Worst tutorial of my 30 year gaming life

New Citizens Q&A
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Ok I started 2 days ago with Eve Online.

I knew from reviews and new player guides that Eve has a step learning curve. Fine with me I like challenging games.

Started the first tutorial mission. Nice intro video, didn’t explain much, but nice. And this was the last good thing I experienced in this game so far.

First mission no intro, nothing explains what seekers are, what my part in the story is. Heck what is the story.
I’m in the middle of nowhere, the camera is spinning wild around my spaceship. I learned fast that you can’t control your own spaceship directly. Fine with me. I’m the captain an just give orders. After some fight with the UI I managed to stabilize the camera.
But something is shooting at me and slowly nibbling away my shield. Aura the voiceless tutorial avatar (I mean really, it’s 2018 and no time/money for a voice over, it’s not much text anyway) instructs me to lock on to the target.
Problem 1. I play on a full HD monitor and the UI elements and text are super super tiny.
Problem 2. The help text is not aligned correctly. It sits on the far right sight pointing to nothing.
Ok not the first time with such problems, time to find the scale UI button.
Problem 3. Seeker still shotting at me, slowly killing me
Problem 4. Game option menu is also super super tiny and like a wall of text.
Ok ok time to alt tab and google this. Found a description where to find the UI slider in 3 sec. Alt Tab back to the game.
Problem 5. Game flashes now green with 10-20 Hz. Had to alt F4 kill the game client.
Restarted client.
Seeker drone still shooting at me. At last this little fella is consistent.
Adjusted UI to 300%, game is readable now without a magnifying class.
Time to shoot back!
No instructions how to shoot back. Yeah… Aura gone. Intuitive use of UI doesn’t work.
Somehow got back to station and dock.
Restart mission.
Aura back and text aligned correctly. Learn to have to approach/orbit target, lock on, and than manually! activate weapon. Kill seeker drone.
So why do I have to manually activate the weapon every time I lock on to a new target. What option do I have besides shooting at the target after lock on. No explanation, nothing.

After 3 missions with the exact same game play: land beside a station, lock on seeker drone, orbit, shoot target, repeat. Aura tells me to level skills. Yeay level up! Time to explore the skill tree… 5% to x,…5% to y,…5% to z…, oh look 2% to something, next behind pay wall, next also, and the next… exciting. But also somewhat understandable, somehow the devs have to make money and the free to play part is more like a demo version for newbies. Learn that skill leveling has nothing to do with game play but is just a passive tic system. Which feels really disconnected. But more important no explanation what the white and gray boxes mean or the yellow dots. What you need for what, is there a hidden skill tree and you need stuff as prerequisites for important stuff and so on. Only the advice that you should always keep the queue full.
Decided to randomly fill the queue with 4 or 5 skills and hope that I don’t brick my char.

Logged on next day to play the next 3 tutorial missions. Which follow the exact same “narrative” like the rest before. No story, seeker wave spawns, lock on, orbit, fire weapon, wait until enemy is dead, repeat. But with new inconvenience. Before, I spawned right next to the quest target. Now it is different. Click mission start, black screen, middle of nowhere, Aura tells me to warp to investigation site. Button in Aura message looks like the button in the top right. But its the align to target button, but right next to it is a warp to button…yay!.. feeling smart… press button warp to random thing in system. Nothing happens. Okay damn. Maybe I have to select the investigation site in the warp to tab in the system listing.
Problem 1. the list is huge.
Problem 2. 50% has non-english names.
Problem 3. No investigation site in it.
Learn after 20 min, you have to open the mission tab again and there is now a button warp to and behold it warps you to a investigation site in the same system.

In the 3. mission the pilot of my ship decided to be extra smart. We killed the first seeker drone right next to an asteroid and than the pilot parked the ship inside the same. Okay glitches happen. Look on to next seeker (so exiting) approach…ships moves at 5.2 m/s along the asteroid to a target 12 km away! Manually activating afterburner doesn’t help. Moving to another target doesn’t help. After 5 min of watching my ship clip in and out of the asteroid, the seeker drone 12 km away is suddenly dead. Maybe he got bored too. Another wave spawns…yeay…look on, orbit target…and suddenly the ship is out, … but now “under” the defect seeker station right next to the asteroid and the seeker drone is above the station. Smarty smarts pilot tries to fly straight true the station, bounces of, flies again straight against the station, bounces of…and repeat…but every time he scraps a little more along the hull of the station towards the “top”. Right before we are in line of sight, the drone dies…maybe he felt sorry. I felt sorry too. Most likely I did a “piloting” error but the game never told me, how to manually fly the ship. Docked at the station, filled my skill bar with random stuff, logged off.

