As usual we get the “kill them all and let God sort them out” types with their knee-jerk “random death is good for new players and is in the spirit of the game, anyone who doesn’t think so is a baby”.
New players aren’t children. They are gamers looking for a decent gaming experience. For the vast majority of players “random death to superpowered (in relative terms) NPCs that don’t even show up on your overview” is not what they call “a decent gaming experience”.
You can make all the stupid excuses you like for why this is ‘actually the way EVE should be’, but the fact is that when someone is new, trying something out, trying to advance, doesn’t even know what his overview is yet… having a Trig lock and nuke him in seconds does not “make him a better EVE player, or push the trash out of the game”. It simply adds one more checkmark to the list of “things I don’t like about EVE” for new players.
Across the MMO genre, players try out new games daily. It’s well known that most games do not retain players past the first few hours. That’s because when players are making their mental checklist of “things in this game that are cool / crappy”, anything in the “crappy” column really reduces the chance of them playing much longer.
Making excuses for CCP to continue to allow sloppy, lazy coding, poor UI, and an NPE that ranges from “boring and repetitive” to “sudden invisible death” doesn’t help anyone. And certainly doesn’t help EVE.
Have to agree. I am all for HTFU and PvP is natural part of the game as that is EVE, but that has nothing to do with someone just learning how to even interact with the game world around them and deciding whether to continue playing the game or not getting destroyed in a way and in a situation he has utter difficulty to recover nor even understand what happened. There is a reason the rookie griefing rule exists.
If they leave the starter system they are free game, if they haul their whole wealth and get sploded it is all on them, but just entering the game, trying to learn how to even fly their ship and getting destroyed where they haven’t even made a bad decision yet (not even taking loot from a yellow jetcan) is just dumb and will make them wonder if this is the first step of the journey then what will await them. Hardcore gamers exist and they might like this kind of intro but the majority of players are not like that.
People who like challenge prefer one where they get punished for their bad decisions not just getting destroyed without anything they could do at their power level, a challenge is something you can and should overcome and when doing so you feel accomplishment, while this can not even be overcome and is not something they could do anything about, and which also prevents them to continue the tutorial missions and learn the game proper before reaching a level where they can actually make mistakes and learn from them or if smart avoid the mistakes to begin with.
Nobody should want to water down EVE nor to not embrace when weaklings quit who never would want to learn, to adapt as they have no place in EVE and better off in a game that suits them, with that in mind this situation has nothing to do with that.
Yes many people started back then when there was no crimewatch and you could be shot at without consequence. I understand some might prefer that but CCP’s intention is not that anymore, evidence by the existance of crimewatch, rookie griefing rule and whatnot, so with that in mind, without wanting to make EVE easy, this situation is complete nonsense to the intentions of the developers, who themselves always made it clear they want better player retention and continuously work on the NPE and initial player experience to make that happen, thus this situation should be corrected and requires CCP’s attention, not because we say so but because they themselves expressed that is their intended goal.
So yeah triglavians should not invade starter and career systems imo.
There are triglavian scouts too completely separate from the invasions. Also there are triglavian conduit anomalies as well though those can be avoided by not warping to them so those should be fine even in such systems.
Edit: Or maybe the invasion despawned by now. Either way…
I’d assume it is/was a new conduit that didn’t have proper restrictions applied and instead of crying on forums “but think of the children” it would have been better (and proper) to file a bug report. Imo
Probably would have been better along with a support ticket too just in case the GMs could handle it even sooner if they have the power to influence such content.
So maybe it is different in today’s theme park MMO’s but all the ones I have had in the past had dangers even around the noob areas that could kill you.
Maybe CCP could program them so that if they detect a week old pilot they can just lock them up and then start a private convo. They could say something like
" Hello capsuleer, I see that you are new. Today is just a warning but if we encounter you again we will shoot to kill".
Step 1: start tutorial.
Step 2: undock and die to NPCs.
Step 3: undock and die to NPCs.
Step 4: undock and die to NPCs.
Step 5: log off, uninstall and count your blessings to have avoided getting hooked to EVE Online.
Bonus: NPCs killing you are invisible on the overview. You REALLY are lucky to have been driven off the game this early, before this kind of lazy incompetent mouthbreathing sh*t looks “normal” to you.
I’ve been playing this game for 11 years now and I can tell you that if one of these Trig invasions had spawned in the newbie system I started in and I was killed (possibly repeatedly) by something I didn’t know of/understand/couldn’t even see on my overview I’d have done exactly what Yiole above me said with the added step of me badmouthing Eve to anyone who would listen.
(Remember the old marketing adage that a satisfied customer will tell 1 person of their good experience while an unhappy person will tell 10.)
