It’s also poorly designed because anyone who pays attention to the mission in the slightest knows it’s a net profit.
“Get given ship for free, put no modules on ship, insure ship for maximum, get blown up, PROFIT!” is not a realistic expectation to be packaging for new players. I would say that ship combat and loss tutorials for new players need a redesign, except that they were never actually designed in the first. So a pre-design, perhaps.
There’s 2 different missions in the Advanced Military Career Agent series designed for ship loss. In the mission you’re talking about, most new players wouldn’t know about buying max insurance. In fact, none of those Agent Mission Briefings say anything about purchasing Insurance.
The reason those missions give out ships first is so the new player can get use to ship loss and more importantly, to continue the series without getting interrupted and sidetracked with spending time trying to replace the ship.
The Advanced Military Career Agent mission series is just a basic overview on various aspects of PvP content - 10 missions consisting of 3x Combat, 2x Combat with ship loss, 1x Speed run, 1x Remote Repair, 1x Warp Disrupt, 1x Stasis Web and 1x following FC instructions.
The only thing that’s not included is Pod loss. However the Agent Briefing in the mission you’re talking about - Angel of Mercy - does mention that after the ship explodes to quickly warp your Pod out of there.
Wow. SO MUCH profit. Seriously? I think you’re missing the point. Forget the tutorial. It could use a lot of improvement, but it’s not the real problem, nor has it anything to do with the solution.
People don’t like to lose their ships because of the grind. There’s too much of it. And CCP wants to make it worse (which, in the short term, translates to more PLEX sales, but does not end well) by reducing the “ISK faucets”.
If we want to see an increase in PvP AND new player retention, we need to look elsewhere: what is every other ■■■■■■■ game doing these days? They’re giving people lots of action. EvE is offering what to its new players? Long waits, boredom and frustration? YOU - assuming you’re a veteran, can’t be bothered to check it - can make hundreds of millions krabbing or whatever the ■■■■ you do, but new players are stuck making jack ■■■■. The game needs to evolve if it wants to cater to a new generation.
Lots of possible solutions have been discussed, two of which I personally like: feed cookie-cutter PvP frigates as rewards for X; or increase the return value of insurance payouts (make it cover a percentage of the total cost of the loss, for instance).
Cut some of the grind right off. People will care less about losing ships, there will be more content, thus more people playing the game.
Well, that make sense in theory.
The thing is, in practice, tons of people do not like to loose, especially in PvP, and very quickly abandon as soon as it happen, even in games where you actually loose absolutely nothing on death.
I don’t think the ISK aspect change this tendancy that much.
Honnestly, ISK is not that much of a problem if you are a bit clever, both with your incomes AND how you spend your ISK.
By adapting yourself to what you can farm in a decent amount of time, it’s very easy to loose less than 10% of what you can farm. And it is absolutely true even at the very beginning of the game, if you are clever enough to realise that you are not supposed to use Battleships.
What games are you talking about?
Because I don’t see this fact in any MMO. And if you are talking about MOBA or Battle Royals, I’m afraid this is not what EvE is about in the first place.
I honnestly have a hard time believing it. I think you already have people who are OK with fighting other players and loosing some ships, and people who are not. From both my experience in other games, and the things you see posted in this forum, I’m pretty sure that they will never accept ANY kind of loss, no matter how hard you try to make it “matter less”.
You make a good point:
If you indulge me, there’s a new idea I just had based on your assessment of people’s motivations that in theory should solve the issue. Due to the pandemic, I’ve been watching a lot of documentaries on Netflix. One of them is called “Abstract”, and it revolves around making good decisions and innovative designs.
In one of the episodes, they look into Instagram. Please, bear with me. The folks responsible for Instagram noticed that their users are having anxiety issues seeing their numbers of followers vs the number of people they follow. Also, a lot of people have trouble dealing with “likes”, either decreasing or increasing numbers, as they feel their lives are either not interesting enough or that they’re being constantly pressured to make it more interesting still.
EvE has a provocative culture of incentivizing players to show off their killboards. I don’t much care for it, but a lot of people do. They might feel bad about themselves if their killboard is mostly in the red, and others feel pressured to keep it growing in the green, maybe to validate their time or for bragging rights. It doesn’t matter. Humans are driven by these sorts of things, and the killboards are an important aspect of the game. It can be a measurement of your worth to others. It can be a tool to keep tally of your improvement as a player. It is also an important instrument of intelligence gathering.
But is it a healthy aspect of the game? I think not. A lot of specialists in the field seem to agree, as seen in the documentary and elsewhere. Having your losses exposed can have a detrimental effect. People don’t want to be perceived as losers, the same as they dislike being perceived as uninteresting or not beautiful enough et cetera. Also, the killboards incentivize a lot of toxicity, too.
What I am saying is - and I know it is quite a stretch - the game would be better off without it. Cut off the excessive grind AND cut off some of the API information being fed to external sites. In essence, kill off the killboards. It’d be an interesting experience seeing what could happen then.
