Sounds just great to me. Second this idea.
Yes, however, for people that might be interested in the lore… what this and the removal of the “description” tab does, is remove a point of contact with the lore.
Previously, during the character creation, you’d select a bloodline. “Deteis” say. Okay, so you’re a Deteis. big deal. Then you get ingame, and look up other characters as you encounter them, notice someone has a radically different portrait, check their description, they’re a Civire. Hmm. You ask people what the difference is between Civire & Deteis, eventually you get pointed to the fiction portal, or one of the player-maintained resources, and find the lore, and can continue reading it, if you find it of interest.
With this thing, it is reduced to picking Type 5 Face. You look at other characters, you see that they chose Type 4 Face. Someone looks radically different with face tattoos and stuff ? Oh, they picked Type 11 Face.
There’s no contact with the lore at all.
The only way that newer players would even know that the face types related to the different home worlds or planetary regions that the different kinds of people originally came from, is if one of the older players happens to tell them.
(Face types are 1.achura, 2.amarr, 3.brutor, 4.civire, 5.deteis, 6.gallente, 7.intaki, 8.jin-mei, 9.khanid, 10.ni-kunni, 11.sebiestor, 12.vherokior)
It’s one of the stranger aspects of CCP’s corporate behaviour, in my opinion - the EVE lore and art style, is the major IP asset of the company, and yet they treat it with such disregard. If the EVE IP doesn’t matter to CCP, then… who does it matter to ? 
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Speaking of character stuff, CCP don’t appear to be hosting larger character portraits anymore, biggest I can get from the forum cdn is 360x360.
Seems like this is exactly what their intention is. In the nascent brave new post-nation world, any ethnicity-related references are no longer politically correct. The origins must be forgotten for good.
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First, it doesn’t say that none of the decisions matter. It only says that your gender doesn’t matter. Of course, that, and the removal of an inconsequential choice has improved things. But, CCP still needs to dump players in the same starting system, and say that starting race doesn’t matter because there are no progression restrictions as an omega.
Second, allow me to clarify my initial point. Yes, players can inform themselves. The problem is that players will sometimes stop to inform themselves, and then get distracted by something else and never come back. Sending players who have not yet been hooked out of the game and to Youtube or elswhere is not a good idea. And this just isn’t like… my opinion… man. It all ties into the idea that humans have limited attention, and that you need to actively fight for it. And, if you’re looking for a real life example of how sending people outside of the game to look for answers can be a bad thing, see my personal anecdote with Divinity Original Sin.
Third, the people who get tripped up by the character creator are not necessarily idiots, and even if they are complete knuckleheads, that still wouldn’t matter. You seem to think that you need to be smart to play this game. Well, I know a few guys that prove that is straight up a false assumption. The only things you need to play Eve are willingness to fail, and the determination to keep getting back up no matter what.
In summation, (1) uninformed choices can send people outside of the game to do research -which is considered a bad thing in the attention economy. (2) Your assumption that only stupid people get tripped up by the character creator is false. (3) Your assumption that intelligence is required to play this game is false. (4) Stop being so elitist. This a video game, not the admissions board to harvard or some ■■■■.
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What the heck is this non-sense? You are supposed to inform yourself about virtually anything these days before you commit to or buy something. Informing yourself about a game is literally among the most important things to do before you waste money on it. That is why reviews, lets plays and so on exist. It is literally the best idea to do before you buy into EVE or anything. Who would possibly and reasonably say otherwise and be considered credible? Your entire premise for “attention economy” and “limited attention span” is wrong here.
- Making uninformed choices is almost impossible with a game like EVE, which is so old and has a myriad of easily accessible info material available just a few clicks away. You can search stuff and entertain yourself – even with misleading CCP provided information – while you download the game.
- Getting tripped by something is not the same as getting overwhelmed by choices. Besides, the char creator cannot trip or overwhelm any logically thinking person because it literally tells you that your choices have no gameplay impact and are only there for flavor.
- If that was my expectation, I would have said so. I said “incompetent people” not “dumb people”. There’s a semantic difference there and you should know that since you love to throw around definitions (albeit often the wrong ones in the wrong situations).
- Elitist? Me? Stop making me laugh. If that what I expect people to do is elitist, then the entire world is elitist and therefore I am not elitist anymore because it’s all normal. Virtually the entire economy and internet economy and digital entertainment hinge on your informing yourself before you do something. That is why there are reviews, evaluations, lets plays, insights, blogs, articles and many more things available to give you information about a thing you are about to use, buy, borrow, get, want to gift and so on. There is nothing elitist about anything I expect from people.
