Player Harassmemt, by bumping

Karak

Yes - exactly.

A perfect NPE isn’t possible either of course …

… but IMO it would be relatively easy to improve new player setup a lot. And of course part of setting up is getting to the point they are no worse than a moderately experienced player at identifying PvP risks and either avoiding them, or facing them effectively.

I strongly agree there should be a natural path into learning PvP. Even without the (completely unnecessary) ISK/ship loss constraint, there’s a lot more to learning PvP basics in EVE than in most games. High-end play is more-or-less constant across games (with the same “wetware” and resources, there can’t be a lot of variation in skill), but IMO getting to basic competence in EVE is relatively hard, and (except for e.g. EVE Uni and maybe R vs B (if they still exist?)) there’s no natural way to get over the threshold.

I’d expect this would actually provide more targets for experienced players - but willing targets, who enjoy the “cat and mouse” game (**), rather than reluctant targets who find it boring and a waste of time.

**
or maybe this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coursing
as seen in the Guy Ritchie movie “Snatch”

I always found it extremely puzzling why CCP would steer their new players not into PvP. It is one of the most interesting aspects of EVE gameplay and honestly the only reason why I come back to this game over and over again.

I know there are some people who enjoy mining and running the same mission over and over again, but honestly compared to what other games deliver the PvE experience in EVE is extremely dull, even accounting for the recent additions with resource wars, trigs, NPC miners and FOBs.

CCP seems to invest a lot of their development time into PvE features lately, but it is just getting nowhere. It all feels pretty underwhelming and boring and I can’t blame new players for quitting when they are confronted with that gameplay right from the start.

It may also be a bit of a community problem here. If you read lots of posts on this forums and in the rookie channel I get the impression that most vets think that new players HAVE to grind missions and mine for a couple of years to eventually be “ready” for the PvP aspect. That I find extremely toxic and is in my opinion one of the major forces that drives new players away from the game.

One should never forget that new players are not children. They are gamers looking for a new and exciting game to play, a challenge and entertainment. The worst thing you can do to a person like that is to tell them they don’t have access to those epic wars they hear about but have to grind dull missions instead.

3 Likes

I find the opposite to be true, most of the people I know actively encourage new players to engage in PvP as soon as possible. The rookie channel is a poor place to use as a measure, for the simple reason that most of the people in it are new players, the older players that frequent it use freshly rolled alts to do so; some will encourage new players to PvP, while others will tell them that they need x skills to PvP.

The latter is patently false, a new player can PvP, albeit in a limited fashion, with little in the way of skills and isk if they find the right environment.

For example BRAVE, TEST, Pandemic Horde and Goons are all about empowering new players in order to help them succeed in Eve.

2 Likes

They need to watch this video.

1 Like

I don’t care what your “forum status” view of me is.

I don’t care if you grant me the favor of your response.

2 Likes

This explains a lot.

1 Like

Indeed. It explains at least two things:

  1. Why I sometimes describe myself as a “serial beginner”, “serial rookie” etc to save space.
  2. Why I don’t care when some dimwit uses a vague but ominous-sounding open statement in the hope there might be something in one of my past posts I regret. I don’t make stuff up when I post. Feel free to continue dedicating your time to reading my old posts. It will be good for you.

And yet you argue and troll people who have played for many years.

4 Likes

A smart person would consider what subjects I discuss before saying something like that.

You should read some of my posts before you fumble around looking for criticisms. At least there will be a small chance you’re on topic.

You really should not post any opinion in these forums any more; you’re obsolete.

2 Likes

I was about to call you a whiner, but you have a point regarding the EULA and harassment.
They hide in Public Corps so we can’t do anything in response.
I say make them “suspect” or even better “criminal” in high sec areas for bumping.

You know every now and again I think about coming back read a post like this, and realise the same ■■■■ is going on and nothing has improved or changed and forget about it.

P.S no you can’t have my stuff, the only nice thing about Eve now is logging in and seeing my net worth has gone up before logging out again.

Send me your ISK and I’ll double your net worth.

5 Likes

Another stalker!! Welcome to the litter /lol.

You…don’t know who TEST are? *
image

1 Like

Thats kind of a weird way to put it, but okay.

I mean, you might be a master Tournament winner at Starcraft 2, but if its your first time playing a first person shooter like Call of Duty, chances are youre not going to be very good. One area of PVP prowess doesnt necessarily transfer over to another.

