Dear EVE, here is why I say goodbye

New Citizens Q&A
144

Hi everyone !

First of all : pardon my English

I just read the first message on the top, and I keep reading until I saw that what I want to say is already outdated ! :sweat_smile:

But I will say it anyway : I’m a new player (1.5 month old). I began this summer with two friend, one who were involved, but not like me, and another, who where just searching “some free game to play”.

I will not enter in the debate Old vs New (it is what I understand, if there is not a debate Old vs New, then okay), and I will not say that someone who asked what new player wanted doesn’t know what they want, or anything else.

I am here to say what I liked in Eve online, why I disagree with the author of the subject, and some other things :

Boring Flashback

I was introduced to Eve online when I was 9 (10 years ago, in 2007) by my stepfather who, in the goal of impress me while I was in my sci-fi big moment, show me trailers of this game. I was in the star when I saw this ship (Amarrians) pewpewing themselves in great, big, clash, with fighter (in fact I know that was frigates) flying between that deadly pewpew.

I began to play this summer. Took an Alpha account (still have Alpha account, but I will buy plex in one month). I made the tutorial, and I went to Hek, in low sec. Sometimes, I went to null sec, but I was (and I still be) impress by the people who make 100 mil of ISK in ratting in low sec in a couple of hours. When I go ratting in Otou (0.3 sec near Hek), it takes me a couple of hour to make 1 mil ISK.

But I don’t care, it’s my million of ISK, and when I plexing in FW, I can make in twenty minutes 25 mil of ISK ! But I get blow myself up in ten second by anybody who come and fight versus me (Alpha Matari who love rifter, my fault) so, I spend 7 mil ISK making a decent fit for another Rifter that will be blow up in ten second by anybody who try ! And I don’t care ! (I love it !!) I’m learning pvp, and after each fight, I improve skills, strategy to fly Rifter, and all the stuff which take a long time to build !

So, why I made a long pause to the last Friday, when I finally log in again ?!

My fault again (maybe), is that, I want to go in WH (already made it with my Probe ! Exploration in Low Sec and Null Sec is really what I love) or in nullsec, I want to live the great wars of thousands of players and maybe live a battle like the Bloodbath of B-RB5RB (or something like that
 Titanomachy). But the question, which, at last, made me make a pause, and that I feeling again today is :

“Okay, FW and solo pvp is good, mining, ratting, exploring, but
 Where do I go now ?”

For me, and, maybe imo, for a part of New Players who are strong enough to play the complicate game that is EVE (and what make EVE, EVE ! If Wow were complicate, it wouldn’t be Wow, it would be a pale.10⁶ EVE’s copy imo) what could make us quit the game is that question. “Where do I go now ?”

Okay, there is all the corps, alliance, and all the players who are willing to teach to New Players how to get the level of “Older Players”, etc, etc, but, we have to go somewhere to reach them, make the Sister of Eve epic arc, make gank gang, etc ! And I don’t know where to go. Some will say to us “go there, you will find someone !” and we’ll listen to them
 or not. We want first to make ISK for keeping playing EVE for free, but, come a time when, you are bored to play alone. And maybe we (as a community) have to make something about this ?

Yes ! If the New Player don’t come by himself, how could he find someone (I found a FW corp (20 members), and it take 1 hour to write a mail to the CEO of this corp just because I wish to join them ! Imagine for joining a corp of Goonswarm !! (but one of the two friends who began to play at the same time as me get now in Goonswarm and told me this : “I stopped to get learning about the story of EVE when I began to live it”)

CCP imo, try to keep players, more than making new ones I think. Because, Eve is not a game like Wow, when I log in, in 12 hours I get lvl 60, and 12 other hours, I make a raid with Illidan, it’s a game with need from you to be involved. So this is a first filter, I think. A filter that success or fail, I don’t know, but it succeed me to come back, because I never forget EVE.
I think that, for making new players, EVE online need us. A kind of pub in real life, where you say the cons of this game (complicate, lot of time, etc, which aren’t cons actually) and pros (PVP WARFARE, BLOODBATH OF B-RB5RB OR A WEIRD NAME WITH LETTERS AND NUMBERS PUT ASIDE, EXPLORATION IN WH, PIRATES, PEWPEW, ANTISLAVER-TRUSTING-IN-RUST GUYS,)
and maybe more help (a bit from CCP maybe, because Rookie Help Guys do what they have to do) in game ?

