Greetings Capsuleers.
Please use this thread for feedback on Aura Guidance (Beta).
Aura Guidance (Beta):
Aura Guidance is a new in-client assistant designed to help new players navigate their early experience in New Eden. It is currently available as a beta to a limited number of new players on English language clients.
Aura Guidance answers common rookie questions using responses sourced from Rookie Help chat, ISD volunteers, and official game information.
Answers are context-aware, taking into account your current location, ship, and recent activity.
Responses include interactive links to ships and items, and can highlight relevant UI elements in the client.
When Aura is not confident in an answer, it will redirect players to Rookie Help chat.
Aura Guidance is optional and can be closed or removed from the Neocom at any time.
This feature does not affect gameplay or client performance.
Rollout plan:
This initial release targets a subset of new players on English language clients as a controlled test.
If results are positive, availability will expand to all new players on English clients.
Multilingual support is planned for a later phase.
The knowledge base is being updated daily and will continue to expand based on real player questions.
Known limitations:
Some questions will not receive an answer and will be redirected to Rookie Help.
Responses may occasionally feel generic, miss the specific context of your situation or be factually incorrect.
Iām so looking forward to the lunatic hallucinations of this AI slop machine.
First, positive feedback though: I do not see it in any of my chars that are definitely not newbies. That is good. CCP maybe has at least learned this lesson from the stupid NES icon mess. Letās hope it stays like this when itās being rolled out en masse.
Since this is stated to be a beta, meaning in developmentā¦
Can we get a statement on how in the opinion of CCP this part of the EULA:
In addition, you acknowledge and agree that CCP may analyze and use such User Gameplay Information for the purposes of review, research, development, maintenance, operation, administration, and support, and for the marketing of CCP products and services.
covers textual information provided by users in an in-game chat channel in order to feed a LLM?
Given the definition in EULA of āUser Gameplay Informationā is legally fairly vague about whether this is covered, especially when taking internationally varying definitions of copyright come into play:
The term āUser Gameplay Informationā means any information relating to your play or use of the Game, including of your gameplay statistics, preferred strategies, in-Game transaction history and trends, history of technical issues and support usage, and history of contributed and received User Content.
Separation
Question: Is CCP aware about the prevailing opinion in the Rookie Help in-game chat channel about LLM or AI usage by players in the context of obtaining information on Eve gameplay?
First Microslop, then Nvidia, and next to start dying from AI poison: EVE Online.. I mean, letās be real CCP.. No one wants this crap in our software. Find another way.
I personally think this is a great addition and would love to see AI āActorsā take on the roles of the agents in game as well, the way eve is build it could very easily have small models do this and provide much more diverse and engaging PvE.
I see the term AI slop thrown around and can see why some people feel this way, but AI agents that that are built to specialize into a niche role with the types of memory currently available are actually amazing when compared to more generalized AI chats.
Anything you send to the Help Channels can be considered āPublicā information as anyone can join the channels and even forced into Rookie Help for the first 30days of characterās existance.
Hello @CCP_Bee This idea sounds like it has potential. It could tentatively replace an in-game EVE encyclopedia and give new players some continuity from the tutorial. It will complement the Air Career Program by giving information and guidance to players who donāt know what questions to even ask to something they donāt know exists in the game.
I would very much like to test it.
I hope it can be just as good or better than the Help Chat, which is already very good.
I wish you all the luck with Aura, though. Sheās a feisty one.
Going to respectfully decline to interact with this feature.
Itās bad enough that almost everyone I know hates these automated support systems when they actually need to address a problem, but now weāre encouraging players to talk to each other less.
At least youāre doing it in the client this time, rather than on some third party platform.
Since the feature is available for test on randomly selected newly created EVE accounts, and existing chars wonāt see it, here is a sample screen of it
After reading the article and watching the CCP video, I really like what you are trying to do here. And I think you are going in the right direction using an AI to help solve the āeasy-to-digest way, to help reduce confusion for new pilotsā.
Looking forward to testing and hopefully providing some good and useful feedback on this.
I have to say, Iām deeply opposed to having any sort of slop engine running inside Eve. There is nothing this thing will be able to do that humans canāt do. Thereās a climate crisis happening, and LLMs are a notable contributor.
Please just donāt. I try not to support companies that contribute to the climate crisis by pressing LLMs on their users. Having just re-activated Omega after a few years away Iāve been excited to get back into the game, and Iāve been telling some friends and family that they might want to try Omega, but most of them feel the same way I do about this topic. Theyāll want to vote with their wallets and they may well get me to do the same.
A Note on Environmental Impact
We take the environmental cost of running AI systems seriously. Our architecture is designed to minimize it from the ground up.
Aura Guidance is retrieval-first. There is no open-ended generation, no reasoning chains, or self-reflection loops. Each question gets a single, short answer. We only run small language model variants, and we evaluate new models with energy cost as a factor.
To put the footprint into perspective, even under generous assumptions where every active player sends a question every day, Aura Guidanceās annual energy usage would be comparable to running a single small European household for a year. That is a rounding error next to the energy consumed by the game servers themselves.
Iām glad theyāve put some thought into this. I hadnāt seen that FAQ. Iād still rather see humans doing this, but it does sound like theyāre trying to approach it respondibly, to some degree.
ISD volunteers in Rookie Chat channel are already doing this. But there is only so many of them.
Based on the below graph (especially āPast six monthsā and āPast yearā there might be an increase in new players inflow
Based on the DevBlog, i think CCP just wants to add a buffer zone for new players, who are afraid to ask ānoobā questions publicly and making fun of themselves. So Devs thought they would put Aura, that already introduced itself to the new player as their AI assistant, in the role of that first guide new player can actually communicate with about the game and receive a tangible response . Complete with Show info hyperlinks and UI highlights and ultimately suggesting to ask in Rookie Chat.
