I find it interesting, a fairly quick scan of the thread shows me …
No one mentions, using players to help the new players. Teachers? Mentors? Corp Leaders…?
I have remained all these years, because I was lucky and had a group of senior players who were available to answered my questions, but did not tell me ‘how’ I must play the game. I enjoyed the learning and exploring the environment. The game had a sense of wonderment.
Mike’s Magic Bus is one of the best items of player generated content I have seen in assisting new players.
CCP has been giving us useful teaching tools recently, the pointer window is fantastic. Please, continue to add more.
CCPFolks… keep throwing it at the fan… We, the teachers, will keep trying to use it.
Also a short video explaining to new players about ganking , as CCP always says it’s a part of the game (which I’m ok with ) so then must be the understanding and techniques to defend against it .
I know it’s a touchy subject but it’s only because people lack information about what’s happening to them and why they lost their lovely mining ship to what appears to be a group of ass hat’s.
Things are only scary when you don’t understand them and that’s where a lot of the anger comes from .
That said I have seen many older players hauling cargo die and not really understand what and why it’s happened.
We try and educate as many as we can. (anti-gankers) why we are fighting these pirates of high sec but the attitude of many to brush it under the carpet is not helping
A short video could help both sides and stop the loss of new players to ignorance and frustration.
Hmmm… not bad, however you already had that stuff. http://wiki.eveonline.com was a good resource and you have chosen to delete it.
Maybe a restore of all that information would have been a good source for more content
Because you’re confusing “roleplay” with “playing a role”
Everyone is playing a role but not everyone is roleplaying, and RP is not the main focus in any MMO, all the lore does is add a backdrop, most people aren’t interested in actually engaging with it outside of the few choices they make when it comes to character creation
You aren’t going to convince people to take part in things that realistically speaking have zero actual impact on them or the gameplay itself, sure it changes the “story” but most people aren’t really playing EVE for its story, i get you RP types seem to enjoy pretending to be whatever it is you pretend to be but for the most part you could replace all the NPC factions with a different coloured square and most people probably wouldn’t notice or care
Vorcypherous.
The issue here is that people often don’t realise they are roleplaying when they are playing a role in EVE.
That is why it is useful to educate folk from the outset that their actions may have profound consequences in relation to known history.
There is little chance of that connection if initiates don’t have access to that library from the outset.
Thats because the two are not the same, despite how much you want them to be
I am playing a role as a insert whatever activity i want to do but this is as a purely passive thing, i’m not going out of my way to pretend to be a mission runner or a miner, they are just roles within a game and i happen to be currently performing one
You can do this without actually being a roleplayer, and you can be a roleplayer without performing an actual role, the two don’t have to cross over in the least
A known history that has no real effects on anything gameplay related, like i get that you guys love the lore “reasoning” for stuff, but it only exists as set dressing, it doesn’t actually have an impact on the gameplay elements and because of that most people aren’t going to care about some pointless power struggle in the background noise
Roleplayers know how to find the information they want and how to find the groups involved, or rather how to ask for directions to said groups, you’re not suddenly going to gain a bunch of people who are deeply invested in the fairly meaningless backstory of the universe, if it doesn’t affect gameplay most people aren’t going to care
Its a fairly safe estimate, it will go the same way as all the other projects they attempted to do but never managed to compare to 3rd party versions
This is both true, and sort of incorrect, I did read them but found a few things were off.
The first one was stories that didn’t work. When an agent that you have never seen opens their conversation with you with something that makes it seem like you have missed something like “as I was telling you” it’s really confusing and you end up thinking you missed something.
Some missions can have empty objectives because some other player got confused and emptied the cans or did something else that causes it to fail.
And worst, for me, was the ones that simply didn’t work for no apparent reason.
In my case I got sick of it and stopped doing them, ran off to the far side of nullsec, lost my ship (and didn’t even know it was gone or why my hud had less stuff in it) and explored a huge amount of space in my pod not even knowing what a pod is. Suddenly I was flying an egg instead of a ship. The next thing I knew there was an almost naked lady floating in space, I thought I had achieved something great and wound up back in my home station not knowing it was my home station. Off I went in my pod again, zooming around looking at stuff and warping to everything in the overview… Including “Unknown Wormhole” which I promptly dove into YAY! Also BOOM, Sleepers or Drifters found me pretty quickly when I went zooming into one of their sites and suddenly: almost naked lady floating in space. Again.
That was all on day one, on day two I got into another ship and didn’t really understand how (obviously hitting clicking led me to board my Corvette, but this later led to the wonderful discovery of autopilot. Back into my pod having no idea whatsoever of how I got there or that some other player had blown me up.
At some point someone challenged me to a dual, I said ok and then, not knowing how to find them flew off to look at the sun or something…
To me none of this was a problem exactly, but it didn’t help me learn anything, I couldn’t fly my ship properly, I had no idea what I was doing or what to do next, and the tutorial stuff was mostly in my way since I was ignoring it due to it seeming disconnected from reality. I was far more interested in exploring (not in the “doing exploration” sense, but really exploring.
Much later I resumed the tutorial stuff, equally confused, but a little more determined, this led to asking all the same questions in Rookie Help they answer a hundred times a day, and also led to someone very cool, who wasn’t a spammer, inviting me to their corporation, I said yes and they helped me a lot with direct instructions about all sorts of stuff, much of which I didn’t understand till months later.