Some new players (like me two month ago) need someone to come and say “Hey ! I’m from PutANameOfCorpOrAlliance and we’re searching new ones to play with ! Do you want to fly with me(us?) for some time ?”

Not all players would need this help, because they go in null sec, find someone, says “hey ! Fleet ?” and BIM they’re now in a Corp/Alliance. But they are not the majority I think.

A large part of the New Players, the ones who discovered EVE alone, or the ones who aren’t hardgamers, may won’t have the pair (sorry myladies) to go to the first one stranger guy and say “Hi ! I am searching people to play with ! Can I join you ?” Even more if they’re in LowSec, trying to make ISK, where big corp aren’t really here, but guys who says “Hek Arena is open !” and other scammers and gank guys who want you to pay 100 mil per month to mine in Hek, while there Otou just next.

So, I guess a lot of New Players don’t find a answer to “Where do I go now ?”, and, after some time, quit because they didn’t played the real EVE. Other will answer this, but another question will hurt them : “How do I get in the place I want to go” “How do I go in NullSec, in the Alliance I wish to join ?” “How do I go in WH, how do I find a Corp in WH ?”

If we (because I just answer the “How do I go there ?” today) can help us to answer this questions, maybe new players will stay a little bit more long in this game, and maybe Tranquility will be a little bit more big ?

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145

Good post :slight_smile:

Contact me by EvE-Mail and i’ll help you boost your ratting income a bit, along with anything else you may be struggling with.

Keep it up :smiley:

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My apologies, I wrote that in a hurry, I should’ve clarified:

Making 200-300m in 2 hours was on my OLD high SP characters! not on this baby!

There is this rule in life, whatever you do, 10% of the people will love it no matter what, 10% will hate it no matter what, you have the remaining 80% to work with.

Most posters are on the forums because they’re from that 10% (or maybe 0.01%). I was merely dissecting the various problems from the perspective of new players who BOUNCE after a short time.

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Okay, I am not sure why people think there is this argument that injectors of any size are needed to play this game. They aren’t.

But


If you want to take a short cut in training some skills they are an option. If you do not want to go the standard route you can use injectors and go from relatively unskilled to somewhat skilled more quickly.

Now, the price of injectors reflects the fact that people are trying to obtain quickly what usually takes more time. For some that price may seem reasonable and for others it may not.

Now the overall objection seems to be, at it’s root, that the price of SP are too high. But they are not when you stop to consider that the price of SP are for all intents and purposes set by the IG price of PLEX. How much is 30 days of training worth? Just about 1 PLEX or 1.5 billion ISK. If you can train 2,700 SP/hour you’ll have 1,944,000 SP at the end of the month. This means that after you factor in extractor costs (and ignoring taxes for simplicity) you’ll make about 1.41 billion ISK off of small skill injectors. Technically a bit more in that you can only extract 1.5 million SP, next month you’ll be able to extract 4 with the left over from this month.

Or we could recast this as: how much ISK is one hour of EVE worth? Take 1.5 billion and divide by 720 (note you should use 30 days as that is what a PLEX is for even though on average a “month” is 30.4 days). This says that 1 hour is worth 2.0833 million ISK. So that is what an “hours worth of SP” are worth in terms of ISK.

So the price of inejctors are reasonable, IMO, when looked at from this perspective. Is it too much for a new player? It depends on the new player. One player might say, “No, too expensive.” Another might say, “Where do I pay.” The argument that new characters are in there buying SP is not only irrelevant it is wrong headed. The market process is not enhanced by limiting access, in fact it is almost always a detriment when access to a market is imposed.

