Before "The Agency existed" and you needed a quest generator there was

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“The Agency” is another sign of how the players who are being targetted don’t belong here in the first place.

But apparently i’m wrong. Apparently this game is now all about needing rails and being told what to do, because the targetted, new players don’t cut it. Without FCs, events and the Agency apparently they’d all be lost and would quit, because they can’t figure out what to do just by themselves.

I really question the logic in running a game no one actually wants to play, where they need incentives (Achievements, quests, events) to actually log in and play the damn game, compared to just logging in and doing something that comes to mind. Oh, that demands creativity and taking risks! Damn!

CCP could probably split the cluster into seperate realms and most people wouldn’t even notice the difference anymore.

PS: your post made me laugh. :smiley:

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We no longer know who they actually want here so it might actually be perfectly targeted.

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We don’t? Why would you think that?

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C’mon now. We’ve seen game devs do it a million times now. The “loyal” existing playerbase ain’t filling those Ferrari wishlist coffers fast enough, so they dumb down…sorry “reimagine” or “revamp” the game so the “masses” will come. It always ends two ways: successfully such as in games WoW, or unsuccessfully such as in games like Star Wars Galaxies.

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I dont think it has to do with Ferrari’s.
Considering Hilmars’ opening speech at Fanfest this year,
Its all about being the first company to create a RL Star Trek style HoloDeck

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Hate to tell you this but a lack of direction has always been one of the biggest complaints with Eve from people who have tried it and quit. I’ve spent a huge amount of time in this game working with and around new and newer players, and “Okay I did X, what now?” has been repeated by an absurd number of them for the entire 10 years that I’ve played.

It’s not that these are bad players or people who don’t belong in Eve, it’s that they get to the end of the tutorial or the SOE arc, or whatever and just kinda stop at the huge number of options available to them.

Something like The Agency that offers a little bit of direction can help these players a lot by giving them a selection of things to try with a reward attached to keep them going.

Also gatekeeping Eve is, ironically, in and of itself against the very point you’re trying to promote here. Eve is whatever you want it to be, you don’t get to say that someone else’s way of playing is wrong, especially not because it’s “too directed” or whatever precisely the wording you’re going for here is.

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I’d rather we get the ability to apply to and join corporations within the game if we want to actually “quest generate” in a sandbox game.

I’ll just say Concord for everything rather than any specific faction or corporation.

Concord Citadel
Concord Engineering Complex
Concord Venture
Concord Industrial
Concord Support/Attack Frigate/destroyer/cruiser

Let players buy/deploy these things as long as they are within the faction in question with LP and isk. Have these things depend on the leadership skill set and your faction affiliation to be activated. Let player corps affiliate with these corporations. Let these players deploy high/low/null sec agents that need their whims satisfied to continue to do what they do. Allow null sec players to deploy gate guns to defend their territory and gates to respect the station settings inside it.

They want to put rails into the game then let the players MAKE theirs too. Otherwise we’re just throwing fluffy distractions at people which the majority of vets will find as an insult.

But what for? You can create missions by yourself, without any help from CCP. All you need is imagination and something for him to do and you can make up whatever reason you want!

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You don’t need a direction, but you definitely need to be aware of your options.

The NPE is a step in the wrong direction. Not that it exists and not in what it tries to teach and even not in how it tries to do it, but in the story it tells. In Eve you are only the protagonist of your own story and it is (and should be) all up to yourself what this story is about.
You are not chosen, not the hero, not the only one who can rescue us all, you are not special in any way - except that you have become a capsuleer, making you immortal in some way, but that is also the case for thousands of other people.
The NPE should somehow reflect that and tell a story of your insignificance, but great potential and ideally end where the career agents start. This is where a player should get some ideas of what he could do in the future. Currently the somehow fail in teaching how to pursue those career paths (common question: “where do I find exploration agents?”) and to show what other stuff there is.
For many people, the SOE arc follows after the career agents. I found it incredibly boring and never finished it, but I did it rather late.
For many others it is the first time they get around the cluster, something to do while they train up some core skills and the important lesson that some parts in Eve may be too hard to do alone (like Dagan if you reach him too early). So it has some justification to be there, although it is exactly what some here call “playing on rails” - even so far that CCP puts new players in systems on the mission arc under special protection.
It might even make sense to build another arc (or two) at level two or three difficulty where (especially Alpha) players can get a Gnosis or something similar at a later point in their careers. Giving them time to try stuff and develop some skills in between is important and giving them a goal to prepare for can actually help keeping them motivated. And if they get distracted from preparation for the next mission arc, even better.

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You’re missing what I’m saying I think.

This is going to be most useful to someone who has never played some or even most of the different pieces of content in the game, not an old bittervet who already knows what they like and what they don’t.

There’s this thing that happens, quite commonly actually, in people when they’re presented with a large range of options called Choice Paralysis. This often results in, if it’s an available option, the person abandoning the choice entirely. In the case of Eve this means quitting the game.

Something like the Agency provides just a little bit of direction and narrows down the available choices into a more bite-sized format. So someone looking to do all the Agency missions might go get their Battlecruiser and start doing scan sites while training for a T3. That could lead to Low Sec exploration, Wormholes, or Null as possible extensions, but it’s at least gotten the player’s feet wet into that part of the game and done so in a fairly smooth way.

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