I like the idea of this arena quite a bit, but I am worried about what Count Vlad Tepes may be worried about.
It is easy for me to picture fifteen-year-old vets in their own worms with maxed out with abyssal fittings competing to see how many newbies they can kite at one time, or how many newbs they can kill in an hour, that kind of thing.
While I love the idea of the arena, if people end up being cannon fodder in it for a string of vets, then I am not sure they will learn much. Maybe have different rankings where newbs can only fight newbs, five-year-old players can only fight five-year-old players, etc.
With more regulated age and ship restrictions though, it sounds like it would be a great idea. I hope to see t1 frigates mean t1 empire frigates, for example, or a second class for t1 pirate frigates.
I am sure some people will use smurf accounts and you’ll have highly skilled vets playing twenty-day old characters ruining your good intentions with this, but maybe that needs to become a lesson in teamwork against the winners?
The arena would need a StarCraft style ladder ranking, with people who regularly trounce people get moved into hire level arenas, so they don’t get to pwn newbs all the time, but eventually the ace players all get to fight each other.
@QuakeGod is right though, the free alpha accounts complicate the good intentions of this idea.
Ya know what really puts people off a game ? Not being shot at or losing ships…but being surrounded by negative people who pretend to care about noobs.
The proposed arena is a place where noobs would have nothing to lose. No kill record…nothing on killboard for anyone who kills them. No loot dropped. Free ships, and plenty of opportunity to try things out. There’d be little reason for gankers to show up, but even if they did they’d get no kill record out of it…and the noob would be able to be ganked without any loss at all. Its a win-win scenario. But all you can do is be negative about it.
No player would be able to to fit ships beyond their actual skill level. Even the 15 year old noob alt. And I don’t think it really matters if the genuine noobs get blapped. Its all free for the noobs…they can just hop in another ship and try again. It will get them used to losing ships…and provide loads of practice.
I am still thinking about your topic for an entire hour, I imagined that CCP could bring an arena event that has free hulls for everybody as much as they wanna play and this special arena should have only the free hulls. The free hull should be a new ship entirely, from a faction that could be even SoE, or a student ship of any of the military academies of the empire factions.
It would be just like playing Team Fortress 2, just pick a class. These free ships while flying around New Eden should be able to engage only free ships until they filament into the arena. If a free ship is engaged by anyone then the free ship could shoot back.
So pilots of free ships would be able to:
freely engage any any free ship anywhere at anytime, including high sec without going criminal, they should go suspect just like in low sec
can be attacked or ganked by anyone anywhere, then the free ship can engage to defend themselves from anyone including standard ships as we have today
free ships offer no loot
free ships should be given on daily rewards to everybody in those containers, people would be able to sell the container if they want
So my idea would bring a bit of baiting, a bit of low sec to high sec, would bring a new market option.
That just used to be called getting started in EvE…
How is it that players learned how to EvE at a level to be the experienced players themselves all these years of EvE’s existence if no experienced were helpful. Vlad ol’ bean?
New players wouldn’t get very far anyway, judging from what I see daily in Rookie Help chat. Most of them skip the tutorial and go straight to begging for help…
How do I move?
My gun says it doesn’t have charges. What does that mean?
My ship just got blown up. Where do I get it back?
And many, many more…
EDIT: Let’s not forget my two personal favorites that almost every new EVE player asks right off the bat:
How do I make a lot of ISK? / What’s the fastest way to make ISK?
How do I autopilot?
They don’t care about learning game mechanics. They just want to make the most amount of ISK possible with the absolute least amount of effort…
Everything you said is so true, but i will comment just on this last part.
The thing is that everything is so linked to ISK in EVE, even the Omega time has a link to ISK since you can use ISK for Omega. So ISK is advertised everywhere in EVE then homeopathically a lot of people switch to “I will farm ISK” mode. What scares me is that there’s people who are doing that for 10-15 years.
If notoriety was a currency in EVE then people would farm that.
Eve has never been about a controlled environment. Everything has to be spread across a massive Universe to allow pilots to participate. The closest you’ll get is SiSi. CCP would have to change the base code to make this work. That’s just not realistic. Sorry to burst your bubble.
After taking a nice little walk while thinking about this, I think the answer is this arena needs a ladder!
There needs there to be a graduated ladder with the winners being placed with winners, and losers placed with losers until everyone tends to win about 50% of the time.
Star Craft’s tournament ladder is a perfect example of something like this. I don’t know how hard it would be to program this and assign everyone an arena ladder score, but if the people who win all the time are lumped together, so the fights were competitive, it would go a long way to stopping newb griefing in the arena, while still giving people a chance to practice PvP in a safe feeling place.
There does not need to be any prizes, or such for this, but if the winners of the different gradations could be listed in the concord billboards every now and then, it would likely spark a huge amount of competition.
I like the idea of everyone getting to pick a generic t1 built frigate to fly, have one each of the three basic frigates.
What do you think @Altara_Zemara? Would a ladder competition be an ok format for your arena?
I like the ladder idea…but then I also like Arya’s idea of having a class of free noob ship that can only engage with others of its kind and be otherwise invulnerable, and the noob then has the option of the arena.
But the primary goal is to get the noob used to ship loss. I think the main problem for noobs is they often have so few ships that they become risk averse…and thus just don’t gain any experience. The arena gives noobs a risk free ( in terms of ISK ) place for experimenting.