Suppose we are somehow able to bar these players from the PLEX market what might happen? Well first off EVE players are very creative at using various means to achieve their goals. We might see a chunk of the PLEX market move over to contracts. Some might move over to the forums, there is still a buy and sell sub-forum. What does all this mean? Well, lets walk through it


Okay, so CCP finds a way to link an alt account to its main account and thus bars them from the IG PLEX market. At first, this would shift the demand curve inwards since there is less demand at all price levels. Given an upward sloping supply function, at first the price would fall. But, these old players with new alts still want those PLEX, so suppose a market forms in the contract system. Now, some of the supply has to move there too! So the IG PLEX market will see the supply curve shift inwards since the prices in the contract market are going to be higher initially. This movement will continue until any gains from trade are exhausted and the prices in the two markets are at relative parity taking into account now higher transactions costs. So in the end the price will likely be the same in the IG new player only market as it is now. It is even possible the prices are higher since the suppliers will want to try and shift any increase in transactions costs back onto buyers to the extent possible.

On top of this we have essentially wasted Dev time. If the Devs are working on this that means there is something else they could not work on. So we’ll miss out on whatever it was the Devs would have done as well. This is basically opportunity cost.

And if you say, “Oh, well we’ll stop the PLEX contract market.” Fine then it moves to the forums. “We’ll stop that too!” Okay, maybe you’ll finally have solved the problem, but again at the cost of other things that the Devs could be doing. But it still might not work. Recall that I noted that there is a close link between PLEX prices and SP prices? If that link is still the binding constraint this will all be for nothing. So we’ll have ended up wasting considerable Dev time for nothing.

Edit: Okay, so I went back and looked at 2 months worth of training SP for extraction and sale. As a back-of-the-envelop calculation I took the 1.41 billion and multiplied it by 4/3 to get the second month’s profits and obtained 1.88 billion. Adding those two months profits together and dividing by two gives and average profit of 1.645 billion ISK/month or more than enough to buy 2 months worth of PLEX and have a small bit left over.

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I don’t know why people turned this into a discussion about skill injectors.

The point was that new player have access to less than 1% of the game content due to everything being gated behind long training queues.

This makes millions of $ spent on development practically worthless, because most players (especially the new ones) never get to experience it.

No one is saying to fly titan on day 1, but it shouldn’t take 6 months from T1 cruiser into a T2 cruiser!

It doesn’t matter if it takes 6 months to learn to fly one properly. The price is enough barrier. Many players would be happy to buy one and just spin it in station until they learn to fly it well.

It’s really pointless to argue against the OP because you’re not the ones who got frustrated and quit the game after a short time. Those players are no longer here to voice their opinion.

I am voicing my experience as a new player from the grand perspective, and these are the same reasons I hear from every friend and gamer as to why they don’t play EVE.

This is a post about the experience of players who quit EVE shortly after joining.

Almost NONE of you are qualified to comment here because you are not the ones who quit EVE shortly after joining due to slow character progression.

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And also because of the lack of ISK. Seriously, suppose we start off every new player with the skills to get into a JF
then what? How is a new player going to come up with 8 billion ISK? In effect, he is still cut off from that content.

EVE Uni tells me 63 days, 9 hours and 37 minutes for the zealot
and that is assuming zero starting skills and that attributes are balanced and there are no implants (i.e. 1,800 SP/hour).

Now perhaps you mean 6 months to have good skills for a zealot. But along the way learning things like T2 small and medium guns makes you better at flying the T1 cruiser, the T1 frigates, etc.

You are basically arguing for a short cut. And what that does is devalue the skill points of everyone who has already gone through this process and you want to do it via coercion (CCP doing it so we have no choice).

Here, lead by example: extract half your SP and go give them to new players for free. Until you do that and post your APIs how about you stop clamoring for the devaluation of other player’s SP? Players, I might add, who have been long time customers.

