It worked better than “here’s a ship, now go mine by yourself in an empty belt where nothing happens until you get bored and quit.”
To be clear, I don’t object to new players having a safe space to learn the basics, nor reject the possibility these NPCs aren’t tuned correctly. I just reject the claim the path to new player retention is keeping new players safe and away from the core game of Eve. That myth is too easy to fall into and has resulted in a piss-poor NPE and lifeless highsec in general we have today. I’ll agree, CCP has taken the easy path and just nerfed most issues around new players instead of adding viable content for new players to start engaging with New Eden, but it’s not like things are harder now.
If anything, they are much easier. But that isn’t enough. Things need to be much more interesting.
In an effort to throw in some kind of constructive alternative, what about announcing in the local region that a newbie system is under triglaivian assault and provide veteran players a means of interdicting that is conspicuous to new players as well?
I think that the practical implementation of such a system would be difficult or impractical, but I do like the idea of getting actual players together to demonstrate the multiplayer aspect of the game inside these systems, and having real live players on hand to perhaps field questions, or render aid in what feels like an emergency situation.
Anyway, I just found the thought interesting, even if it’s just a pipe dream of mine.
Can confirm, if I’d been attacked by Triglavians or any such threat in the simple act of undocking, I would have quit the game before I began.
And for those of you who think well, that person wouldn’t have lasted a week anyway, hi, I’ve been here over a year.
Early impressions are everything. No one’s saying new players need to be coddled. Indeed, I learned the hard way that nowhere in space is “safe,” and it’s actually saved my butt while my bittervet friends who think a 0.7 is safe lost their ships.
Losing your ship because you lost a fight due to not knowing how to apply damage is something that a new player should be frustrated about for a minute, then take a breath, figure out what went wrong, and jump right back in.
Losing your ship because you didn’t see the NPCs and wouldn’t have the ability to fight them even if you did see them is something that, if a player quit EVE and badmouthed the game forever, I wouldn’t blame them for it.
This is something that is done, and that you can also do.
During an interview, Hilmar states the intention of making the new player learning curve less daunting. Having Triglavians on the new player welcome wagon seems counter to Hilmar’s stated goal.
In this Chaos Era free range rookies are the best training targets for pangalactic oppressors in their youth. Look at it from Triglavian rookies perspective for a moment.
Like I posted here - I undocked an alt character from Hedion University in Sehmy (NPE starter system) which had a Triglavian Invasion happening in the very next system to it.
Having them in rookie systems is a shitshow. At least with Incursions they could undock and warp between systems safely. Getting repeatedly blapped on undocks and gates for new players isn’t a recipe for retention.
So where is the problem? System next to starter system is a fair game for all the events as EvE is a living world. Things that happened in Couster recently were probably because of new content or some other “undocumented feature” that CCP failed to anticipate, but it was NOT invasion.
You keep posting/linking your story with overpriced and unreasonable fit to prove your point and then, imo, fail at it when you say you only lost 20% of shields which is nowhere near dangerous, especially considering that you were flying fatter (signature that made targeting and applying damage to you easier for trigs) and slower warping ship. E-war applied to you in the story is of no relevance (to spook readers?), unless it is a web that actually would have helped you to warp out faster - so why complain about it?
That’s what you get when you don’t listen to the warning before entering the system. I hope those silly warnings will be removed one day and make high sec a better place.
Well, last time i checked there weren’t any invasion going in the Couster (unless Agency thingy lied) but there were deaths by trigs on zKB. So there could have been a plethora of issues on top of each other, including but not limited to The Agency misreporting things.