I know some people will foam at the mouth from me writing this, but it is worth the reflection: how much better off would we be without these anxiety-provoking metrics? If people don’t know how bad (or how good) you are as a player, would you be more inclined to not give a ■■■■ about losing ships?
Well look at the bright side you didn’t get instakilled warping to a gate to get Smartbombed…cheap sorry sucker
oh how about on the log in screen
The message pops up asking, “Do you accept that you might lose a ship today?”
The options are;
Yes = successful login
No = opens up an new client leading to the game Sparkle Space Ships & Friends.
I would imagine that most new players don’t know anyone in the game already. Lucky them, right? Anyway, losing the ship that they just spent all their isk on is clearly frustrating and not “ok”. Sure, it’s just a game, but when you lose Multiple hours and play sessions worth of grinding in a venture, being frustrated or discouraged is expected and normal. If the new player was rich, maybe they would feel differently about it.
If you were mentoring a new player and that new player lost their ship, you would try to teach them how not to lose their ship, yes? Teach them what mistakes they made? Why would you do that if losing ships is ok…
What if I don’t like her?
Brand new player here, only 3 days old I believe.
I have a long history of MMOs, Including some kind of like EVE in terms of complexity and high learning curves.
Firstly, let me start out by saying that the community here is extremely friendly in comparison to many other games I’ve played, so thanks for that. And the shear amount of reading I have done, questions I’ve asked and forum posts I’ve read, tells me that this game is also unlike many I’ve played, I’m terms of sheer scale and intricacies.
I came into Eve somewhat knowing what I would be getting into and preemptively emotionally prepared myself for for countless deaths, frustrations, and grinds.
That being said, a new player who just randomly bumped into Eve, and decided " hey, I like spaces games! " would be really intimidated after just a few minutes of play. This game definitely isn’t for everyone. Honestly, If you get butthurt and rage quit a game because you died before becoming at least somewhat competent in its play, your not the type of person for this game
I’m looking forward to seeing y’all in games and by all means, teach me the right way. Blow me up, tell me how to improve, add me to friends, because I’ll be hitting you up for pointers again soon.
Well, I know this is not so much of a popular opinion, but nowadays, I do believe that a New Player of anything should do some Google research about the game he is going to play.
In the case of EvE, it is VERY clear after 5 minutes on the internet that loosing your ship is part of the whole philosophy.
In the same idea, just type “EvE online New player” on Youtube, and you will find dozen of videos explaining you how to make much better money than loosing your time with useless High-sec mining in a Venture.
All of this lead to the conclusion that I personnally believe that anybody who put ALL his ISK into a single ship and loose it deserve no sympathy, no matter how New the player is, and if it was created by hours of venture mining, it’s just worst.
… That’s… A very strange kind of reverse logic.
The fact that loosing ship is OK and a part of the game does not mean that you should not learn to avoid it.
I mean, a Football team train themself in order to win as much as possible. By your logic, it means that eventually loosing a match is not OK and if it happen, they should disband the team?
Welcome 
I can agree with that. But I don’t consider that any game should be “for everyone”.
I strongly believe in the statement that “When you try to please everyone, you end-up pleasing no one”. Which by the way is one of the reason why I don’t give that much attention to people only using the number of players to judge if a game is doing good or not.
Fine. I’ll keep that name in mind. My first advise would be to not be afraid of going into Low-sec and Null-sec to discover it a bit. Don’t let yourself get stuck in High-sec.
It’s fine if you end-up actually loving High-sec more than the rest and decide to stay there later on. But if you do so without even trying the other parts, you are just missing out opportunities 
Yes absolutely correct. Losing games is not an acceptable practice in sports. If you don’t make every reasonable effort to win games, then you should not play the game. And yes, teams that lose all their games are not popular, not profitable, and should be disbanded or improved
I fail to see the logic.
Teams that never loose any game just simply do not exist. Making every reasonable effort to win never give you 100% winrate. You will always sometimes loose. And it is acceptable and part of the game.
Doing your best to win and “loosing is acceptable” are not incompatible statements.
It’s “lose”, not “loose”, btw.
Also, the point is “if you keep losing, then become a better player”. Instead of improving, you’re basically just complaining so that the game babies and pampers you.
Bollocks.
These guys and girls do not agree.
Well if the fitting is loose the ship might be lsot.
Where am I complaining exactly?
And how could I want the game to “babies and pampers” me, when I’m actually saying that being destroyed is legitimate and good for the game?
Exactly! This perpetual economy in EVE where the same amount of ores mined today is leaving the game through exploding ships tomorrow is what makes EVE a fun universe.
You know this is a computer game right? You talk about PVE and PVP as if it’s two different games - this is a single sandbox which supports many different play styles and is all the better for it - there are plenty of other games for PVE predictable game play. EVE has enough arbitrary rules already in place to provide protection and room for growth - as demonstrated by your aversion to losing ships. Every new rule is a potential loss of choice so think carefully before adding more.