I propose to add beginner missions in the seeker investigation that make the beginner go in abyssal space.
The reason for abyssal space is simple : you can be requested to start the mission in a capsule, be given a free ship (noobship or sunesis) for the mission, and only leave the mission with a capsule, effectively removing any direct gain from abusing it.
Another benefit is that people doing this mission know at advance the maximum time it takes to do it (because they die after 20min). This should be written in bold in the mission description : takes 20min at max, requires a capsule, you will likely die.
A possible other gain is to force players to self destruct (or be killed) to leave the mission.
An issue I noticed with the current missions is that you don’t get familiar with the weapons systems, so you are expected to choose a weapon system without knowing its usage.
Another issue I noticed is that the tutorial tells you to orbit with a long-range gun. This is just awkward when someone orbit a frigate with a cruiser and tries hit it with a railgun(I actually watched this a lot when looking at noobs streaming).
Some missions would reward the l1 of a skill if is not trained yet, just like seeker investigation does now. eg small hybrid weapons 1 would be injected as a reward for the “blaster” or “railgun” training.
Basically there would be
- one training for turrets : “turret” slot on ship, explain what is tracking, optimal, falloff
- followed by one for lasers, projectiles, and hybrid types. each with two ships, one for close range and one for long range guns.
- one training for launchers : “launcher” slots on ship, explain that damage decreases when target sig decreases or target speed increases (so several moving target that would heal and could be shot at)
- followed by one training for damage types
- after completion of all the previous, one mission for damage types, eg damage dealt by weapons systems and damage resisted by factions for pve, then damage resist bonus for T2/T3 ships
- then tutorials on the sunesis/gnosis ships. The goal is to teach that bigger is not better, it’s just different . This would need however to add medium civilian guns (eg medium hybrid railguns).
- one tutorial on “specialization vs generalisation”, eg explaining why dual tanking is bad or splitting weapons types may not be a good idea.