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Has one of these ânewbies need to get more and fasterâ guys even defined how much newbies should get and how fast exactly? And why exactly that would be reasonable and not even more and even faster? And why not everything and instantly? This discussion is almost comical. Anyone who starts today can be among the top 10% richest players in EVE within one year from now, if he just wants it enough. How is that not fast enough?
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Calm down, minorâŚ
âGadget thought you could use a pick-me-up
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You donât seem to grasp that the wait is a fundamental part of the game. It is the long slog to do all 10,000 feet of the mountainâŚtaking many hours. Why would anyone want to get half way up that slog only to find a bunch of people who have taken the cable car in 10 minutes ?
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Skills points, free Gnosis, free Sunesis, free Sakura skinâŚall for doing precisely nothingâŚand thatâs just in the past 2 weeks. Yet somehow noobs arenât being mollycoddled enough.
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I love super cringey internet threats based on nothing. âDonât cross this line! This fake, digital, nonexistent arbitrary line because there will be some kind of fake, digital, nonexistent arbitrary consequences and you will regret it!â
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How dare she.
Orca is overrated anyway. A REAL miner uses a mining frigate. Check out this one
awesome, right?
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Things are fine as they are. I would say they give too much to start! I have ships I havenât yet to unpack and name, let alone fly. I have modules I donât even know if I need or not, some I donât donât understand what they do. The career agents just throw them at me like hotcakes!
So I can lose it stupidly. No. New Eden is a whole other universe. Unknown to me yet, and the tech stats all depends on different things at the same time but not others at other times, give me a Titan! Sure⌠what exactly is a Titan? What can it do? When?
Noob losing a Titan to a couple of destroyers should be hilarious 
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I have indeed, but to repeat:
I think CCP should eliminate the basic skills that new players are currently advised to focus on before training other things. For example, targeting, power grid and CPU, basic MWD and AB, and so on. These skills represent perhaps a few weeks or so saved, so nothing in the greater scheme of things, but their removal will allow new players to immediately focus on skills that sound FUN.
And thatâs the point. I believe that the sooner new players can begin training things that sound fun, the less likely they are to quit. Obviously it wont solve the problem completely, but if it can keep even an additional 10% it will have been worth it.
The âextraâ SP is not intended to DO anything. It is intended to alter how new players view the task ahead of them. Right now they see a mountain, and they are told âBefore you can even begin to climb we need you to train the following skills to four or five: crampon attachment, rope navigation, sunscreen application, rope attachment, fixed rope maneuver, tent erection, Sherpa compensation, and a half dozen more foundational skills!â A player that subscribed to climb that mountain is gonna view those weeks of training as a complete and unnecessary waste â and they would be correct.
What I am proposing is to eliminate this nonsense and let them get started straight off working on the things they want to do in game. If itâs mining, let them immediately train that, along with the associated skips and such. The same if it is PvP. Let them immediately begin training guns and frigates or whatever.
It doesnât hurt me, it doesnât hurt you, but it might just keep them as a customer.
I agree, OT
Why bother with skills at all. If they want to mine give them level V in every mining skill. If they want to PvP just give them gun skills to V for every gun. If they want to fly titans just let them have Titan V.
I would even go a step further. The ISK making is just in the way of them having fun. Just give them the ship they want to fly. If its a hulk just give it to them. If itâs an Ishtar for ratting just give it to them. If itâs a blingy Titan just let them have it so they can have fun.
At that point players can have all the fun they want when they want. The flaw in your proposal OT is that the players still have to wait â which is not fun. Why bother waiting for gun training. Itâs no fun. Why bother waiting for ship training. Itâs no fun. Newbies will be bored out of their mind. YAWN. And play a different game.
This way all nonsense is eliminated. Thereâs is no mountain. They donât have to look at a mountain and get scared at all. Want to be a big industrial player? Boom, wish granted! A titans pilot? Boom, wish granted. No mountain, no problem. No time wasted. They can work directly on what they want on the game without wasting time.
In fact we can spin up a separate server so these rotten people arguing against us can have their newbie unfriendly hell hole. The rest of us can play on our dedicated server for maximum fun. We can name it singularity.
See you there!
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The amount of SP a new player receives has increased before - multiple times.
Do you have any numbers showing that increasing new player SP has increased retention rate?
âCurious Gadget
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Right now the new players see a mountain in the distance, but luckily they still have a few miles ahead of them on a mostly flat area to learn how to walk. A couple of lower hills, so they learn how to walk when the path isnât flat. And then, once they know their new shoes fit, that they know to pack the right gear for a mountain trip, then they start climbing steeper and steeper, until they eventually even need mountain climbing equipment to proceed.
In EVE terms, we have a really good introduction to skills for new players, where they can get a whole lot of small increases, quickly.
5% faster targeting and it takes only a few minutes to train, thatâs nice! More armor skills, takes an hour. How do I add that to my skill queue again?
Later on in their EVE journey every EVE player runs into the skills that take a month to train for a mere 5% increase in one area. Thatâs where the mountain is so steep and endless that players are wondering if thereâs ever an end to it.