And yeah, I understand what youre saying, and I find it as just a fact of video games.

World of warcraft is probably the most popular MMO in the history of MMOs, but there are people who found it boring. There is always going to be an aspect of grind that would put someone off from a certain game.

No one is saying that “ALL” the people who choose not to stay would have never enjoyed EVE. I dont think theres a single person who actually means EVERY SINGLE PERSON, EVER.

But the difference with other games and EVE, and that youre missing out, is that the so called “End-game content” that most other video games have, doesnt exist in eve, in so much that any beginning player can join in on what every vet is doing.

There is no necessary barrier preventing new players from doing almost anything that a vet can do, nor do we consider the things that only vets can do, as end-game content.

Thats how we know that many, if not most people who left eve, wouldve left eve eventually either way. If you dont like first person shooters, youre not going to like Call of Duty. Theres no telling whether or not you may have enjoyed end-game PVP tournaments, but chances are unlikely.

1 Like

Today a new player was in my system, asking for help attacking a “pirate base”, which I knew to be a Guristas refugee camp. I decided to form a fleet. We were then tethered together, and he did not seem to notice my glowing red aura, perhaps because CCP’s tutorial utterly fails to explain or even acknowledge PvP.

Anyways, I decided to bump him off tether, while he talked about his awesome new ship… however, I remembered this thread, and didn’t want to be accused of harassmemt. Therefore, I fleetwarped him to the sun, where I promptly shot him.

6 Likes

Not weird. Protection against equivocation. I wish it wasn’t necessary, but collectively, this forum is severely “logic-impaired”, so I do what I must.

A lot of people say it here, including the guy who induced the post you replied to. It’s an obvious “faulty generalization”, but it’s still part of the standard “bittervet narrative”. It’s also one of the more toxic parts of that narrative, because it’s a “call to inaction”.
In fact you’re doing much the same thing below, though in the less extreme form the that other guy I was talking to.

You got that from some eccentric claims, which I can summarize with one quote:

This isn’t false, but it doesn’t describe what actually happens. The interesting question isn’t something like
“Can a new player have fun if they join the right nullSec Corp?”.
It’s
“What proportion of new players actually join a high-end (e.g. nullSec) Corp, and of those, how many stay in EVE”?
The two-stage question is essential, or we’d get caught in a “petitio principii” fallacy.

It wouldn’t surprise me at all if new players who joined a nullSec Corp stay in EVE. But if there’s a pre-req not available to most beginners (like the “Goons” old technique (participate in a non-EVE online forum (Something Awful?) forums for a year of two) it’s not correct to draw any conclusion about new players who don’t meet that requirement.

I don’t see where you’re going with your conclusions related to other games. For any given type of game, or specific game within the type, there’s plenty of evidence that some will like it, some will not.

We can conclude (unnecessarily :slight_smile: that not everyone will like EVE.

But it tells us nothing about why EVE has an exceptionally poor retention rate

What does need to be considered is two related questions:

  1. What kind of person tries EVE (regardless of whether they leave or not)?
  2. If those, do a significant proportion of them come to EVE without any understanding of the type of game is, or of its more obvious of its defining characteristics?

The “bittervet narrative” (and, to some extent, yours) only works if the answer to (2) is “a large proportion have no idea, and leave because they discover EVE is the wrong type of game for them”.

II don’t see how that could be true. EVE is 15 years old. Information is readily available (including e.g. the free-fire PvP characteristic, and loss of equipment in PvP). And both the game and its players both have terrible reputations. How many new EVE players wouldn’t learn all this, and decide to try EVE anyway?

The only way the “bittervet narrative” works is if most of the people who try EVE are very poorly informed about EVE, and/or have hardly any online gaming experience of any kind.
Perhaps it was true in 2008, though even then EVE’s reputation was well established and well publicized . But it’s 2019 now - I don’t buy the “most new players are ignorant about EVE” assumption.

  1. Why would I? They’re not relevant to me, nor to anything I’ve posted.
  2. Is this knowledge a requirement for posting on this forum?

(editing for spelling)

Interesting. Freudian slip or simple typo.

Well…TEST is a fairly prominent EvE entity and has been for some time. Not even knowing their name when they have been heavily involved with some pretty major events in EvE for quite a while speaks to your general knowledge of the game you expound upon at length.

2 Likes