After having helped many new players getting into the game for a number of years now I can say that
from my experience, most new players don’t know about all of the handy and essential 3rd party tools that veteran eve players use on a daily basis.
If you were to ask most veterans if they would play the game without dotlan, zkillboard, tripwire, Eveworkbench, or other essential tools, many of them would probably say no.
This should tell you something about how most new players are feeling about the game right now that don’t know about all of the different 3rd party tools that EVE has to offer and will probably never know about them because they will leave before they know.
I think that if you took a survey of how much people knew about 3rd party tools based on how old their characters is you’d find that this is something most people get into after the vast majority of new players have left the game.
I, therefore, think it should be an essential long term plan for CCP to try and integrate as many of these tools as possible into the game as I think this would massively improve player retention.
I know that there are probably people at CCP that think this would be a huge undertaking but you also have to remember that most of the developers of these tools would happily help CCP with the work that needs to get done to get something like Zkillboard or dotlan, evepraisal, integrated into the game and they would most likely do this work for free.
CCP just announced that they wanted to give some love to the content creators with the partnership program and I now think it’s time to give some real love to the developers that built the 3rd party platforms that are essential to playing this awesome game.
If you have more suggestions on this topic please feel free to leave a comment