Over and over they’ve said “EVE has trouble retaining players. There’s a huge dropoff early on.”
They’ve also consistently pointed out that no, ganking is not the cause, very few newbies get ganked, and the ones who do are actually more likely to stick around than the ones who don’t.
So they decided to implement a safe space without ganking.
I don’t know if they’re blind or something. Newbies are quitting EVE early because PvE (or more specifically, mining and missions; abyssals, hacking, and burners can be pretty fun) is dead boring, and guess what, the tutorial and SoE epic arc (tutorial+) are both entirely made up of missions with a tiny sprinkle of hacking and mining. Exordium, it seems, does absolutely nothing to fix this.
I think the thing that would help newbie retention is giving them a taste of PvP early. Have one of the career mission agents be “enter the (newbie) proving ground” or “enter this simulated FW plex and fight one of your fellow rookies”. Gradually build up their PvP skills by introducing them to a basic corvette slugfest, then give them a web and a point, then explain playstyles like kiting and brawling, and have them try it out (this can be done with something similar to burner missions, ie against rats at first, but rats that put up a fight and actually try to get away). The current missions, at best, tell you “go use this civilian stasis web against this pirate NPC to prevent him from fleeing!”, and the whole mission ends without firing a single shot, and the target rat is just orbiting a point in space at 50m/s or something anyway. Yeah yeah, “the shipcasters dump you in the FW HQ”, but that doesn’t help if 30+ boring and unhelpful tutorial missions have already made you quit EVE.
Instead of learning to swim in the deepend, you learn to swim by the stairs on the shallow end. That way when PVP does happen, they at least know how to somewhat fly their ship.
Maybe the issue is that EVE is largely boring. Long periods of nauseating tedium intermixed with relatively few actual combat engagements. And those being almost overwhelmingly dogpiles or ganks.
The game is stacked against the average player. The only winning move is not to play…
FC has to do something to try and keep new players. This is a first step. Whether it works or not remains to be seen but at least FC understands that they need to try something in order to keep new players and grow the game beyond the hardcore niche fan base.
There’s also a lot to be said for this. FC needs to innovate and keep the game fresh so that it attracts new players while keeping the current ones satisfied.
You do not learn how to swim near the stairs. Near the stairs the water is shallow and you can stand and walk on the ground. Near the stairs, you pedal and dabble and can’t even get deep enough to start swimming. That’s what the newbie systems of old are for.
You learn to swim in the medium depths and with some assistance, where you cannot stand on the ground but also don’t go under uncontrollably. That is what High sec is for.
Exordium is the shallow end that teaches you that you can stand on the ground if you do something that is beyond your capabilities. This has nothing to do with EVE and teaches wrong assumptions and concepts.
Thanks to Exord, they won’t know better on even worse levels. But that’s fine. CCP gets to extort money out of unfit players for a month longer and then they get even worse reviews and criticism.
If that were true, then there’s no need to implement a ‘Safe Space’… After decades of saying it’s not an issue, do you really think CCP is going to admit it’s actually an issue? No, they’ll never admit it…
Implementing this new ‘Safe Space’ under the guise of making it easier for new player friends to ‘Fleet up’ and socialize after picking opposing Factions is nothing more than a ‘Face-saving’ excuse…
Implementing this ‘Safe Space’ doesn’t address the actual reason for poor new player retention… What it does is increase the amount of time new players spend in the game before actually experiencing the ‘Real’ Eve…
Now according to CCP, the ‘Fear Of Loss’ is the primary reason why new players quit EVE Online…
This new player ‘Safe Space’ basically eliminates early ship loss by preventing hostile PvP engagements, war declarations and ganking, the ‘Real’ Eve… Maybe the thought process for implementing this ‘Safe Space’ is that even after experiencing the ‘Real’ Eve, new players will continue playing due to having invested a lot more time in-game…
Which is it, dead boring or pretty fun?
Doesn’t matter anyway, despite the obvious inconsistency with your statement, PvE content is not the reason…
Pretty fun is inside the parenthetical, meaning it applies to “abyssals, hacking, and burners”, because they can be pretty fun if you don’t go into them as solved content but rather treat them like a challenge and a risk. The semicolon separates mining and missions from the following clause about the PvE which does have a fun factor, which means mining and missions specifically are dead boring. Because they are. Not necessarily so because they are solved content, all of EVE is solved content, but because they are either insanely passive or so undertuned for their intended ship classes they become insanely passive.
Yes it doesn’t make a sense. But you forgot about the massive antiganking propaganda on all platforms and that CCP is listening to this and is nerfing ganking really hard over last 2years.
So this is most likely to cave to that toxic playerbase yet again rather than anything else in my opinion.
What CCP/FC doesn’t realize is that the more you give them the more they cry because they see that it is working…
Give it few more years and ganking will be completely disabled in highsec.
How can new players learn pvp in a space where you can’t even get suspect? And even if you could, I suppose killrights would be still possible to activate, these systems, just like current rookie protect systems will have rules against suspect baiting and if you do that GMs will have a talk with you.
I learned pvp the most in Clellion, career mission hub where I was suspect baiting as 3 months old player. But I was 3 months. And regardless of the age of the players who took the fight (I never checked that) I was told by GMs it is against rules, so I had to leave. Still those 10 fights before GMs found me taught me a lot. More than pvp roams in corporation I joined after.
I can’t believe how many people are advocating for the tired old “throw em in the deep end and let em sink or swim” philosophy. That’s really not a valid method of teaching. But then again they’re not FC management or investors. They have no economic skin in the game. They’re just keyboard warriors gambling with someone else’s money.
You can’t teach people who don’t want to be taught. I’ve spent almost two decades in Rookie Help Chat and the number of times I’ve seen “I skipped the tutorial” would number in the tens of thousands…
I imagine that FC, Google and the other investors would take issue with that statement. Do you really believe that Hilmar and company would rather be pulling in WoW numbers of players and revenue or what Eve’s making now? You guys seem to forget that FC is a business that exists to make money. They do that by attracting new players.
Well, they’ve had 22 years to do it. So, like I said, niche game. EVE is the longest-running, most successful space MMO in gaming history, and it didn’t get there by having a poor business model. It got there by being the ONLY game of it’s kind. Nothing else compares. And if you start to water it down by adding “noob” zones and safety rails, now you’re just another Elite Dangerous or No Man’s Sky…
PvP in EVE consists of being the blob or being blobbed; there are few if any fair fights - even if sought out. This is why most players lose interest in EVE and quit.