Today logged on. 1 Mio bounty on my head from another player. o.O Okay how does the bounty system work in this game? Did I do something wrong? How do i get rid of the bounty? Will I now be attacked by other players while doing the tutorial missions? Does it get worse if I just ignore it? Answer’s from the game exactly 0! Answers from the rookie help channel 0, also 50% of the messages are not in english so who knows. I also only asked once, because I didn’t want do get banned for spaming the chat and I didn’t know if writing in chat with a bounty makes you even more a target for other players and scam attempts. (Fun fact aside if you google Eve Online and new player advice more than 50% of content is “don’t trust anyone, everyone is out to kill you or scam you. Here are the top 10 most used scams, but there are a lot more. Btw don’t get scammed.” Which sends a really awkward signal)
Alt tab…google…read stuff about bounty…such fun game play. Troll move, bounties can only be removed by getting killed…nice. Can be killed in high sec system…yikes, but attacker gets banned because newbie protection. Soooo…I can just ignore it and because I will get later killed 1000’s of times it doesn’t really matter anyway.
Alt tab back…green flicker of death. Kill client. Search google…find no solution up to now. Drivers are all up to date, no overheating, no problems in other far more hardware demanding games. Decide to just play 1 mission and fill the skill bar.
Mission is the same old snore fest like the last 6 or 7. Exactly the same. Only the name of the mission changes. No narrative, no new informations, nothing, just lock on, orbit target, fire, wait, repeat.
After the mission, i just wanted to fill the skill bar and call it a day. Yea… so i thought… and than came EVE… To make it short. My skill bar is empty but I can’t fill in new skills like the 2 days before. I have the filter set to “can learn now” and i tried several of the skills with learning times from 2h to 1d but every time I get the message this skill does not fit into the queue or something along this line.

So in summary.

The “game play” in the tutorial is an atrocious snore fest without anything interesting. Glitches everywhere. Up to now I have no idea what I’m supposed to do in the game. Why did the game let me chose a faction and a bloodline and a corp when nothing matters. How does the EVE Online developers expect anyone to pay money for such a playing experience. Shouldn’t the first moments of such a subscription based game be awe inspiring so you are lured into it?

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Welcome to EVE. Where most game mechanics make absolutely no sense whatsoever. The short answer to your question is yes. But to go into more detail would require a short novel to explain…

Free tip: reject invitations and duels in your settings. Both just serve to bait new players.

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The tutorial does not teach you how to play EVE.

In my opinion, having played for years now, no tutorial, no matter how in depth, could give you any idea of how to play EVE.

EVE is personal. There are probably as many ways to play EVE as there are players of EVE.

The tutorial does provide you with a few commonly shared reference points, so you can either continue studying the game on your own (not recommended) or find a mentor(s) to expand on your knowledge of the game.

You learn about EVE by doing.

You write your own story.

You’ll understand that later, if you stick with EVE.

Probably not what you wanted as a response, but the best advice I can give you is to seek out a mentor, and or a mentoring corp (there are a bunch of them) for help.

New player friendly corps come in a wide variety, so if you don’t find a fit at first, don’t worry about that. Just keep looking.

To give you some perspective on EVE’s famous learning curve, this game is so vast, you’re still a newbie at six months, some people make the argument you’re still a newbie at a year. No matter where you stand on that, you can play this game a decade and still discover possibilities you never knew existed for game play.

And EVE is evolving all the time, because EVE, though unique to each player, is the culmination of all our shared experiences of and in the game.

And, yes, in the earlier days of EVE, faction, bloodline did matter, and had consequences.

Best of luck.
o7

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Welcome to Eve.

The tutorial has been through a few iterations in the past couple of years but it’s an impossible task - you can’t learn Eve that way. Eve is a game that works a whole lot better if you read the manual before logging in. Things make a whole lot more sense if you have some background.

A good starting point is https://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Getting_Started_in_EVE_Online

There is also a tutorial video series called flight academy available in-game (F12 -> tutorial videos tab) or on youtube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCczUeYqoS7d40bkeWmJHXGw

As mentioned the learning curve is easier to deal with the support of a new player friendly corporation. There are several - 2 worthy of mention are:

https://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Applying_to_EVE_University
https://wiki.bravecollective.com/public/corps/brave-newbies-inc/how-to-apply

Good luck!

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Well, you are right, the tutorial is not satisfying at all. But that’s EVE: Reading and watching in advance.
You need patience and have to like learning to enjoy EVE, and there’s plenty of players who don’t like the concept, that’s perfectly normal.
This is a sandbox played all around the world with many languages. And there’s a story/lore, but most players just ignore “historical facts” and start to interact.
Many players also confirm your notion of the dullnes of PvE, which is the heart of missioning and the tutorial. But to learn about PvP, it is highly recommended to watch tons of youtube fights and talk to corpmates to learn.
And after a while, you’re in the game, and even accept Icelandic English or all the other accents you will meet in New Eden :slight_smile:

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Welcome to New Eden.

