My new character could do basically nothing, and the time i needed to invest to change this was ridiculous. CCP, you want new players to stay? Change this nonsense. Characters should start with the basics already complete. We dont need a time sink to hold new players back. Very few people will play a game for months before they can even play the thing. The only way to screw this one up is to do too little. You could literally give them all of the “magic 14” at level 5, plus another twenty million sp on top, and it wouldn’t matter in a competitive sense in the slightest.
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Your posting history reads as a “I’m mad and clueless” and it shows up here as well.
New characters can do things just fine, just because you can’t doesn’t mean others can’t. Beyond that, being new means they need to learn the basics anyway which takes time, and by that time their skills will have gotten up just fine. Malcanis’ Law would apply so hard to this it’s not even funny.
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You mean like learning the learning skills? With no free play? I did that on more characters than I can remember and here I am still playing.
Mr Epeen 
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Whats wrong with you? You can do basically anything on Day1. Mining, Missionrunning, Scanning, participating in a fleet… what the heck?
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When I started to train skills I was shocked to learn that my pilot couldn’t even turn her ship properly and had to train alignment skill. Couldn’t use a decent engine and didn’t have the skills to place a basic shield on the vessel. I then guessed that a Capsuleer is nothing more than an ordinary inhabitant of one of the many planets in the cluster, a smith or a potter… “invited” into space by one of the tyrannical factions, like many, to serve as drone clones to whatever end.
I am not a new player. I created a new character. And even with all the knowlege and resources at my disposal i still found myself astonished at all the things my new character could not do. The barrier for new players is ridiculous.
This is a PvP game. If you took a new player and handed him a T1 tackle frigate it would probably take a month of dedicated training before he could even try to fly it using all T1 mods. The poor guy can’t even target past like 10km without spending a day or more on it.
It is time to fix this.
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Just because you can “do everything” doesn’t mean it’s particularly fun. Those first few hours in the game are crucial, and a big chunk of that time is spent meeting basic prerequisites.
It would be perfectly alright to start out new characters with a few million skill points so that they can use some fun things right away. Or just rework the skill system entirely so that there are no prerequisites for most ships and items; players could use pretty much anything right away, but without the skill bonuses.
This conversation pops up a few times a year, and I still don’t understand why vets are trying to gatekeep progression from new players in a twenty-year-old game. Kind of makes it feel like they aren’t confident in their own abilities, and need the crutch of years of skill progression to ensure they can beat these new players in competition.
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Are you on drugs?
Also, 1 mil SP referrals.
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Well said.
It is a 20 year old game in need of new players. Players offered the choice of thousands of other games. When we do get one of these players the first thing they encounter (other than spreadsheets and sociopaths) is a few weeks training to do anything interesting at all. They see vets zipping past in T3 warships, while they cant even fit an MWD. And THAT is the metric that will determine whether they stat or go.
Maybe this made sense two decades ago, but that was then. The time to fix it is now. And if someone finds this threatening, get better.
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New players dont know about that. That is a bonus to vets to make another account.
They get spammed to hell by it, also it can be applied later. Still the thing remains: New players, ACTUALLY new ones (so not alts pretending to be new but magically do really well) need time to learn the basics and find their way anyway, it doesn’t matter.
Also, please provide “a T1 tackle frigate it would probably take a month of dedicated training before he could even try to fly it” fit. Thank you.
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New players rarely do any “tackling” anyway, so it’s a moot point.
The basic gameplay loop entails getting into some form of mission/abyssal/anomaly-running, and as such the goal should be to get the new player into some kind of cruiser hull ASAP. To have a remotely effective setup for that would require about two weeks of training. During those two weeks, the retention rate drops to 7%:
The goal should be to keep new players on the hook constantly during those first two weeks in the game, instead of making them wait for basic prerequisites to train. Because what actually happens is that they either log off between skill training, or worse yet, start doing AFK Venture mining runs, and we all know what happens next.