Some of you take this “social Darwinism” stuff way too far. At this point CCP needs as many potential customers as they can get to stick around and get hooked on the game. They sure as hell don’t need to be scaring off the newbies by having content meant for more seasoned players attacking them in rookie areas and driving them away.
Sure, I’m all for a proper starting zone. Perhaps these Triglavian things do need to be toned downed somehow to impact less on new players - it’s been a while since I was in such a mindset. But because they explode new players, in-and-of-itself, isn’t a reason to delete them.
A priori, I see no reason to assume more player explosions equals less retention. However, I do see a reason why no player explosions equals less retention. That is a boring, boring game. Maybe it isn’t boring in the beginning for most players and the extra pressure of NPCs isn’t needed or beneficial, but I do remember the NPE back in the day as kinda easy and lifeless.
I hope CCP is monitoring the situation and I see no issue with bringing to CCP attention. But let’s not be presumptuous enough to assume our wants for a video game, or tolerance for challenge, is the same as everyone else’s. And let’s really stop acting like our concern for new players makes us better than everyone else.
News flash: we all love newbros and want more of them to try and stay in the game. We all want the game to be successful. And yes, we all fall into the trap of thinking our likes and wants are shared by everyone else.
Regardless of this kerfuffle, I really hope a complete revamp of the NPE is part of the next expansion, either this winter or latest by the spring. The current one is lacking, in so many ways. But the possibility of losing a ship, even to overzealous NPCs is the least of them. Eve is all about loss, and the activity and energy an Invasion brings to a starter system probably offsets any negative impact they have on retention.
At least, I want to see some numbers before I buy what the OP is selling.
There is a non spoken but definite “but” here. That, along with the liberal use of cutting edge memes, trending internet social theory, and buzz words du jour in your posting in general gives me pause as to what your actual agenda is.
Or are you just a forum chef tossing up another word salad that’s nice to look at but has no substance?
There are definitely some people here who lack the ability to reflect on gaming situations.
They’re the people who “don’t get” how a newer player, killed randomly and quickly by an opponent he almost certainly cannot even see, while losing his ship and most likely everything in it (because he’s new and doesn’t realize he needs to bookmark his wreck), could perhaps become frustrated by this event.
Calling a request to tone down this behaviour “infantilizing” newbros is the height of non-awareness.
But then, the continual stream of “PvP forevah, no mercy for newbros!” on the forums has never been much of an indication of awareness of any sort…
Oh, I get that. But I also get how boring Eve can be.
Eve’s retention rates are atrocious. At least that is what CCP has been telling us. It’s not because the NPE is too challenging - in fact, all challenge has been drained from the NPE over the years. Power creep has rendered the NPCs (with a few notable recent exceptions) meaningless, and the other players have been systematically isolated from interactions with new players. It started in earnest with CrimeWatch 2.0, but has continued over the last 8 years to the point new players can only be interacted with by other players if they choose to, or make a large mistake or shortcut normal progression via PLEX or whatnot without understanding the game.
The reality is the NPE of Eve is boring. It is confusing. It is not engaging. Statistically most players are not being driven away by NPCs (or players) exploding them, but by a lack of anything interesting happening to them during their first weeks in the game.
Against such a backdrop, I am even willing to bet random explosions by NPCs you can’t see along with a backdrop of a other players fighting an NPC invasion will engage more players than… silent mining in a belt or running L1 missions.
But by all means, CCP should improve the NPE. They should make roaming NPCs in highsec influence veterans over new players and make new players have meaningful things to do in the game. But let’s not pretend that new players are children that need our protection or that the game needs less things happening.
Because it doesn’t. CCP may need to dial things in some - in fact the NPE does clearly need a rethink - but they don’t need to gut all content from their game in the name of ‘think-of-the-children’. After almost of decade of wrapping and wrapping new players in layers of bubble-wrap, retention rates have never been lower. I really think CCP needs to focus elsewhere than worrying about shielding new players from experiencing the core game of Eve Online that they signed up to play.
There’s a pretty big gap between “uberNPCs in career systems aren’t a good idea” and “gutting all content from the game”.
It’s the exaggerations and hyperbole of so many forum posters that end up diluting their message. Try to stick to reality, and to facts, and your posts will have a lot more punch.
I totally get that you and @Karak_Terrel are wannabe-PvPers, hanging out in high sec looking for easy targets while remaining almost completely safe yourselves… but seriously - there is more to content creation than saying “newbros should die more to engage them”.
Its that sort of two-dimensional thinking that has crippled CCP’s creativity (such as it is) for years. We need to move beyond that and start working on actually interesting character progression. “Here’s a cheap ship, now go die in it” just doesn’t cut it anymore.
