The difference is seeing “newbies” as a collective group where you, thus, must cater to the lowest denominator by treating them all like babies, no newbie left behind. Or seeing them as individuals who all have their own level of iq, effort and time invested. Who can and should make choices based on their personal situation and likes/dislikes.
I don’t think the first option works, not for long anyway. I think it breeds bad players who can’t think for themselves and who will always require effort and handholding, if they even stay around… EVE should be proud of being a niche game, advertise it, and cater to the “can do” type of newbies. That’s much better as a long term strategy.
Trying to cater to “everyone” is just a short term cynical cash grab where ccp hopes those folks spend cash before they realise the game is not for them and uninstall, it’s not good for the game long term. Look for a main dev who benefits from short term gains and you’ve found the one who pushed it.
IRL I was a teacher for 30 years. I tend to work to and with the ability of the student. I am fairly sure I do not treat all newbies the same and that I try very hard not to forget to explain basics and skips ahead based on my own knowledge. This is sort of ingrained into me over the decades.
But that is not what eve is doing. Eve is doing “everyone who clicked this gets to train all these skills for a week long and you don’t even know what the skills are for. Don’t think, don’t ask any questions because you have no choice in this matter, do as you’re told”.
It’s very tempting to bring RL (politics) into this because the similarities are so very evident. “Not enough new students pass the entry requirements for universities, how do we solve this?”, “lower the entry requirements”. WHAT?!?!?!?!? It’s the modern disease which shall not be named.
Hi Mike, this is my proposal - the magic 14 is designed for pilots to cover everything as a jack-of-all trades. However, my experience talking to people in rookie chat, etc. is that a lot of new players are interested in more specific areas when starting off. Also, the skill learning system in general favours newer players specialising over generalising, as that means they reach parity faster in their speciality.
Let’s quickly go through them all and what they do:
CPU Management 5% bonus to ship CPU output (starts at 4)
Now let’s look at a few archetypes of new players:
Explorers - Mostly wants the navigation skills from the magic 14. Will get far more value from training the scanning and relic/data analyser skills than the rest of the M14: doesn’t really need the tank skills to 5, doesn’t really need the fitting skills to 5.
Venture miners - Gets some use from the fitting and shield skills, but they’re not hard needs. Will get a lot more value getting levels of their mining hull and mining skills up. Only needs to M14 skills to get baseline tank modules and capacitor levels.
Haulers - tank skills and agility skills are a must, and fitting is useful, but capacitor and targetting are mostly useless.
Mission runners - wants good skills with the racial tank type, fitting, capacitor. Decent targeting and navigation skills are nice too, but not deal breakers. Will get a lot more value from training up their racial ship hull and weapon system skills than most of the M14 level 5s.
Faction Warfare frigate pilots - FW 1v1 fights are tough, so getting most of these to 5 is impactful. Targeting range and warp drive cap usage are not really necessary though.
Personal note: my experience as a newbro was that I skimped hard on the magic 14 and went more into getting the necessary ship hull / exploration / mining skills to support the mission running / exploration / gas huffing I did as a newbro. Looking back I think that was a good decision and saved a lot of time getting into the content that drew me to the game.
My suggestion is this - flip the relationship with the magic 14 on it’s head.
Focus on the key specialist skills needed to pursue the career in Eve that interests you, and only add on the necessary M14 skills that have relevance. Leave the rest of the magic 14 to later (especially level 5s) - as a newbro it’s better to do content sub-optimally than not at all.
I wish I could bet with CCP that changing the NPE drastically by moving the start area to a pocket space not connected to any space and into this pocket space no aggression, would lead EVE to epic levels.
So, newbies start, learn and choose where to be transported:
Some NS NPC station;
LS / HS station;
Take the exit into some WH and good luck, make a run for it;
All of this with ONE agent giving all types of mission and tiny skill injectors so the newbie could train the next lvl 1 / 2 in their graduation career, the ultimate mission is a fully fit faction ship with named T1 modules, nothing fancy and a good luck.
amarr is made to middle range , since EVE is 90% short range and long range well… you know were im going lol
and yes tracking do suck
and the capacitor is empty
and yes is NOT noob friendly … it gets good with top skills
thats why i recommend to train the small ships and them the cruisers
no need to train for battleships anyway because besides the nightmare they are all outclassed by the others especially the galente ones , talking about PVP , they are kinda good for PVE or F1 money ing
in the old days a fleet of apocas was almost invincible , but now they just bring N+1 for ever … they say its all about the application , yes it apply very well in a shitty weird range
that said , amarr have the optimal range close to max range and the damage is surprisingly good at that midle range , better than other races , so if you can maintain the dude at that sweet spot he will have a nice surprise , since most people dont know how to fight amarr very well and the damage is crazy and you do track using the prop and web and scram that is kinda mandatory to have said range
Not just that but its mostly optimal which means the tracking is excellent at range, compare that to mini who are in falloff and only get 50% of their tracking inside falloff.
Amarr can’t brawl imo, alergic to neut’s so getting under 7km is strange.
Amarr is EVE on hardmode and it requires an active playstyle, laserships generally don’t fit the meta (especially not for solo) but you can make them work just fine, it just takes more experience and understanding.
lot of opinions here. I was tricked into thinking the “magic 14” were necessary, so i blew my free million skill points on them, and then when i bought plex to buy skill injectors, trained more. I’m now at 3.4 million skill points, and can only fly a couple of ships. Like, cool, I have the maximum cpu for a ship, but i can’t hardly fit enough to use up that cpu, or power grid. I have crap weapon skills, and I use weapons every day.
I really wish there were people to counter the rookie help channel advice, because I took all their advice and thought i was learning. Then I joined a corporation of people that actually know what the hell they’re talking about and I’m trying to play catch up, as an alpha, to fly or shoot anything and it actually matter.
When I subscribe next month, maybe i’ll get more use out of these secondary skills, but that also means I have to spend valuable paid time to learn basic weapon and ships. Not even including the tier 2 frigates and destroyers.
So, in short, I guess my first real lesson in eve online was to stop listening to advice from rookie help channel.
You’ve not tried different play styles, ships, ship factions, weapons. You’ve not sampled enough of the game to find your niche, you’ve not actually played. All you’ve done is train boring skills that don’t necessarily do anything for you other than perhaps “give 3% more stuff” and you were made to believe you need those skills to get anything done so you did just that, waiting and wasting time doing nothing, getting bored and disillusioned.
And now that you have spent/wasted time on those skills you go “ok, so what do you actually do in this game”, if you even got that far and haven’t uninstalled yet.
Magic 14 and long term skills plans are for alts, for people who are already invested and for alliances who just want another standardized clone soldier that can fly doctrines. It’s NOT for actual newbies who don’t even know if they’ll even play tomorrow or in 5 days, those players need to be able to try and sample new stuff to figure out if they’d even enjoy the game, get dopamine hits from unlocking and trying new things, reaching short term goals. Finding stuff they enjoy to then get invested in to, perhaps then they start to think long term and see the use for most/some/all of the 14 skills.