Luckily in EVE, new players arenât dropped right on that steep part, but are in the relatively flat starting area where every skill they train takes only a few minutes.
You want to pick those new players up, instantly skip the easy part of the journey, the part with a low effort high gain feedback cycle that teaches the new players how to train skill, with a helicopter (free SP) and drop them in the middle of the steepest part of the mountain where they need to train a month to get a single upgrade.
⌠and you think that that would increase player retention?
Sure, with enough SP those new players can skip their entire introductory period to the game, but what do you think happens when those players realise that SP is actually a valuable and hard-to-come-by good in this game and that it will take months to see any more upgrades?
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I only want FUN rorqual skills.
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With the clear risk of you not liking the answers either, Iâll try anyway.
- the âSPâ subject
- you didnât give any details what you exactly mean with âthe basicsâ. You may or may not be referring to the Magic 14
- my personal view on Magic 14: I never advise a rookie to train it as such - I think it harms motivation. Instead I either tell them to try fitting a ship, based on âthealphasguide.comâ and pick from the Magic 14 list what they need AND mix it in with the weapon + support skills, or I tell them to have a good look at Short Skill Plan - EVE University Wiki . The Magic 14 has likely been blown out of proportion from its original intent: to be a guideline rather than a skill plan.
- in a game with over 500M SP, and hundreds of hulls to fly for dozens of tasks and styles, I fail to see how giving basic skills would change the perspective of a newbie. The bigger first hurdle is ISK, if they are not happy with the ships they receive from career agents and AIR program.
- SP is not The Learning Curve. The learning curve is what you do and how you do it with minimal risk, maximal outcome, etc.
- On knowing what one wants.
- the sandbox allows almost anything, we donât need to go into detail. A new player has no handholds, except a few - pardon the term - false ones offered via career and AIR, which reduce it to 4 professions.
- it is vital for a long stay in EvE to sample the playstyles as much as possible as soon as possible. I really do not believe a rookie knows exactly what it means if he picks a specialism while still wearing his newbie blindfold. âI wanna be a minerâ is of course fine, if you know what it entails, what the risks are in the setting including hisec. Iâd rather have that rookie also try to hunt miners (or something in that spirit) and then make up his mind, make an informed decision.
- it is equally important, in my opinion, that a new player explores the different ways of making ISK. That requires different types of ships, which require different types of skills - which some will call basics for what they do.
- the mixup of elements in proposals
- There is no gain in time or benefit in the early phase. On the contrary, if you let a newbie fly a retriever - assuming he can even pay for one - he will lose a retriever instead of a venture which came as a free ship. Or a battleship. That likely feels worse early on than later in oneâs EvE piloting adventure. We all get a bit less bothered by losses the longer we play and the more experienced we are, Iâd say.
- The time it takes to grind the ISK to benefit from the higher skill levels can/should be used to train those skills in the first place while exploring the early possibilities in the game. That too is pure waiting time, and from experience the longest time for a newbie. I did not see you propose additional funding to make use of better (hence more expensive) equipment/hulls made accessible via the higher skills. At best youâd have a short term effect on hull use, and a steeper drop in ability to replace losses - which is already pretty rough these days - which I think would hurt retention even more.
Thereâs a lot more to write and discuss about newbie retention, but that would be more about the social aspect of the game, what I believe to be the major factor.
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So has the number of skills new players are expected to train â and significantly. For example, at one time ship skills were universal. If you had Battlecruiser 5 it allowed you to fly ALL of them at level 5 skill. They changed that across the board. If you were an older character and already level 5, you were GIFTED every race at level 5 without extra training. New players, or players who had not yet finished training these skills to 5 got nothing. I imagine they have added additional skills as well.
Good response, and you make valid points. I think you understand my position as well.
This is not really such an important topic that it deserves hundreds of replies, but here we are.
That came from the promise by CCP that âwhat you can fly today, you will be able to fly tomorrow, provided you have destroyers and BCâs at 5 when we introduce the t3 destroyers and the attack battlecruisersâ. And that was 2013 or something ? As far as I am able to find, nothing similar has occurred since then, on the contrary 
Thank you, sir, appreciated
But you need those skills anyway to unlock certain t2 modules, not? And these are small goals that make people feel good when they finally can replace the Compact Energized Membrane with a T2 Energized Membrane that even further boosts their tank. I see basically every few days some newbro asking me for advice when he has modified one of his fits because some more skills finished. Why do you want to take away these small steps of success - that also train the softskill âunderstanding how fits workâ - from them? I donât get it. Fitting ships and playing around with numbers is fun. And you donât have to wait for the skills to finish, you can play the whole game in the meantime.
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Objectively wrong.
This only happened to 2 skills: Battlecruisers and Destroyers. Thatâs it.
Also incorrect. The learning skills were removed. New players were expected to train those. Not Battlecruisers. Thatâs millions of SP eliminated. Destroyers SP wasnât enough to offset the learning skills. Additionally, all charactersâ attributes were increased speeding up SP gain, particularly for newbies who didnât have to train learning skills anymore. That makes your narrative even more incorrect.
If you want to see what the skill tree used to look like in 2008, hereâs the image. Verify for yourself:
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