Exactly. you are proving my point here. Players are so keen on keeping these tools running that they offer up their own free time to support them going forward.
and this isn’t even more the most part some of the major tools. THAT is how much players love these tools, need them and think that they are an essential part of their game play.
CCP wouldn’t remove good gameplay features that people love.
To say that the maintenance cost of integrating more really good features into the game would be so huge that it wouldn’t pay of in new players staying I think is a very dodge argument to make.
CCP talked a great deal about all the pain points that they removed in the new fitting tool that were resulting in players getting stuck and having huge troubles. Most of these features were actually just copied features directly from pyfa.
No, my main point all this time has been to have the most amount of focus on the New Players not veterans. It wouldn’t make much of a difference for veterans if dotlan were integrated or if it was a separate homepage because veterans have gotten used to the tool.
However, for a new player that doesn’t have a strong connection to the game and have many other games to choose from might just quit that day because when he opens up the in-game map it is like looking for an needle in a haystack trying to find out where you are, where you should go and where the trade hubs are.
The in-game map as an example should look A LOT simpler and should preferably mimic dotlans setup.
I hang around a lot in Rookie Help in EVE and questions about where people are, how they get to stuff and general map navigation is very common and something that players are very confused about.
So, the earlier you can get a new player involved with a simple and good feature the longer he will stay. 3rd party tools always puts good features one step further away from new players and if the features of these tools are really good it is in my mind a good investment for CCP to integrate into the game.
Omg I’m dying laughing from this one. Do you really believe this??
Also, if a new player joins a “newbro” corp, then the people running said corp should be responsible for making known all the 3rd party stuff to new players. If they aren’t, then they shouldn’t be begging new people to join just to be .
I’d rather see dev time go to what’s in game and keep the 3rd party stuff separate. CCP would no doubt ■■■■ it all up
I don’t know where you come from but I hang around on the Rookie help chat a lot.
You really have to hang around there and talk to new players in order to see it from their point of view.
Whenever I link stuff like dotlan, eveworkbench, evermarketeer, lazy blacksmith or any of the other really good tools out there they are overwhelmed by the fact that they have played this game for weeks and months and haven’t discovered this yet. Newbies that I’ve helped inside my own alliance also tell me that the tools I’ve to help them find massively improved their gameplay experience.
So all I’m saying is that, if these tools were presented to the player, as part of the normal NPE it would improve the gameplay experience massively.
Now, you can argue all you want about how much work this will be for CCP to maintain but that goes for all new features put into the game, if they have a 3rd party equivalent or not. Ultimately, all features are there to make the game better and to make players stay longer.
It’s hard to know which thread to reply to since they are all very similar, so I picked this one.
I’d honestly go the opposite direction. Personally I wish they had left the fitting tool out of the game.
The reason is this. Unless they are willing/able to make an in game tool as good if not better than the out of game tools, I think they should leave it to the third party tools and instead just promote them better.
CCP has done an amazing job at building a robust API to allow for a plethora of amazing out of game tools. This has 2 advantages. First it allows players with a passion in certain areas to make really cool tools. Second this frees up CCP to do the things for EVE that can only be done in the game.
It seems the main issue you have is that people don’t know about these tools. CCP could do a far better job of touting the rich set of tools available. That we can easily agree on.
You’re thinking so much from a veteran’s perspective right now. I love Pyfa, and I use it much more than the same tool. However, I’m not a new player. I am not someone who will drop off after just a few weeks to a month of playing this game like most new players do.
The biggest problem with eve is still the retention rate of new players and that I believe is to a very large extent connected to stuff like this. 3rd party tools outside the game that new players never get to experience before they leave.
I think you really should spend some time in the Rookie chat in eve to see what I’m talking about here. The vast majority of new players think that the game is all there is. It is natural to think that because the vast majority of other games have most of their tools built into the game.
So I am confident that if you were to remove the current fitting tool from the game the retention rate would take a huge hit since the vast majority of new players don’t use 3rd party tools and 3rd party tools are in no way connected to the EVE UI.
The problem with most of the 3rd party tools and the API is that they don’t have close connection to the actual game since most of them require players to go out of the EVE UI to be able to use them.
What I would like to see as a secondary solution if CCP doesn’t integrate the tools themselves is a “Mod store” where you can subscribe to modifications to the game UI. This is something that many other games have and it’s working wonders for them. For example. Dotlan could just be a mapmode mod. Evepraisal should be a mod that is added under the finance tab and pop up ingame and so on. The closer you can connect the good tools to the players the faster you will get these tools in the hands of new players and therefore keep the retention rate up
No, you don’t know what I’m thinking. Sorry If after 28 years I can’t see what my wife is thinking, I guarantee you can’t see what a mere pixel stranger on the internet is thinking.
My perspective is as an EVE player, who still remembers their first month playing this game. Back then there wasn’t a fitting tool in the game at all. PYFA didn’t exist yet either.
I’m also thinking as a realist. CCP like any company has finite resources and cannot do “everything”.
I have. I also have a son who started playing a couple years ago. So I have a very personal perspective of a recent new player.
I never said to remove it. I wish they had never added it. Now that it is here for better or worse yes it would be bad to rip it out. (still salty about my in game browser and jukebox…)
That isn’t necessarily a problem. The fact that these 3rd party tools are not constrained by the EVE UI is what makes them in many cases superior to what they might be if integrated into the client.
What would be good, as I have already stated, is if CCP did a better job of educating the playerbase about the richness of the API and the tools available because of it.
The TLDR would be yes, I agree that it can be a problem that new players aren’t made aware of the plethora of API based tools. Having new players know about these tools earlier may help retention.
Since new players are not only dropped in rookie chat, but A NPC corp as well, I noticed that there isn’t a “leader” since NPC corps have NPC CEO’s. If CCP could add a MOTD to Corp Chat of the NPCs relating information about 3rd Party tools, that would help some.
@Mike_Azariah you spend a hefty amount of time in rookie chat, do you see the same issues as OP?
The vets in Rookie Chat spend a lot of time linking 3rd party sites. But I am not sure CCP is willing to do the same as that makes them semi responsible for what goes on in those sites.
Some players have made a links page over the years. There is even one in the rookie section of the forums here (or was, I have not looked recently)
As to what the Rockies want and need? They are fighting to try to understand a very complex game with q lot of moving parts and hidden choices. But yeah a corp message for new pilots in the npc corps would be a good thing . . . Maybe if specific devs were willing to make characters for that.
I think OP is also not really taking into consideration at how truly remarkable EVE is plus its a 17 year old game, new players shouldn’t be coming in and be expected to know all the ins and outs of EVE within their first 30 days. My honest opinion, they should get an understanding of how the majority of the in game mechanics work, before they start looking for out of game tools depending on what they are doing in game.
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