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BTW, that includes you, so have a nice cup of STFU. :roll_eyes:

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Since you are still here, you are also not qualified to talk as it seems you’ve also managed to get around the “issue”.

Most of the older people here are those who managed to get into the game when starting Eve was more difficult and time-consuming. You had learning-skills, no tutorial, the ship-balance was very different,etc. Eve has never been easier to get into than now. There are many corporations who are dedicated to teaching new players how Eve works. The ships have been rebalanced and are very much viable, even for older players.There is a pretty decent tutorial that teaches the basics of Eve.

If you think you need some tech 2-ship to be effective in the game, then you need to rethink your expectations and learn the game better. Old players quite often can push this mentality to newer players, which leads to them setting too big goals for their short-term plans. Also the fact that most games nowadays do not require you to actually think what you are going to do is also to blame.

What new players need is a healthy dose of patience, willingness to learn and to think bigger than just themselves. Not shorter training times. Not all important things come in the form of skillpoints your character has. Most new players seem to skip the player-skills in favour of SP, thus leading them to rage-quit after losing their new and expensive ship due to not knowing how to use it effectively.

Most activities in the game can be done with almost minimal training and without access to advanced ships. They just make things easier. Find friends and group up. The only thing that I can think of that most new players won’t be able to do is incursions, just due to how min-maxed they are.

When I started, I had a friend who taught me well. I moved to wormhole-space, into a class 5 system, while I was barely able to fly a tech 1 -fitted drake and a scanning heron. That didn’t stop me from doing PVE and PVP, helping older players do other tasks, etc. I enjoyed every minute of it. The time it took me to train new ships and modules I used to learn more about the game-mechanics and how to apply my limited in-game skills better. I learned how to be a good scanner and scout with bad scanning-skills. I learned how to increase damage-application and what steps to take to minimize my own vulnerabilities. I’m now reaching the point where I can fly almost all non-capital ships and even some capital ships with decent skills and experience. I have never used a skill injector and I never will, as I view it as cheating. I’ve also been teaching new players the way of Anoikis and seen how they handle things.

If you are that worried about new players, try teaching them that SP isn’t everything in Eve. Break the habit of giving them goals that are impossible to achieve as a rookie.

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Are you even literate? you should learn to read before writing stupid things on the forums :slight_smile:

I DID quit, and for the same reasons as 95% of players who quit or don’t want to join.

so I DO represent the demographic the game is losing.

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Then why are you still here?

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We’re the people who stayed. We’re the people paying the bills. We’re the people with experience of the game. We’re the people who were ok with slow character progression in the first place. We’re the ones who stuck with EvE through it’s ups and downs, and saw the results of CCP pandering to new players who have no clue what they’re on about.

That’s fine. Seriously. No game is for everyone and EvE isn’t for you. EvE is for people with minerals and drive, determination and a spine that isn’t made of wet tissue paper. The thread became about skill injectors when you claimed people were stuck behind a paywall, which is blatantly false since skill injectors are a thing that gives a decent SP boost for a sizable but still achievable amount of ISK.

Everything is fine and working as intended, except for your ability to choose what games to play :fiestaparrot:

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You quit after you reached 80 million. I can see you aren’t enjoying that cup of STFU. Pitty, I made it just for you. :stuck_out_tongue:

Edit: To be clear
 No, you are not the demographic. You quit in 2014, according to multiple posts in this thread, with a main and alts that had over 80 million SP. You were in a number of well known PvP alliances in NS, lived in w-space and have owned personal fleets of capitals.

You are not a new player struggling to gain access to all this gated content. You had access to that gated content. Yet you left.

And now you set yourself up as the spokes person and savior of “the new players” who would totally stay with the game if we removed the gates
never mind that these same players can’t afford that content.

The degree of hubris and inconsistency is quite impressive.

