I have a suggestion to help with the newbie retention. This is something I have been doing for a couple of years and about 75% end up signing up for omega or stay in the game or stay after considering quitting.
The idea is a mentoring system. Pair up a veteran with a rookie to explain the game and help with mission, mining, indy, picking ships, fitting ships. This develops a dialog with the newbie and the vet and other corp members who usually love to help out a new player.
The problem with this is finding the rookie in the first place. They have to be on around the same time the vet is and a reasonable distance to the vet . The way to fix this is to create a mentor database of vets willing to help and rookies. If one could search for rookies meeting that are on and a reasonable distance or inversely the rookie could search for a mentor. All you need is both to sign up for the database inclusion.
I do this because I really enjoy helping new guys out and realized that if someone didn’t help me out when I was a rookie I would have probably have quit to. So I now find necessary to pay it forward.
I would do this for free but I realize that most will not, so a modest reward for every rookie helped per week and maybe a larger one if the rookie signs up for omega.
I typically have to spend a week just trying to find a rookie to help. There is always people wanting help, but its hard to find one within 10 jumps and on the same time you are.
Just a suggestion for something I already do, but I would appreciate a reply from a DEV on their thinking and how I could help.
Help and NPC corp chat do that just fine as well as other chat channels for specific activities - you have a question, you ask the question, you get an answer. This also saves the hassle of searching for “mentor” that is online and ready to answer.
Good point. EvE could facilitate a mentoring program, with certificates, a finder, a feedback loop, assessment, and rewards. Originally corps were destined to do this job. But there is no control, or quality management, and a lot of crap corps out there.
In a game like EVE one has to ask… how many of these “mentors” are sincere? Are they really out to help newbros or are they out to collect tears because they get some twisted kick out of it? On the other hand…How many of these newbros are really vet alts looking to fk with people that are truely trying to help?
I disagree. The help channels are clogged and very hard to even see and answer. Half the time the rookie doesn’t even know how to frame the question they really want to know. As for rewards, they need not be large. In my case I could care less whether I get one or not. Most likely to pass the reward on to the newbie.
current helping/mentoring players in various chats already get a reward for their efforts: each and every true rookie they help is a prospective recruit for their corp/alliance and (member)numbers is everything in EvE.
Mentoring is a good idea, until you realize that anyone can be a mentor.
I’ve seen it happen in eve uni, where someone was a mentor, but kept feeding newbies their own biases and prejudice. The game should just present new players its concepts in an objective fashion and let players make their own choices.
Suggestion to helping new players…yes, create a video they have to watch before anything else. Bluntly tell them that there is scamming, you will lose your crap, wars, suicide ganking and you agree to PvP once you log in to the game. No where is “safe”.
The video features all sorts of folks that are infamous for pushing your poop in one way or another. Then have CCP Wrangler cap it off with…welcome to EVE.