The Gateway Quadrant comes to an end this November, and we’re happy to bring you a summary of what’s been accomplished in the areas of the new player experience in EVE Online, as well as some details on what’s to come in the future – both near and far.
Take a stroll through the various additions and improvements EVE has seen during this Quadrant, and look forward to what’s next!
Feel free to post questions and comments regarding the topics of the Building Better Capsuleers article.
being able to drag ship fittings into a Skill Plan to automatically populate it with the fitting’s required skills. Corporation Skill Plans are coming to players in December.
Finally, also will corps still be limited to only a handful of plans? Right now outside the clunk in creating them that’s the biggest bottleneck.
Will there be better explications when it comes to creating Corp ads. One of the biggest things that hurts people’s visibility is not understanding how things like filters work.
although the game guys care about anything here… the only ones I guess…
I’m really looking forward to a set of career agents, or whatever you’ll call them, that mesh with the new Air NPE.
The Academy videos have been surprisingly informative for how short they are.
Great job so far.
I try to avoid the skill window now because it’s not improved it’s just plain annoying. It’s bulky, you can’t hide skills already trained to level 5, the vertical column alpha sorting instead of horizontal for the skills, and the category labels taking 4x the space that the thing your wanting to look at the most - the skills themselves - all point to a more terrible and less usable design.
As much as improvements to the NPE are appreciated, what happens after the NPE finishes its handholding will remain the killer for NP retention.
Because frankly, NP gameplay rather sucks. In particular so if you start playing solo and have no immediate access to a bunch of spacefriends. Yes, joining a corp can help. But there is very little in EVE that would allow you to find out what corp would be right for you, i.e., no obvious place where you get to know people prior to joining a corp.
Where for example is the equivalent of a pub to hang out in and meet people? Why does one have to join a corp to find out what the people in it are like? Where is a way to earn some ISK together with strangers without big skill or wealth barriers, and in relative safety? There should be missions where you can make friends without hoops to jump through and without suspicion and fear about getting conned or ganked ruining it.
Since EVE does not really deliver for NPs, and probably cannot be made to deliver due to the incredible gaps in skill and wealth and the stratification of player power, you need the social net to catch them and keep them around long enough to get them futher up the food chain. Hence maybe think hard about how that could be improved?
They would be if they were more focused on teaching and less on being a marketing tool.
I don’t think they have put up a single one not riddled with errors or confusing miss information.
This could be a useful Intel tool to hunt people or avoid them. The info is already on the kill board but I think the game needs less free Intel rather than more. Local and some of the other information available is already bad enough.
That being said do people really join a corp without asking if people are playing when they are?
It’s more people lying about it.
Honestly the worst part of the npe are ceos with no business being ceos. But I can’t think of a way to fix that.
I want a pod with rainbow paint and trails. Perhaps pink and a Unicorn too.
We already got a gold one, so why not. We also have skins for Amarr Avatar (Blossom) that look like a …
I disagree. The outline of Corp types was especially good.
What errors are you talking about? I’m seriously asking you, not trying to pick a fight.
Doesn’t the corp finder tool help with this? I feel like when I’ve used that tool, it does do some semblance of this. I don’t really know how accurate it is, but I am hopeful when I put the time zone of my play in there, it’s looking at that?
With regards to TZ use for intel, I feel like you can do that with zKillboard anyway, tbh.
How about create a real academy and grow pilots more efficent and ready to face challenges of new eden at graduate?
Instead of making p0intless changings in game wich effects whole eco system and drop vets out of game ? Most those changings does not accomplish and their changing reasons still intact and go even more bad ?
That will increase your retention rates drastically .
Tested ! Approved !
The new AIR NPE has brought a powerful first adventure to new players, with a 30% increase to the average length of a player’s first session in EVE, and a massive uptick in NPE completion rates!
This would be cool achievement. Only if NPE would actually teach something about real eve. afik they still teach new players that hiding in asteroid belt “masks your warp signature”…
After work I’ll pull up a list, the fitting video was especially bad
Players can and do have a variety of effective teaching groups. NPE is not supposed to be long. It’s supposed to get you excited and give you an overview of the variety of play styles.
I’ll go watch that one again without my rose colored glasses on. No need to make list.
I feel like another thing that sorta tags on to the statement of ‘what about once they’re out of NPE’, is the current lawless state of HS. I think you underestimate the impact on NPE when they’ve either chosen to try and make ISK with trade routes, only to be tackled by Alpha suicide squads or whether they have finally earned enough to do L4’s somewhat efficiently (which let’s be honest is still not great ISK/hr) only to be ganked during a mission.
One person’s content is another person’s griefing. And with EvE, unlike other games, that hit you take when you lose what you’re flying is really demoralizing. “Don’t fly what you can’t lose” is fair in NS and LS, but HS really should be safer than it is and I think is a major deterrent to long term players,
I mean, seriously, Imagine how horrible shopping IRL would be if every time you walked out of the store, there’s a gang of known criminals hanging out seeing if you’re worth robbing and the cops only respond after you’re dead/robbed. Crazy. This isn’t how the game used to be and imo, this is why you lose players after several months.
Honestly, I don’t think Alphas should be able to turn off their safety from green in HS. If Omegas want to be pirates in HS, well at least I feel like they’re paying for that right to grief. Just my $0.02.
Statistics have shown higher levels of retention of a player who is ganked vs ones that aren’t
how safe? safe to the point that the only threat is NPC’S? because that would be awful. If HS players dont need to consider defense as part of their fitting/mining/exploration process everyone will min max. there will be no fitting diversity and nothing will ever blow up.
Which begs the question how do you make it safer? Because its not that hard to avoid being ganked. In most cases folk are asleep at the wheel.
^^^^^ This