Eve is not for everyone, and neither should it be, as Psychotic Monk said over on the old forums, Eve is a contact sport for your brain.
It’s meant to be hard, dangerous and brutal, it’s a game for thinkers and planners, and the ruthless pursuit of power, influence and riches in a virtual universe; or a huge corpse collection.
FTFY 
You’re not wrong, he blew a couple of thousand bucks on the old style PLEX; and it gets worse.
He subsequently got recruitment scammed out of 60B of assets; by the very people that killed him in the first place.
Yes, eve isn’t fair in some aspects. Like, if you fall for a scam, then it’s just tough luck. This is how eve has been since it’s what CCP has decided their game to be. So it’s unfair, in the sense that not every engagement with other players is perfectly balanced. I can fly out in my T1 frigate and get dropped by carriers. Not really a fight I’ll win.
However, that is not to say that a newbie character cannot become competitive and influence engagements.
As for trust in corps, maybe it’s just me who have been lucky. Besides EVE Uni, I’ve only been in nomadic small-scale PvP corps, where everyone have to sustain themselves. So there are no common corp hangars and stuff, since everyone just have their own stuff. Nothing is really shared.
And no one really awox in such corps, since we have enough of a hard time finding people interested in small-scale PvP as it is. So those who are recruited are taken in with open arms.
Let’s steer this back on track. I get that vet players have spent a great deal of time and effort acquiring ISK assets and honing their skills. I also get that some vets to not want CCP to take their power from them, in the form of no pvp zones and such. The topic here is newbie retention. What do the vets suggest, besides grow a tougher skin and take advantage of the P2W features?
Make friends. Talk to people. Be prepared to learn. Accept some loss. Do that and you will be fine in EVE.
CCP could do better with game systems that make more interaction and less penalising for making groups in high sec also, but that’s outside the players direct control.
Personally, I still believe rehauling the PvE systems, especially those newer players tend to check out first (missions and mining). The PvE experience is abysmal compared to other games. So if newer players join and think that is what eve is about. I totally understand why they then quit.
Besides those rehauls, CCP should also really fix their tutorial system/NPE. It should better explain what eve is actually about, so players know what they are getting into.
Don’t trust anyone is too general to be fair.
By all means trust people, just not with anything that you value.
Yeah, if we could start using that phrase instead, then I’m all good.
Aligns well with “Don’t fly what you cannot afford to lose”.
Instead of thinking ‘How can we protect noobs more?’
Think ‘How can we help noobs kill stuff more?’
When we talk about noobs in T1 ships being stomped by T2’s, lets not think how can we protect the noobs from the T2’s, but how we can help the T1’s fight the T2’s.
Same concept with capitals. Same concept with wardecs. Ganking. Whatever…
Lower barriers for PvP, rather than raising.
You made some very good points, you also said “some” loss. I think a lot of players, even new ones would be okay with some loss, it is when some loss approaches total loss, that it becomes a problem. And don’t say “don’t fly what you can’t afford to lose” That is not always an option and it has been my experience that it is something that rich players say to poor players to shift the blame to the victim
The second half of your post is why I said some loss. Though in some cases that might mean going “well putting my billion isk of stuff into an iteron v was silly, back to square one”. As being prepared to own mistakes is important.
But I’m certainly not going to pretend that EVE is fair as a game at the player level, let alone at the character level. There are bad game mechanics, there are bugs. And accepting everything isn’t great either.
The link will probably be removed by an ISD, but I hope you can catch it before they do…
here is your proof that your are wrong about t1 ships not being able to defend themselves…
Back then the only 2 in that engagement, who were not new were the 2 Logistics pilots on the mail.
What the mail does not show: The Cynabal actually had backup by 2 tristans, who stayed on range though and gtfo when the cynabal was about to go down.
The 3 guys in my little gang there, who have been flying dps ships, were all 2-3 weeks old, could not even t2 fit their ships and yet we killed a cynabal assisted by 2 tristans without a loss, just with 5 t1 frigs.
Sure the new guys had the advantage of having someone leading and training them, who has been playing the game since 2003. But still that person (me) was only flying one of the t1 logistics ships in the gang, which a new player can train into fairly quick as well.
The thing that decided the fight there was not my SP or billions of ISK in my wallet. The deciding factor was strategy and teamwork. (Also note that the guy losing his faction cruiser there, was no newbie either… it´s somebody with 2000+ kills in his eve career).
The idea that new players don´t stand a chance against vets is a complete misconception people bring here because they are used to it from other games. While in other games you can send 100 level 1 chars against a max level char and he won´t even flinch it´s totally different in eve.
Here the little ones actually have a chance to win against ppl who have years worth of SP ahead of them and are by far better equipped, if they put in the effort to learn how to actually play the game and to understand the game mechanics.
