To the EVE Online Development Team

Council Of Stellar Management CSM Campaigns
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To the EVE Online Development Team

Subject: Proposal for an Official Sherpa Community to Improve New Player Retention

Dear Developers,

With the upcoming new player experience update, I would like to propose the creation of an official Sherpa community - a structured mentorship system inspired by similar models in other hardcore online games (without naming them). The core idea is to pair experienced volunteers with new players to provide direct, personalized guidance.

Proposed Structure

The Sherpa community should be organized similarly to existing mentorship communities, with clear ranks, rewards, and quality control. The primary motivation for Sherpas to join and participate would be unique in-game rewards - for example, special ship variants (identical to standard ships except for a unique name change) or exclusive ship skins that cannot be obtained elsewhere.

Tiered Testing and Rewards

To ensure quality, Sherpas should pass different levels of tests depending on the complexity of the topics they wish to teach. Each level would grant a proportionate unique reward - for instance:

Basic Sherpa - a unique frigate skin or a renamed rookie ship

Intermediate - a unique destroyer/cruiser skin or a specially named industrial ship

Advanced - a unique battleship skin or a renamed faction ship (cosmetic only)

All rewards should be purely cosmetic or collectible (no gameplay advantage), but highly recognizable as marks of dedication and expertise.

Retention Problem

Based on available data, new player retention in EVE Online is low. Many newcomers leave because they simply do not understand what to do. In my three years of experience as a recruiter across various groups, I have seen that a large portion of new players are actually trying EVE for the second or third time - and the main reason they quit again is lack of direction.

Why Current Help Systems Are Insufficient

Multilingual help chats often fail to provide consistent, high‑quality answers. Worse, many players are shy or hesitant to write in public chats.

Forums and external resources are useful but only a small fraction of players actually use them. From my recruiting experience, most players never visit forums for help.

Suggested Solution: A Forced Pop‑up + Dedicated Request Channel

I propose adding a mandatory pop‑up window for new players (appearing early in their gameplay) asking if they would like to be assigned a Sherpa. If a player is not genuinely interested, they will not invest time seeking help on their own - so the system must reach out to them proactively.

The request should be sent to a dedicated email inbox or hotline that guarantees fast assignment of a Sherpa. This would work best in text format, as many players prefer written guidance over voice.

Quality Control Is Essential

While the tiered test system might be negotiable, some form of quality control over Sherpas is absolutely necessary. I have frequently encountered new players who received incorrect or misleading information from public help chats in my native language. As a result, they tried to do something that didn’t work, got frustrated, and quit the game.

A system similar to the Discovery mini‑game (with percentage‑based “match” scores) could be used to evaluate Sherpas. But at minimum, there must be a way to verify that Sherpas are providing correct and helpful guidance.

My Background

I have spent roughly three years actively recruiting for various EVE corporations and alliances. I have experienced a wide range of content in the game. Among the new players who came through me, approximately 30% remained in the game long‑term - a figure that shows what structured personal help can achieve.

EVE Online is an extremely social game, yet also one of the most mechanically vast and complex. A Sherpa system is not just a nice addition – it is a critical necessity for the game’s long‑term health and growth.

Thank you for considering this proposal. I would be happy to provide further details or assist in any way.

Sincerely,
A dedicated EVE player and recruiter

1 Like
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Thats called a “corporation”. And it already exists for basically any acitvity in the game.

I don’t know how long you play the game, but the number of guides, videos, tools, training fleets and whatever offers is greater then ever. And CCP does a lot to point new capsuleers towards joining a corporation where they can come in contact with veterans to learn from.

The main “problem” with your idea is, that you want some “CCP approved” mentorship program, but that would mean CCP would need to check, test, reward and motivate all those “mentors” (or “sherpas”, call them as you like). Now the question: who exactly should do that? They’d need to hire people (and pay them) for doing that. Thats resources taken away from other tasks… like bugfixing or creating more new content.
Besides that: How to make sure people don’t abuse the system, like all history of EVE clearly shows people would try to do. What prevents an “alliance recruiter” to cash in rewards over rewards, but all the positive reviews (or whatever system you want to use) are actually from mass-alts? You want CCP to hire people to crosscheck this too?

Sry, good intention, but I highly doubt a developer-driven mentorship system would work. It may work for some other games (you don’t want to name), but I am willing to bet those games are much smaller and much less complex than EVE is.
If you want to do something for the new player retention: Offer a great environment for newbros within your group, prosper and teach, offer them participation and perspective and interesting stuff to do with their time online.

Sincerily,
a dedicated EVE player and recruiter, mentor, trainer of Newbs for more than a decade.