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That’s some great smelling STFU dude, my compliments to the chef :thumbsupparrot:

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I can fly Shuttles, Corvettes, Frigates, Destroyers, Cruisers, Battlecruisers, Battleships, Industrials and Mining Barges.

I can mine, salvage, explore, rat, trade, haul and pvp in High Sec, Low Sec, Wormholes and Null as I choose.

Can you please explain how this is 1% of the game content?

So now we have gone from months to never? I think your definition of ‘never’ could use some work.

You know most players never get to own Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker? Some do. Most never do. There is a real never.

You know how many of them post on a forum demanding that it be made easily available to all new players? (probably a fair few sadly, if I know anything about game forums, but point made).

If I can fly I can fly Shuttles, Corvettes, Frigates, Destroyers, Cruisers, Battlecruisers, Battleships, Industrials and Mining Barges in just 2 months what on earth makes you think a new player has time to be upset about not having a T2 Cruiser?

They spend the first 4 weeks in Rookie Help asking what guns they should put on their Venture, how to get out of the Wormhole they are stuck in and why the container in front of them is yellow.

This is where you masquerading as the poster child for the new player collapses like the hull of a Venture at a CODE surprise party.

Stop pretending you have the new player mentality. You do not.

You want back exactly what you had when you quit and you don’t want to wait for it, because you don’t have the patience of a new player and are not content with the massive amount of content you can access. You have very unrealistic wants and needs that any new player worth their salt doesn’t demand.

Your agenda is so transparent. Personally I’m insulted every time you align yourself with new players. You are being totally dishonest when you do so.

You are a man who once had a Ferrari, and has now been reduced to driving a normal car.

“Look at all these people without Ferraris!” you shout “How is it fair that they don’t all have access to Ferraris? The world is so cruel! As someone who has to drive a normal car, I know how much you all want a Ferrari! Give everyone a Ferrari now!”

In reality, they are happy driving their normal car. They are looking forward to getting a slightly better normal car soon.

That is not you. You are just salty and want your Ferrari back now.

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You should see what I can do with a tri-tip and a grill
 :stuck_out_tongue:

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But in EvE you can participate in very engaging content from day one. Being little does not limit anyone from doing marvelous things with large groups. In other games if you can’t bring the lv 80 sword it’s gtfo ruby nuby. In EvE one more hero tackle is always welcome. EveUni, KF, PH, BN, and how many more? This is not criticism of you; you live in Rookie so you already understand having old players engage the rookies matters. I guess my point is that since the OP seems to think that only being able to fly battleships(lv 80 sword) as soon as possible will keep new players he is missing that CCP has learned that being engaged in groups is what does so. I should probably direct this at the OP instead of you.

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160

OP,
1% is bollocking hyperbole. As pointed out by others there are many skills available to lv 3 that enable a lot content. In the first 90 days, 100-150 skills can be trained and that includes all 4 basic battleships. Lv 3 is at least adequate for practically any situation. As my memory is hazy now, it might be worth doing an experiment with a new toon, no remap and a complete set of +1’s to determine how many of the 400+ skills can be trained and how high in 90 days.

This is what happens when you short circuit the long training queues.

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On what basis do you question this? Do you suggest they cherry picked the data? Would you be up in all arms and question the data as well if the study would suggest ganking is a problem?

Actually the whole point of the study was to do one thing. There was a question in the room, it is the question which always pops up in every thread on the subject: “is ganking bad for new player retention”. This is the assumption some people make.

Now CCP conducted a study to find out if this is actually true and if those players are right. After all it is in their interest to remove elements which hurt the player retention because it would drive potential customers away. The conclusion of the study was: There is no evidence at all, not even slightly that ganking hurts player retention.

This is science 1:1, the carebear hypothesis is falsified.

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The point is being successful at Eve in terms of PVP/PVE/making isk is dependent on the player’s actual skill and knowledge of the game. There’s no need for the artificial bottlenecks that are ‘skills’.

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Yes, and that takes months if not years. If it takes you 10 months to figure stuff out
by then you should have 13.132 million SP.