Tommy's Story & the new player experience

An Expanded New Player Experience

Many New Players: "Eve seems boring, repetitive and I don't even know what to do after a couple days playing."
Vets: "You're a moron. Eve doesn't need you."
Vets: "Go back to WoW."
Vets: "It's not boring. Learn to play."
Many New Players: "It seems like I have to spend 2-3 months training before I can have any fun. I'm not subscribing."

My assessment is that Eve's problem is not the famous steep learning curve itself, but how new players simply don't obtain enough information about the game to make basic decisions. This is not a good thing, no matter how vets and perhaps some devs try to spin it. The learning curve itself is completely disconnected from the experience curve.

It's like infants trying to learn a complex language in a household where nobody speaks around them. In this case the problem is not the complexity of the language but the disconnect between experience and what must be learned. New players should obtain a better sense of the game within 5-15 days and should be better guided through some of the decision making you make in the first month (while they learn about the game enough to start making real decisions on their own).



Combined with this problem is the fact that Eve often gives you two choices: (A) the smart thing to do vs (B) the fun thing do to. The perfect example is the interest in training Learning skills up. The experience curve has many counter-intuitive elements (i.e. it can quickly feel like a pointless ISK grind with repetitive content and you are limited to playing only 1 character). The experience curve needs to be much more engaging in the first couple weeks and some of the counter-intuitive elements need to be diminished.

Let me put a summary of my suggestions up front using a fictional new player (Tommy) and then give the full explanation. The important ideas are having an expanded tier of Advanced Advisory agents along with a "closed" set of systems for newbie pvp.

Tommy, The Newbie

Tommy just started playing Eve. He's heard about it over the years and decided to try it out. He's a former MMO player who enjoys FPShooters as well.

[ Give players more fun things to do on a platter, while they absorb the massive amount of information required to MAKE basic decisions in eve. ]

He enters Eve and immediately gets a pretty welcome screen and a sexy female voice which explains that he's been put into the CAS Corp as a new Gallente character, and will have the opportunity for some guided play that will help manage the steep learning curve of Eve. He's also told that as a Gallente character, he's still free to learn any skills and other racial technologies. It explains that the Eve universe is extremely broad, complex and can't be learned by a simple manual. He's told Eve is not a linear progression from start to finish but instead is an open-ended sandbox where players make an exciting world. Tommy is excited by this, not deterred.

Within his first minutes, he's engaged in the Crash Course tutorials which start giving him simple tasks and rewarding him with low hanging fruit. Tommy likes it so far.

Tommy goes through the current tutorials and is told that finishing all 3 branches of the stage 1 tutorial agents will grant him access to more advanced opportunities. Once he completes all 3, he is taken to a special CAS Advanced Advisory Agent that starts a tutorial which explains how Certs work. It also shows him a fun in-game Ship Information Repository which has info links and 3d models of all the basic faction ships in eve. Tommy is excited about all the shiny toys and things to do.

The special CAS agent also shows Tommy a list of LP Items available through CAS. They are mostly basic civilian modules for a variety of things along with some Gallente frigates, ammo and BPs. LP Items are traded with LP and... newbie player tags!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Tommy is then granted access to several advanced CAS tutorial agents. One is devoted to PvP & Exploration (Security). One is devoted to Advanced Industry (Production). One is devoted to General Advancement (Administration). He's told to come back to his primary CAS advisor if at any time he wants to look for other corporations to investigate. [The newbie corp advanced tutorial missions will include days worth of stuff to do, equivalent to hitting L2 standing in another corp.]

Tommy is sexually aroused at this point but has to get up in the morning for an exam. Tommy decides he doesn't need much sleep anyways and keeps playing. He wants to see PvP in Eve.

He immediately goes to the CAS PvP & Exploration Agent (security) which starts a cool chain of tutorials and missions. The first thing he is guided through is the star map. He sees how huge Eve universe really is and is shown stars colored by how many kills are happening and by who controls what. He's told to set a destination to a system several jumps away and is given a civilian probe launcher with 8 probes. He's told he must find a wormhole, to bookmark it and to do a quick investigation inside.

[This is special worm-hole space only available to new players who are on these missions with frigates and destroyers. It's a constellation of several WH-systems interconnecting different newbie races. Entry points should have basic Concord presence to avoid gate camps. There would be several central systems where it's much more of a free-for-all around the planets that include the main pvp objectives for group missions. Wrecks would not be salvagable nor be profitable.]