Now this one kill is just an example I remember from a couple of years ago, and I am sure if you go searching for these kinds of kills you can find plenty of those. You certainly also can find mails of battleships going down solo against a single t1 frigatte, hell if you go back far enough you can find gangs of industrial ships (the haulers like good old badgers) taking on battleships and winning.
New players not being able to compete with vets or not being able to even defeat them in combat is nothing but a myth that the clueless people, who just suck at the game, keep spreading. They can not do it, so of course nobody else can do it.
In EvE dedicated new players who invest the time to learn about the game mechanics, have a much better chance to compete with vets who have been playing for years than new players in any other game.
And in regards to anything else, newbies these days have it so much easier than ppl had it back in 2003.
Here just a few points:
Today new players have:
An actual tutorial and career agents that give you ships worth several millions (compared to "Here is your rookie ship now see how you figure things out)
Specialised ships like the venture they can fly on day 1 (compare to unbonues t1 frigs with t1 mining lasers and a 100 something m³ cargo space)
Much better balanced ships with specialised roles that make them way more effective and a much easier way to progress to bigger ships for better income. (When I started in late 2003 we had frigs, cruisers, industrials and battleships were just only added)
Today new players have a lot more ways to make huge amounts of ISK right from the start (as an example exploration, the amount you can make with that on even on your first day as a new player, took weeks to get together as a new player back in the early days)
Today new players start with a lot more skills and much higher base attributes and did not have to spend weeks training learning skills to speed up skill training to todays levels.
Today you have remaps to optimize your training (compared to back in 2003 were we were stuck with the attributes we started out with)
Today you have Youtube, twitch, all kinds of wikis and other sources of information, you have help channels like rookie help [which is not alyway good I am going to admit, but there are good ppl in there too].
Today you have organisations like Eve University that new players can join and get fast tracked on everything in regards to eve from people with years of experience in the game (compared to 2003: we had to figure out pretty much everything on our own, Youtube did not even exist yet, nobody made extensive wikis which explained all game mechanics in detail, we had no tutorial explaining anything to us at all).
Today there is no need for jetcan mining and since crimwatch 2.0 new and older players have been a lot harder to mess with and are much better protected.
Today you have warp to 0. (Back in 2003 if you wanted to venture into low sec or 0.0 even maually warping was only possible to a minimum distance of 15 KM, which means you either had to create your own bookmarks for warps directly to gates for every gate in every system you frequented, or had to get the bookmarks from other players.
Now I could keep going with the list, but apperantly I don´t feel like writing a complete book about the topic of “How much easier it is to start playing eve, compared to the old days”. And I don´t want to complain about it either. I am totally fine with new players not having to mine in a silly unbonused frigs for 1-2 weeks for hours every day in order to be able to even afford a cruiser.
But for once be somebody who listens to a person who has been playing eve pretty much daily from 2003-2015 (That is when I pretty much stopped because EvE got boring, I just check in here once in a while, when I am in a nostalgic mood).
EvE has not become harder for new players, it has become easier in pretty much every aspect. EvE also has become a lot more friendly for casual players, it has become safer and ccp added methods that allow players to catch up to older players in skillpoints, they made making money a lot easier and it has become safer and safer (and they did all that trying to lure in more mainstreamers).
Nothing of this has worked though, quite the opposite happened. CCP chased away all the creative people who liked the harsh universe. People who did not want things to get more and more convenient, the old core playerbase that would spend hours just escorting freighters and who were willing to work together, to achieve something as a group, rather than todays players who only care for their personal profit and don´t give a rats ass about the group they are a member of.
Step by step CCP changed the game into the direction certain people here on the forums want to keep driving the game and none of the things ccp changed in order to get more mainstreamers worked to attract and keep more players. No they alienated their old playerbase continously and after years and years of slow, but steady growth of the playerbase (while other games from the time of eve alraedy died or were losing subs eve was still growing) CCP kept making changes that gradualy pushed out the dedicated players, who really made the game interesting.
And that is where CCP went wrong, making the game less hardcore and more casual. Nerfing player interaction on every corner and making a lot of things more convenient and moving group activities to solo semi afk grinds is what caused the player numbers to collapse.
I’m not too surprised you won that fight, i agree that teamwork makes a big difference and I’m sure that there are many examples like that, however i am will to bet there are many more examples of the opposite. I have talked to players that talk about when you could double or triple and Iteron almost forever due to the large amount of cap batteries it could hold. Hell, i fought off a Cynabal in a Prophecy with a mix of meta and T2 modules a couple years ago. I didn’t kill it, but i made it run. However this thread is about now, not a few years ago
Lowering subscription cost would’ve been a good move to draw more players a while ago but now it’s risky .