Not only that, the entirety of EVE’s ecosystem hinges on you to inform yourself about virtually anything outside the game, be it missions, DEDs, industry, PVP combat, PVP fittings, PVE fittings, corps, alliances, unfriendly characters in your system, system stats. Looking stuff up outside the game at all stages of playing EVE is a cornerstone of the eve experience.
As for that point about Harvard. I bet that Harvard does not have such strict admission restrictions and background checks as many corps in EVE demand from their applicants. It is outlandish to expect people to not to inform themselves even a tiny little bit about what they get themselves into. Pandering to the notion of doing something in an uninformed way (as CCP is pushing EVE to, if your irrational points are indeed true) is the definition of a stupid idea.
Well, this is confusing to say the least. The idea behind it may be good and it may end up being an improvement… when it works right AND consistently… which currently doesn’t…
Believe it or not, I didn’t have any alpha accounts in addition to the 4 omega ones I regularly play with, and I wanted to create a few, just in case they might turn up being useful some day.
So I figured I’d like to create male and female chars for each of the 4 races. That’s a total of 8 chars, for which I need 4 accounts.
Man, am I glad I saw this thread right before I started doing it…
First problem I encounter is I don’t know what I’m creating anymore. I might easily end up creating a Caldari char when I wanted to create a Gallente one.
But it gets better…
Two of the NEW accounts I created make me have to use the new character creator. The other two use the old one. There is no explanation for the discrepancy and no way I can see to make an account using the new version to use the old one or vice-versa.
WTF?
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I think it’s great that CCP is streamlining the new player experience, in this case the character creation flow.
It’s a good thing that players now don’t get distracted with choices that seem to be meaningless later on, such as making the portrait (as you can change your portrait at any time later on), or choosing bloodlines.
However, I think it’s a terrible choice to detach the look of the character from the bloodlines. Bloodlines or races don’t have any real impact on the gameplay, but it does show lore of the game; it makes the universe feel more ‘real’, when I recognise someones face or clothing as fellow Gallente.
Now all of this is gone. Random faces are random faces without story. Random clothes have no background anymore, tattoos lost meaning.
Please don’t go through with this CCP.
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Hey everyone o/
Wow this thread went places in a day.
It looks like this wasn’t something that was intended to go live at all - seems it was something in-development that accidentally slipped into the live build from what I’m hearing. I’ve flagged this to the teams internally that this went live and it’s being looked into now. Will update you on what comes out of that.
Update:
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Thank you Aurora 
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I did say that though it didnt effect me, I understood it affected others.
Same as when I said that bios should be mandatory but bloodlines were irrelevent when looking up Show Info on another character; just my opinion and I get that others like it the way it was.
Either way, CCP should have had the forethought to know people wouldnt like it, and could have engaged before rolling out at least.
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Thank you for letting us know.
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Would have engaged if we had any idea it was going live 
But this seems more like it was something in development that wasn’t intended to go out.
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No its cool, I didnt see you had replied when I wrote that, and your reply makes things clearer. Contacting us is always appreciated, even if it seems otherwise some days 
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Did you just pull a Brisc? I think you just pulled a Brisc.
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No, I stretched properly before doing exercise as normal?
Please tell me Brisc Rubal isn’t a muscle in your body… hint hint wink wink
(Brisc responds before reading. He was telling everyone to calm down because “this isn’t on TQ” when in fact it was - inadvertently)
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Yeah. Once it was figured out what this thing actually was, I was okay with it. It’s a neat option for people who are invested in the lore, to create different character backgrounds.
When people first spotted this, it looked like it was random, which combined with the lack of documentation or notification, was received poorly.
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Only as implemented, it is not.
- You cannot still create someone who went to RMS, looks like an ethnic Khanid, and wears Minmatar-style clothing. Because if you select the Khanid-looking FACE TYPE X, your clothing options change to the Khanid options, too.
- Apart from maybe 50 already invested visually-oriented lore nerds, you will not know you are making a Khanid-looking character, and so new players are not in fact creating background, they are just creating random stuff that pleases their OOC eye. Basically kills background stories like that, other than for the maybe 50 people who can remember each races visual looks from the old version…
The idea is good. Implementation needs work.
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I totes believe you. Wink wink, nudge nudge. 
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