Just explain the benefits of the turrets you’re giving me and why I would want to use different types of ammo. Yes, this knowledge will come with time, but isn’t the point of the tutotrial to really tutor you on such things? This doesn’t have to include more advanced things like overheating (i saw on youtube) or turning modules on and off. I think that stuff could maybe get a mention later down the line but should really be learned through practice or research. The basics, though, should be given to new players so that they don’t get frustrated and quit. That said, I do want to mention that I personally will not be quitting any time soon.

  1. What’s the deal with giving me so many ships? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining that I get handed a dozen ships in the first two days, but it’s a bit confusing as to why a) duplicate ships are good and b) ships are so seemingly easy to acquire. Should I expect to lose ships A LOT? ARE ships really that easy to acquire? Am I expected to outfit more than 1 of any given ship with a different set of things for different purposes?

I felt quite accomplished after the first career agent arc and getting a few ships but I honestly didn’t feel like I “earned” them. I understand that some of them are necessary for the missions at hand, but maybe they should require some more upfront work, some big cash deposits, and/or heavy penalties for failure. I don’t know exactly how to remedy this one, but I can tell you that one of them earned me a bantam that had nothing to do with that arc or the missions within it. Getting the venture makes perfect sense early in the industry arc as well as a merlin for military, but I just feel it needs a little more weight to earning them or explanation as to why I’m getting handed so many ships. Earning the specialized ship at he end of the arc would be a nice way to go about it (maybe step 8 or 9 so that you are forced to use and learn it for the big ending)

I know this all sounds like a rant and that I hated the tutorial or whatever, but I honestly feel like there is likely a large influx of gamers due to quarantine and that giving new players as much help as possible could really lead to a higher retention rate (no idea the past, present, or future rates). I stuck with it because I apparently love space games (ED, SC, ~IB, etc) and have grown bored with all the other MMOs I’ve played, but I’m not sure the tutorial as it stands is enough to stop a less-enthused patron from getting totally and completely overwhelmed and storming out.

Thanks for reading and listening! I’m looking forward to many hundred of hours in this game and being exploded by all of you (much more likely than me exploding you)

P.S. I want to thank that GM for reaching out and I love love love this policy because it really helped me to feel more comfortable in the game.

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Welcome to EVE, @Bajak_Yakyak! Thank you so much for your feedback. CCP regularly makes improvements to the tutorial, so commentary like this does get heard and incorporated into future iterations.

In principle this should be the case, but it relation to exploration specifically I would imagine it would be extremely difficult to incorporate this into the game. CCP should definitely look into it, though! Regardless of what the best long-term solution is, I think the best short-term solution is for CCP to provide links for their official training videos on scanning in 1. the tutorial, 2. the in-game help menu, and 3. the support center webpage. There are plenty of other YouTube videos made by players… some are good… most not so much - but the starting point should always be the official videos in the official EVE Online youtube channel.

So this is actually where low level PVE, moreso L1 missions than any other, come in. They’re designed for people who are 100% completely new to EVE and are still learning the game and basically have no idea what everything is or what they’re doing. As you’re using your extremely poorly fitted ship with very low skills levels to kill things, those rats you kill are going to drop a wide variety of modules for you to play with from weapons, defenses, navigation, scanning, mining, you name it. One of the reasons NPCs drop modules is to serve an academic purpose - they’re there for newbies to experiment with instead of buying random crap off the market just to try new things. And since low level PVE is designed to be completed by players who barely have a grasp of the basics and are using with poorly fitted ships with low skills, they’re basically a safe environment for you to experiment with these modules you come across. Consider L1 missions to be your sandbox. (You can also use the fitting simulator to see how your ship might perform with modules you don’t actually own - but if you don’t know what everything means, you’ll definitely learn when you jump into the deep end!!!)

Missions are probably the absolute best way for a new player to start off with the game, because - for the purposes of starting off in the game - you’ll learn the basics, have fun, earn ISK, score loot, let your skills train, etc, all at the same time, so try that out and see if it addresses your concerns. (If by chance you’d like to be paid to run missions you’re already running, I’m the Co-Head of the United Standings Improvement Agency [USIA] , and my group is hiring mission runners - we do hire newbies, even first-day-playing-EVE newbies, and train/supply them if necessary, so if you’d be interested in discussing what we can offer you, kindly join the USIA Discord server and we’ll discuss there.)

As per the above, it’s all about exposure to new things. Every ship has a niche in which it excels at better than any other ship in the game (in general, there are no ships such that one is strictly superior to the other - not even T2s are strictly superior to T1s - and no two ships are interchangeable). You might not come to understand or appreciate that at first, but at least you have something to play with and you’ll come to learn that as you go along.

If you’re educated in the ways of EVE, absolutely. Even the priciest of ships + fittings are within an arm’s reach for a casual player who plays a few hours of EVE a week.

The ships you received are a dime a dozen, so I wouldn’t worry too much about that. In the time it takes me to take a piss I could perform activities in the game that would net me a hundred of those ships. There’s even an activity in the game called Project Discovery that requires no ships, no skills, and can be done anywhere in game - even while docked up - that, once you get good at it, will net you 45m/hr + several rewards… so basically what that means is playing for a less than a minute will buy you a few of those ships you earned. You can do that right now this very instant if you wanted to.

You can lose ships very easily in the game for a variety of reasons (ignorance, foolishness, lack of preparedness, ambush, etc), but they’re just as easily replaceable as long as you follow the Golden Rule of EVE: do not fly that which you cannot afford to lose.

Apart from diving into missions as a great starting point, the best thing you can do - better than going through any kind of comprehensive tutorial/manual/YouTube series - is to find a good corp to mentor you. (If you’re interested in my offer above, note that you can still work for us and receive our training even if you choose not to join our corp, though you are most certainly welcome to join ours, and we’d mentor you whether or not you joined ours if you choose to work for us and get paid to run missions.)

I hope you found these return feedback to be useful. And I hope to hear from you, too!

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Oh man, excellent response. Thanks a ton for taking the time.

I have worked through all the Career Agent missions now except that I’m a bit stuck on the 10th of Advanced Combat (lost two ships :grimacing:) but i’m working on better understanding the modules and getting a fit that’ll lead me to ultimate victory over these pirate scum. That said, I kinda wanna join the pirate scum. is that bad? haha

I now have some serious to-dos on my list for after this mission:

  1. check out the L1 missions you mentioned
  2. figure out how to Project Discovery
  3. research corps (since you’ve been so helpful, yours will be first! :grinning: )
  4. start the SoE epic arc (suggested by the aforementioned GM)

Interesting side note: this final stage of advanced combat gives me a destroyer, which is awesome, but I have to train the required skills to fly it, so the ship is somewhat useless if I wanna complete the mission within the bonus time. Feels like something they should have you start doing earlier (this specific training path) so that you can don it

Cheers!

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Thanks for taking the time man. The tutorial is a bit better than it once was but still famously terrible. One day tho :blush:

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