I see new players asking “noob” questions in the rookie chat every day and I never see anyone making fun of them or acting in condescending fashion.
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As a game developer myself, here are some thoughts and suggestions:
- I start with the one I deem most important: Social connections between players. EVE is a social game and the meaningful connections between players is crucial for the game’s continued success. If we assume that Aura Guidance would work as intended, it would mean less of the very important social connections that new players get by asking questions and being active in the Rookie Chat. Or even passively following the discussions there.
If new players get answers from Aura Guidance, the less need they have for Rookie Chat and the less they are exposed to other players, players that they can make social connections with. And even though there are the occasional arguments in Rookie Chat, mostly between more experienced players, in general it is very welcoming chat, very much so compared to any chat or social media platform and other games out there. And I’d say that 95% of the questions I see there get answered.
Just imagine all new players using Aura Guidance and ignoring Rookie Chat completely, it would not be good for the social connections so that tells us Rookie Chat has value for enabling those crucially important first social connections. While it is impossible to put exact value for Rookie Chat’s social boost, I’d argue it is considerable. The better the Aura Guidance works, the more it weakens the early social connections.
- Gamers, by and large, detest AI. It does not matter what each of us thinks about AI personally: Gamers do not like it. And based on this thread and some recent videos from established EVE content creators it is very clear that majority of EVE players do not want AI in this game. Of course, it could also be the case that the anti-AI members of the EVE community are just a vocal minority but, given the general sentiment gamers have, I would dismiss that possibility.
So the questions becomes; is CCP to gain or lose more by adding AI to EVE? Not just based on community sentiment but also for example the point 1 above. At the end of the day it is a simple business decision but I assume one that is impossible to evaluate precisely enough. So it is a call someone at the CCP has to make based on their intuition. Intuition I hope is not affected by their personal view on AI, one way or the other.
- What is CCP trying to achieve with adding Aura Guidance? I assume the obvious: increased early retention for new players (= smaller churn during first few days or weeks). One pitfall to avoid in game development is to not increase one KPI at the expense of / decreasing another. My points 1 and 2 above should be considered as something that can decrease other KPI’s more than Aura Guidance can increase early retention, resulting into a net negative.
So what could be alternatives for Aura Guidance that would affect the same KPI, early retention, without or at least with assumably less negatives than what the Aura Guidance (arguably) has?
There are many but their effect is harder to measure than Questions / Answers ratio for Aura Guidance. Vassal system? CCP starting to manage EVE University Wiki (yes, players would alt tab off the game client but I don’t know if that is actually increasing churn or not, I assume CCP has analytics data point to measure that), bringing back the in-game browser for the wiki, adding more ISD’s… At least all of these I have seen suggested somewhere by the community and content creators.
If I have understood correctly, ISD’s are unpaid community volunteers. I think I have seen maybe 5 or 6 different ones online the past six months or so. All of them have been extremely knowledgeable and they are also very effective in keeping everyone in line on the relatively rare occasion that people start fighting in the chat. Can we have more ISD’s?
Early retention is not the silver bullet metric. It is easy to focus on that because that is the simple KPI that stakeholders understand and AI salespeople likely tell they could improve. Example:
GAME A - Day 1 retention 45%, D14 12%, D30 5%, D365 0,05%
GAME B - D1 20%, D14 7%, D30 4%, D365 3,5%
Many people, even in the games industry, will not even consider anything beyond D30 important and for them the Game A is the clear winner here. However, for a game like EVE, where people play for years and can spend hundreds and thousands of Euros to the game that they keep playing for even decades it is very much OK and even normal to have a “weak” early retention.
So one thing I would challenge, even if only for the sake of argument, is the need to improve early retention in the first place. But I do not know if that is a legitimate concern or not.
One factor especially important for hard to learn social games is that a new player joining the game because their friend asked them to and then that friend showing them the ropes, increases early retention by a huge margin. Is there something (besides the referral code) that CCP could do to get more active players to bring their friends to EVE? Or can EVE University be made more active or at least more visible in-game, as that would have similar effect.
Another suggestion I’d recommend is including content creator video’s to the EVE launcher. There could be a whole permanent segment of “learning EVE” videos. But I would also advocate for having an actively updated segment of “latest and greatest” videos in the launcher. Many EVE players, so I assume, watch youtubers like Loru, Warlock Industries, Chloroken and many others. Having that kind of content would remind us more veteran players to watch those videos too (as if we would need reminders…) but they would also initiate the new players to find our the magnificent depth of EVE and New Eden and one should not underestimate the importance that has on early, and long term, retention.
It would also boost the content creators and I’m sure it would motivate them to keep making the great content many of them have been doing for years.
I realise I got a bit carried away here and veered of the original subject a bit. And those asteroids are not gonna mine themselves so time to login. o7
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Battlefield 1942 had that feature also. A single player could solo any of the maps or dlc with bot support.
I’m testing it out on a new alt. So far, so good. But the window should really follow chat settings. Now the font is extremely small.
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Since last downtime my five-year-old omega main account suddenly has Aura Guidance.
Where do i remove this waste of menu space? (from both neocom menu and neocom bar)
And no, the clanker couldn’t tell me. It tried to get me to reset my settings instead when i asked it.
Right-click it and select Unpin from Neocom.
Nobody’s interested in risking a $1 billion dollar data center to the next volcanic eruption They’s sooner put these in space before Iceland…
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