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Dear colleague,

Thank you for your detailed response. I’ve been playing EVE for 3–4 years of active play (not consecutive), and during that time I’ve been involved in recruiting and helping newcomers. So I’m familiar with the arguments you make. However, let me offer a few corrections based on my experience and the data I’ve seen.

1. Corporations do not solve the problem of new player drop‑off

You say that corporations already exist for virtually every activity in the game. That’s true. But the problem is that most new players quit before they even join a corporation. They go through (or skip) the tutorial, try to do things on their own, hit a wall of confusion, and leave. My recruiting experience shows that among those who do eventually join a corp, most have already tried playing for the second or even third time. Their first attempt was solo – and it failed.

Moreover, even after joining a corporation, a new player often doesn’t receive quality guidance. Many corps either lack a structured newbie program or expect the newcomer to “just Google it”. In help chats, I constantly see new players being given bad advice or simply ignored. As a result, they do things wrong, fail, and quit.

2. A “CCP‑approved” program does not require hiring staff

You ask who would check, test, and motivate the Sherpas, and assume that CCP would need to hire people. That’s not the case.

The model I propose is a volunteer community rewarded with cosmetic items (unique ship names, skins). No salaries from CCP are needed. All that’s required is:

  • An in‑game interface for Sherpas to register and track their mentees.

  • Automated tests (similar to the Discovery mini‑game) – no constant moderation required.

  • Automated rewards triggered by certain criteria (e.g., the new player completes N tasks or stays active for a month).

CCP already does similar things with the AIR Career Program and the NPE. Extending that logic to a mentorship system is not a huge resource drain.

3. How to prevent abuse? (alts, farming)

Yes, EVE teaches us that players will try to abuse any system. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t build it. Simple safeguards would suffice.

One account can be a Sherpa (tied to a character with a certain age and activity level).

A Sherpa cannot earn a reward for the same new player more than once.

The new player confirms whether the help was useful (a simple yes/no checkbox), but the Sherpa’s reward should not depend solely on that rating – we could also factor in the time the new player spends in the game after receiving help.

If the system detects anomalies (e.g., 100 “new players” from the same IP), a manual check can be triggered – but that would be an exception, not the rule.

No system is perfect. But the current situation (30% retention with my personal recruiting, and I suspect much lower on average across the game) suggests that even a small improvement is worth trying.

4. EVE’s scale and complexity are not a problem – they are an argument FOR such a system

You say that developer‑driven mentorship works less well in large, complex games. I believe the opposite: the more complex the game, the more a new player needs a live mentor in the very first hour – not a wiki link and advice to “find a corporation”.

EVE has thousands of mechanics. A new player opening the game for the first time doesn’t even know what questions to ask. A mandatory pop‑up offering a Sherpa is not a replacement for corporations – it’s a bridge to them. A Sherpa can help with the first steps and then recommend a suitable corporation.

5. My experience versus yours

You say you’ve been teaching new players for over a decade. That’s commendable. But your experience doesn’t change the fact that most new players never reach people like you. They quit earlier.

I shared a 30% retention rate among those who came through me. That’s above the game’s average (from what I know, first‑week retention in EVE is around 10‑15%). And that was achieved without any official tools – just personal communication. Imagine what could happen if every new player had such a Sherpa from day one.

Conclusion

Corporations are good. But they don’t solve the early drop‑off problem. A volunteer Sherpa program with cosmetic rewards does not require large resources from CCP, and the risk of abuse can be minimized with simple rules. EVE loses a huge number of potential capsuleers not because the game is too complex, but because no one reaches out to them in time.

Let’s not dismiss an idea just because “it hasn’t been done before”. EVE is evolving, and the NPE is being updated – so this is the perfect time for such proposals.

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you want quality control…over how i run my corporations or alliances???

no thanx..taek your proposal and hike up your nearest thruster port.

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No, I want beginners who are trying the game not to disappear into obscurity after 15 minutes.

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Looks like AI slop, im not even reading it

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I wasn’t entirely sure, so I put the text through 3 different free AI detectors online. They are all confident that the text is either AI written with a bit of human disguising sentences added or a human basic construct highly bloated and polished by AI.

Not saying the general idea is bad. Rewarding long-term recruiters gives motivation to actually put effort into training and educating new players and creating an environment in which they have fun learning, growing and playing the game. I just highly doubt CCP is capable to create such a system, especially making sure it won’t be abused by the players.

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To translate my sentences into English and improve the structure of the text, I used AI; the use of speech patterns in my native language may be translated incorrectly.

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People ignoring ideas that smell like AI generated wall’o’texts is the price you have to pay for such “improvements”. Sometimes it is just better to be yourself and try your personal best instead of letting a machine polishing everything up. People value personal effort.

