I have just completed Empires of Eve, and I am now reading " The Great Scam"
Reading through this journal, I found this portion interesting:
“HardHead’s masochism paid off in generous dividends though; while Trazir and I were dumpster-■■■■ broke, HH had close to 6 million credits.”
Was Eve’s economy so new and profits so small that this was considered wealthy? If true it is a testament to how much Eve has grown and or how much inflation has come into play amongst the stars.
Back in the day… recruits were not handed ships to go forth and be fodder.
Week 1… mine to get a better frigate.
Week 2-3 mine to get a cruiser
Week 4-5 mine to get a pvp cruiser
week 6-10 mine for lowest tier bs (because waiting for that long you couldn’t hold out for the higher tier
Week 11-13 mine for pvp bs
And this was if you where in a corp that had someone doing rat patrol and mined a couple hours a day… this is how you bonded with corp mates that went on to make solid corps, that joined alliances and populated null sec.
Now they don’t have kern/omber in hi sec anymore 
Noobs straight into the game go to null and get ships handed to them and run through pvp tutorials with a trainer. No wonder the game isn’t what it used to be…
Do you think that the trainer missions have hurt the game?
I was thinking of an actual live person going over fleet ops.
I did run through a couple of the in game training things, I think they are great for new players to get an understanding of the game.
I mean when I started you could point your ship and hit warp… and get lost in between various systems SO MUCH FUN. Research agents handed out TII blueprints (if you were lucky)
So much has changed and been added new players need that opportunity. Perhaps corps that are starting fresh could “register” for noob recruitment and new players could be directed to them if they chose to. Seriously I think that was the most fun… being in a corp with mostly the same sp characters as we all were working toward similar goals. Then those corps would move on and new corps register… just need at least 5-8 noob corps running (1 for each faction - lo sec noob corps for pirate areas)
I have seen a few corporations, namely Eve University, which seems geared to fostering a new crop of players. I joined a corporation that was very friendly and welcoming but not very active, based on what I could tell. Unless I was in their HQ Null Sec, I really wasn’t able to get any fleet time.
For me, I think learning the game with other people would be more beneficial.
Right… I’m thinking of smaller 20 ish active member corps … with 2-3 vet players running the corp and educating the members.
I think something like that would go a long way into building numbers of active players.