Also alot of games that wanted to draw more people in upon going after the free to play model either optimized their game for lower end PCs or reduced some of the eye candy general thought process here being that f2p players wouldn’t have alot of money invested in a PC.Unfortunately CCP just does what they want and wonders why far fetched ideas don’t hype up an old community that had to watch milions of dollars squandered away on failed side projects.
People won’t engage you now unless they know for sure they can win.They’ll stay docked if there’s the slight chance they’ll lose or they’ll dogpile on top of you to whore on your killmail . Back then people took risks because mentally was more along the lines of you went out exploring and encountered other players and wondered if you could best them in a fight.Nowdays you see them from 10 jumps away and nah man we won’t fight them they got 4 logi we only got 3 let’s ping for more guys so we got a decisive advantage if they fight we kill them and pad our precious k/d on zkill but if they leave we win also cu we can go back to farm in peace
Checkout the zkillboard stats for solo kills of these three T1 frigate ships. Notice how the only ships destroyed solo by a T1 frigate are other T1 frigates? People love to post how newbies are just flying their T1’s wrong but it’s clear from the stats these ships cannot win solo fights against bigger targets, nor are they meant to.
I do not expect that. “Only fly what you can afford to lose”. If I follow that rule I can only fly T1 frigates. If I only fly T1 frigates I’m at a disadvantage in 95% of encounters. It makes it very difficult for new players to do anything when anyone in local can easily blow you up.
It would be nice for more areas where new players could fly around with more evenly matched ships. Faction Warfare is like this! When I’m in a novice plex I know I have a fair fight against anyone else who warps in. Having more areas in game that severely limit ship types allowed in would be a nice stepping stone for beginners.
That is a lie. You even posted the evidence to that yourself. It did not even take me a single minute looking at the links to find solo kills of faction frigs, destroyers and even a cruiser being defeated solo.
And bigger ships are probably rare, because killing them solo often just simply takes to long to chew through the tank, before somebody jumps in on the fight. But I have seen it happening in the past, given that the firg pilot does have enough time to chew through the enemy ship and has the right setup to neutralize the targets tank.
Solo killing bigger ships in t1 frigs is quite possible, but rarely something new players will accomplish as they most likely wont be fitted the way they need to be fitted to pull it off and also most likely lack the experience to do it right.
However nobody forces you to go around solo trying to fry bigger fish. Go with 3-4 t1 frigs and you can take down pretty much anything up to battleships, even if you are not a pvp expert.
To be honest, most of the problems with eve is related to the mentality of the playerbase, and that includes failure to make new players stick. There’s only a couple surefire ways to make eve better:
CCP needs to beef up their community support team again and try to establish a healthier relation with the playerbase. They’ve taken a few good strong steps in the right direction with this recently, with Hilmars AMA standing out the most. But still, most players know who CCP Falcon is, but as far as they are aware he’s the only one working for the company. More work is needed.
New player experience. Tricky one, there have been so many iterations and none of them have really landed in a big way. But without a doubt the current “tutorial” is a few miles in the wrong direction compared to the last one. Imo the best bet for this is to get a variety of players input in to design a new one, and revamp the UI to be a bit more intuitive, because I don’t think they really understand where it’s falling short. Many players would be more than happy to take up the challenge.
Dramatic balance changes in nullsec are needed to reduce “bittervetism” in the playerbase. The pendulum of balance in this game swings wildly between “blob strength” and “small group strength” over the years. Right now it’s further into the blob strength side of things than it has ever been, which is bad enough by itself, but they have to take careful measures in dialing it back because if they move too fast too soon then they risk causing essentially a mass exodus of nullsov players. But basically, supercoalitions have more projection ability, protection, power, safety and as a result numbers than they have ever had. This is a very difficult thing to balance because such a large part of it is in player mentality. Changes need to be made to make it harder for large groups to live in a small area, as well as for a large group to defend themselves effectively over wide areas, and it needs to be done in a way that’s not ■■■■■■■ up the game for both types of players. Changes to ansiblex gates and jump fatigue, combined with a major overhaul of space value (especially anomalies and their spawn mechanics) and a complete fundamental rework of citadel/upwell structure damage mechanics. Citadels are too difficult to kill in terms of times and timers, gives them hugely inflated potential as both an offensive and defensive tool, yet too easy to kill in terms of on grid fighting, with concepts like boosh ravens rendering both the citadels and defense efforts irrelevant, making it more effective to simply drop 20 of them to burn the enemy out over timers than it is to actually defend any. It’s a fundamentally broken and shitty mechanic.
That is not argument to justify price of 15$ per month.
That is Starcraft, not Eve.
They do not want coopeation they just want VALUE FOR MONEY, they will give 15 $ per month for SOMETHING not for “player created content” ( whatever it is … )