Anyhow, with all of the broken stuff, lack of context, and the staggering complexity of Eve and it’s UI, the tutorials and career agent missions were a bit of a hindrance mostly, at least for me.
Later I did finish most of it, and much later did them again (with a new character) and found that the problems I encountered the first time were quite real and that if a new person was going to get anywhere they needed to either be an experienced gamer (I’m not, Eve is one of the first video games I’ve ever played) or get help in a big way from other players.
Being that EVE at its core is a PVP game that is an understandable statement but at the same time there is nothing wrong with adding, or expanding on, other features, play styles and depth of lore.
I would suggest that there are a lot of folks who would welcome it and it would attract or keep different/more players who currently ignore the game or who quit (early) because of the lack of, let’s say, fluff content.
Different people have different drives, likes, dislikes and reasons to start/stop/keep playing.
You know what would be nice? If relevant videos, wiki articles and blogs were linked at each step along the way of the tutorial so that people can educate themselves more thoroughly while they travel to another place or wait for a skill to finish training. Sadly, this would require actual work from the developers and community developers and more engagement with the community to figure out relevant material and implement it ingame in a usable fashion.
You’re not wrong.
But you appear to be attempting to further distance ignorance from knowledge.
This is not the battleground for it. Perhaps the CSM elect is.
And i never said there wasn’t, but at the end of the day there isn’t much point trying to ram the lore down peoples throats and those who are interested in the lore do know how to find more in-depth articles regarding it, i’m not saying don’t add a section about the basic lore to it but if this is aimed at newbros then you’re better off focussing on information that is actually relevant to them, knowing that the amarr hate the minmatar doesn’t teach them anything about how to play the game given that those standings have little to no effect on things for new players
I doubt a lack of fluff content is actually the driving force behind the vast majority of players leaving, complexity will likely be highest with a lack of RP content falling way down the list
Indeed, but the RP community is a tiny fraction of the playerbase, they will always be a minority in MMO’s because the vast majority of players are here for other reasons, mostly gameplay ones
The NPE is always in need of an overhaul, my main “concern” would be in people having to keep leaving the game client in order to look something up, for a new player thats probably going to annoy them, i’ve learned after all these years that playing in windowed mode is the easiest way to access resources but for a new player that snot going to be obvious
Its not that complicated really, it just means going over the NPE and providing links, issue is most of those won’t work ingame so it will just be a mess of links to external web pages, now, this is actually easier for things like the steam version because of the steam overlay so people don’t feel they have to leave the game in order to read something, but alas the standalone version doesn’t have this sort of feature
We used to have a barebones ingame browser which was (validly) removed due to security concerns, it was also extremely limited in terms of what it could render so nothing modern really rendered there anyway, so i’m not suggesting we bring back the IGB because that would cause more issues than it resolves in the long run
What I would like to guess is that this will be coupled with more direct instruction, a tutorial runner only help chat channel would be good and “forced” PvP in the form of dueling. @bluelysian has been trying to get this to happen for ages and has, in one way after another been rebuffed over and over again.
Rookie help is good but it’s an insane flood that new people have a hell of a lot of trouble keeping up with. It’s also gotta ton of spammers, trolls, and strangely enough moderators that make it worse by halting any and all conversation they don’t like. CCP picked some real winners for that, a question and often does lead to conversation, (and even joking around) and some of the ISD people are total snotgobblers about it.
Actively hindering people from learning stuff, especially in something as complex and sometimes stressful as Eve is obnoxious, using copy and paste to answer nuanced questions makes the floor of random information a lot less useful and to add warnings for things that don’t warrant it makes it worse.
So… My guess, and hope, is that CCP has learned, I think they should contact people like @bluelysian directly, give them a cluster of either new systems or carve out a chunk of Jovian space, and say “teach these new people to go to war” and give them the resources to do it. Paying them might be wise, volunteerism has its drawbacks.
If I had that kind of instructor in the begining I would have become a monster in my first few months and Zkillboard would stop trying to snuggle with me.
EVE being difficult and very much unlike any other game (which for some reason deters people which I personally don’t understand: “I want to play a new game but it has to be exactly like all the others I played and got bored of”), that is obvious. You stating that there is very little interest in lore and “fluff” is conjecture at best. How could you know this, where do you get these “facts” from? There are lots of games out there with extensive lore (the big guy being the obvious one) where for many it’s at least part of the reason why they play and keep playing.
Personally I always very much enjoyed the interactions between the factions and would have it affect the game to a point where all high sec faction areas are on their own with low sec in between them. Lore can be a driving force or give direction to changes and additions/expansions, a REASON for things to happen.
The whole Trig stuff is a very good example of this, looking in to it all (I just came back to the game, haven’t played in years) it’s just very interesting. Back then we had Caroline’s star and the drifters, it was amazing and very much a long play. That lore background gave it all meaning and made it interesting. Not for everyone, obviously, but for quite a few people.
Someone stating “there’s not really a place for this stuff” is very much ignorant, egocentric and not realising he’s part of an echo chamber.
It’s designed to do both. It is a resource to help people, but it’s still very much a for-profit enterprise.
PA has had nothing to do with any of this. PA’s been completely hands-off, and CCP was a mess long before they were acquired. Honestly, anyone who want to blame Pearl Abyss for CCP being CCP just doesn’t know their history.
Friggin brilliant!
Those systems should also all be faction warfare systems and winning or losing them should be far more important, not just a silly progress bar.