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I don’t try to “gatekeep” anyone for sure. I have mentored more than one “newbros” during my EVE days as one of the “Vets” in my corp and I am absolutely convinced: People can have fun from Day1 on and there is so much to learn and to explore that actually takes a LOT longer than skilling the most basic skills to III or IV (which is in most cases more than enough to create proper fits for all and every situation).
I mean, really, how is it more “fun” to fly a Sentinel instead of a Crucifier for a Newb that can’t even do somewhat quick and well-timed flight maneuvers on grid, not even talking about really understanding what is going on in the fight for most parts? He is far better off in a 2 million ISK ship that can explode and is replaced in 5 minuted than losing a 50 million ISK ship fully T2 fitted that he needs 2 hours to regrind.
Newbies todays “catch up” 10times faster with all the login reward SP, daily challenge SP, available SkillInjectors to buy for RL cash or ISK, Cerebral accelerators and so on. They often skill faster than they can understand the mechanics behind the modules and ships they are using and just produce expensive killmails. And then being frustrated that their T3 Destroyer full of Faction-Stuff died in 10 seconds to some mechanic they just didn’t even know.
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None of those require cruisers or would you even want to use cruisers for. Abyssals is best done in frigates at that level, payment is far better and they wouldn’t be able to do t2 anyway. Exploration = frigates. Anomalies and combat sites is doable just fine in destroyers and then grow into cruisers. Mission running is probably one of the play styles that need a severe rethink anyway, it’s fine for newbies to gain combat experience but beyond that (unless they really enjoy it) it’s probably not really a good idea, if only because alpha caps at lvl 3.
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They can have even more fun with a redesign of these game mechanics. Fun isn’t a binary consideration, it’s a spectrum.
You’re framing all of this in terms of PvP engagements, but only a tiny fraction of all new players even encounters any form of PvP during the first month.
Gatekeeping skill points doesn’t address whatever issue is inherent to the ability to acquire and lose a “T3 Destroyer full of Faction-Stuff.” Someone who’s dropping cash to get the ship and gear would need to drop a bit more to get the skill points too.
The vast majority of players don’t do this, however. Making design decisions around outlier situations is foolish.
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Go join Eve Uni.
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Which are “these game mechanics”? The fitting skills? The ShipSkills? To be honest I wouldn’t care much if CCP would completely remove all the Attributes and Skills in the Game and everyone would be on the same level right from the start, all items/ships have stats based on LevelV now and only ISK decides what you can fly and what not. I am just not convinced that would help in any way to keep players in the game. In my opinion the reasons why players quit EVE early are completely different ones than skills.
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Dude, things are way better for new characters now then they ever have been. New characters have something like 500k SP now and more skills.
When I started characters had next to no skills and only 50k SP, back then you couldn’t do much on day 1. I still have a few 50k day 1 chars lying about.
I just recently made a new char to try out the new NPE and was shocked by how much I could do before I even put a skill in training. It doesn’t take long at all to get going in EvE nowadays.
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I came back to EvE after a long break during covid, and started a new alpha character to try out FW, following the guide that Blight’s Wretch created.
(see New Player/Alpha Factional Warfare Guide - EVE Online - YouTube)
I was amazed at how quickly I was up and running and making iskies and fighting. My experience seems to have been the polar opposite of yours. I wonder where the difference between us is at.
If you did the career missions, and claimed your new character’s free million skill points you should be able to do almost any basic thing that you to do from mining to faction warfare to hauling/trading to mission running, with a passel of free ships easily earned.
Giving new characters twenty million skill-points and a free Golem on day one will only result in them being killed by rats or ganked early on without them learning anything important.
(edited cus, well, you know I spel gud)
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Huh?
Any newcomer can equip a mining laser, a weapon, a point, or experience the market.
Learn the basics and help out corpmates.
Or learn the basics and strike out on your own.
Whatever floats a new player’s boat, but BOTH start with Learning The Basics.
All the SP in the world ain’t gonna help a new player git good.
It takes time and experience.
–Helpful Gadget
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