You are lost, that’s absolutely normal. You play Eve on the long run, some people have been playing for 15 years.
Help yourself, make some new friends by joining some noob friendly corporation. Alone and without valuable knowledge of game mechanics, you’ll probably quit out of boredom.
As Do Little told you, Brave Newbies are a good corp to join in the begining.

Fly safe.

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When I first started the game, we had no tutorial per se, all we had were the career missions which I did not do till much much later.

I’m running on my fifth year of playing this game. There’s a lot of trial and error I had to go through. But I think it was better that way for me.

Nowadays, a lot of people need to be spoon fed the basics, because learning is hard and 20 year olds with the attention span of a 5 year old seems to be the norm. I guess we can thank call of duty for that.

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Like I have written before, I have no problems with complex games. I play chess/go on good amateur levels. On PC, games like CiV or Stellaris on highest difficulty are relaxing.

What I have problems with is:

No explanation at all by the tutorial missions in the game. 7 in words SEVEN completely identical boring grind missions in the introduction campaign which all teach nothing new past the first one.
Glitches from the start in nearly every mission. Up to now I can’t even train new skills, because the game will not allow me to add new ones in an empty queue (Support is also silent on this one since 2 days).

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Forget the tutorial, it’s useless. You should join a newbie friendly corporation, they know how to explain things better than most vets can, they could propably get your skill queue issue sorted out too.

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@Yenife Asire

Found the troll.

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Just quit and play something else trust me you won’t miss anything worthwhile and you’ll end up regretting getting involved in this game later on

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Welcome to EvE!

Yes, the tutorials aren’t so great. The real EvE that captivates and entertains is created by it’s players rather than being scripted by the developers. Some like this, some don’t. There is an EvE meme that has been around in various forms for a long time. it simply says - “EvE: here’s a ship, F you”. You’ll figure things out.

as far as the skill que - free Alpha characters are limited to a 24-hour skill que, subscribed Omega characters can put max 50 skills in their que with no time restrictions.

English - EvE is an international game with players all over the world. Often people chat with each other in various languages. It’s a good part of EvE.

Stay with it, join a group. EvE has it’s faults, certainly (some glaring), but can be a lot of fun.

p.s. - you will want the choice whether or not to fire at something even if you have it target locked.

p.p.s. - Yes, trust nobody. You will learn who you can trust a little. Don’t buy stuff hawked in local chat. Don’t do direct trades in a trade window. Read contracts very carefully multiple times before accepting them. Never complain if you get blown up or scammed. Learn from it and move on.

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Nope, developers are to lazy for that …

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I’ve just returned to the game after 2 years off. I thought I would try out the new tutorial line to remind myself how to play. It is absolute garbage, I can only think that the developer who implemented that must have been working out his notice.

However, at the bottom of the tree of missions are 4 standalone tasks which I believe link to the old career agents (I haven’t actually confirmed that though). These were half decent and I’d recommend doing them assuming they are the old ones. You don’t need to do the other 16 missions in the tree before going to these career agents.

One big thing I remember which was a huge eye opener for me when I first started was discovering that you could double click anywhere in space and your ship will fly in that direction. So you don’t need to keep head butting an asteroid or station as the autopilot tries to get you to the other side. Double click in space and manually clear the obstacle before using the orbit/approach selection.

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:slight_smile: funny i just found that out myself… yeah pretty new here too

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Might I suggest having Rookie Chat open and asking questions. There are almost always some of us vets there to help out.

m

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hey @Einar_Estidal

you got a few responses but i didnt saw the MAIN thing
play in windows mode … no alt tab stuff … press ESC … in settings left top corner choose not full screen … choose window mode … you can max it then but you can change windows easy … :wink:

and the rest … hmm … the tutirial is … basic controlls … BASIC means basic … you cant make a tutorial for everything … the next steps “career agents” will go deeper in different things in EV but only BASIC to …

best advice: hurry up and join a new player friendly corp … like EVE Uni or Brave Newbies or any other corp you like and where you feel ok

o/

JuuR

btw. nice wall of text

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Doubleclick in the direction or at the object you want your ship to align to. Holding Q + Click also works.
Alt + Space stops your ship. Or the little minus below your capacitor, the little plus brings you to full speed.

Shortcuts and keybindings help a lot later in the game. It’s worth just reading a bit in the options to find what’s possible. With only a few days in, you probably will leave with more questions than answers.
So keep googling, and asking questions. That’s basically the best way to know what’s even possible.

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No need for tutorial really… just dive straight into the timers and the huge empty space.
You will have plenty of time to do something else while waiting.

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