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For myself? I would rather deal with what YOU have to say without it going through any AI other than maybe a translation one.

Most of us get that this is a world wide game with a lot of other languages in play and can adjust for that.

m

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I tried to rewrite it again, the way I see it, but in any case I used a translator.
Problem:
New players drop out fast. A lot of them never link up with a corporation. And even if they do, nobody really takes the time to show them the ropes.

Those help chats? They’re a toss-up – sometimes you get good advice, sometimes you don’t. And forums? Forget about it, most new folks these days just don’t bother reading them.

What I am proposing:
So, here’s my idea:
How about we set up a volunteer “Sherpa” system? We don’t even have to pay in ISK or PLEX, maybe just some cool, unique ship skins or renamed ships – purely for looks. Folks would probably actually be willing to help for something like that.

We could make the tests automatic, kind of like how the Discovery mini-game works. That way, we wouldn’t need to bring in a whole lot of staff.
Rewards would automatically go out once a new player finishes specific tasks or just sticks around in the game longer. We’d also need a few basic rules to stop cheating: only one Sherpa per account, no getting double rewards for helping the same newbie, and the new player has to quickly confirm they got help. Any really suspicious situations would get a manual look.

Maybe new players should have a secondary evaluation system in addition to the in‑game automated one. After all, the goal is to put this on a conveyor belt so that the system accumulates within the game itself, because some people will burn out from questions they consider stupid, and someone else will need to replace them.

How it would ideally work:

Sherpas would take some tests – basic, intermediate, or advanced – depending on what kind of stuff they’re up for teaching.

Each level would have its own special reward. Like, for those helping out brand new players, maybe a frigate skin with a cool new name, and for the more seasoned Sherpas, something even better.

Right when new players start the game, they’d get a pop-up window that says, “Want a Sherpa to give you a hand? Click here.” If they don’t want to, that’s okay. But chances are, they won’t go searching for help by themselves.

Their request would land in a simple inbox or maybe like a special “help line”. Just text. A lot of people feel awkward asking questions in public chats.

Why this matters:
EVE is a massive game, and everything in it really hinges on talking to other people. New players need to chat with a real person right in their first hour, not just get sent to a wiki link. Corporations are good, but they often don’t manage to grab folks before they totally give up on the game. This system could really connect them before it’s too late.

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At the very least, in the race for new players, this will force the stagnant alliances/corps that only do spam recruitment and don’t actually help newcomers to get off their asses and start doing something other than just spamming.

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Often, even if one out of a hundred new players actually makes it to a corporation, he — as in many other MMOs — just clicks on the first ad and ends up in a spam corporation, without realizing what he’ll have to deal with — like assets that will tie him to that space, and so on.

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So if I understand the request correctly you want to have a reward structure for some kind of mentors.

(I skimmed through what I saw as very long winded AI posts, sorry if I missed crucial bits).

Would such gamification not lead to players who do the bare minimum to obtain rewards?

Or worse, exploits of the reward structure by making ‘new characters’ they can recruit and guide but are in fact their own alts?

I fear that these are realistic consequences of such rewards in EVE, where people have been known to do the same thing and farm new player rewards by repeatedly creating characters.

EVE currently has different mentorship programs, built by players with the main purpose of helping new players instead of obtaining rewards.

Large (and small) groups recruit and help new players simply because having more capable players in your group is both fun and a compeitive advantage.

TL;DR: I do not think EVE needs rewards for mentors and fear this would be abused.

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If we create a well-designed system with the ability to evaluate a mentor using percentage-based statistics (from players and the internal system), I think that would allow us to properly assess a player’s qualifications. But most likely we would then need to introduce a system tied to the launcher (to prevent people from farming good reviews with their alts). Also, people probably wouldn’t bother doing this just for cosmetic items. The main thing is not to introduce any overly expensive items into this system — for example, account-bound skins cannot be sold, so they can’t be abused. Personally, I would like to receive emblems for different ships, similar to corporate emblems, but with a Sherpa logo.

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Rewards should be purely nominal — just enough to motivate people to join the community, without breaking the economy. Especially if you make a long progression tree with restrictions, like in Discovery, it will be hard to abuse.

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Use the AI, that’s what it’s for. A few scared troglodytes crying uselessly into the wind matter not.

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I use AI, but not to draft full on slop messages. Anything I post came from my own fingers. I find practical uses, like refining food ingredients or safety of massage with medications or bounce ideas, as well as questioning the reliability of the AI.

But I dont let it type a whole ass topic on here as AIs arent always correct

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In a separate message, I wrote down all my points — not edited, just translated by AI.

1 Like