Tommy goes off to find the wormhole several jumps away. He is extremely confused by the scannnig process at first, but then finally realizes how to use them after about 20 minutes and with the tutorial's help. He is shown how to bookmark the wormhole he finds. He is shown how to go to the wormhole. He is shown how to look at the wormhole's information. It says something about how it leads to "tutorial unknown space." He jumps through the wormhole and immediately back. It looks really amazing in there and is scary because he's told people can shoot each other in there. He returns to the agent.

The PVP & Exploration agent explains how to setup clones properly and explains that the next step may involve dying. Pods and being podded is explained. He's given a mission to go join a fleet in "tutorial mission space" and to come back once he's killed several other enemy players. He's rewarded with a civilian webber and reminded of the cool LP Items obtained with a mix of isk, LP and tags from other newbie enemy players. He is blown up on one of the pvp missions but just laughs since he has a good sense of how to get right back on his feet, and has a mix of ISK and LP enough to quickly setup a new frigate.

[Civilian probe launchers and probes are limited in what they can find. Civilian Cloaks are mission items turned in with mission and which only work in tutorial w-space]

Tommy does a lot of pvp-oriented missions in this worm-hole space and decides he's one of the best Eve pilots to ever exist, having blown up many other ships and learning to use orbits, blasters and webber to his advantage. He spends the rest of the night doing pvp and grabs some of the simpler LP Items. He dreams of blowing ships up in his Imicus. When he gets home the next day, Friday, he rushes straight to his computer to play more Eve.

He finds he's been awarded several Decorations by the CAS Advanced Training Agents. He received one for finishing basic training. He received another for meeting some simple CAS pvp goals (i.e. killing X number of enemies). He has also gained a bunch of new skills while away and feels happy about the skills he'll gain in the next 24 hours. He's making good progress towards a few Starter Certs.

Tommy decides to try the other Advanced Tutorial Agents and to do some more PvP later.

He decides he isn't in the mood for more Industry stuff just yet, so he picks the General Advancement Agent. The tutorial explains how Tommy's standing with the Corporation increases with his mission achievements and that higher standing allows better agents and missions. He's shown that there is a Level 2 agent for CAS with more advanced missions and better rewards. Tommy sees that it's classified as a Security and PvP agent. This is his new objective: to gain access to the L2 Q -18 CAS agent. He also wants another PvP decoration.

The Advancement agent gives him basic combat missions and some courier missions with interesting story-lines. He finds these give much better ISK rewards and Loyalty Points. He gets a basic Learning skillbook as a reward and is guided through the attribute remapping tool, warned not to use remaps until you have some longer-term training objectives. He is introduced to the concept of implants and Jump Clones. He is told that finishing all the advanced tutorials should grant him sufficient standing to have a Jump Clone (and that Cybernetics is available as a LP Item). Tommy spends many hours that night doing Advancement combat and courier missions, along with storyline missions that get him implants.

[Gaining standing in newbie corps should progress much faster than normal, allowing reasonable access to a Jump Clone when finishing all the tutorial agent missions. CAS station locations are limited so being allowed early access to Jump Clones is not overpowering whatsoever for newer players and simply liberates them into feeling more freedom]

He gains access to the L2 Agent which dramatically increases his rewards and sends him back into an intense PvP epic chain within wormhole space.

He gets a mission with a Civilian Cloaking Device that tells him to sneak through the wormhole space to a deadspace where he must hack into a datacenter and return. He gets a mission that has him analyze an archaelogical relic. He gets a very special storyline mission that requires him to find the closest Amarr sovereign system and to scan down the mission objective that he must hack into (i.e. use the map to look at Amarr sov and figure out which has the shortest jumps from destination). These keep him busy with increasingly interesting perspectives into Eve.

He is granted access to e-war civilian modules that are amazing. He's matched again with a fleet for pvp. He discovers a couple other similarly minded CAS players he likes to fleet with for PvP. One is a veteran Eve player who teaches him a lot over the voice comms.

He spends all Friday night completely obsessed with Eve, doing a mix of PvP and more focused isk/LP grinding.

He wakes up Saturday morning and decides to try the Advanced Industry agent. He learns a lot more about the markets of Eve, how to do research and more manufacturing. He also spends a little time mining in the newbie w-space because he spotted some good veld in there and wants to see how much he can make during quiet time. He gets blown up trying to haul ore out of w-space and has another laugh.

He discovers that a lot of the items he has are not "real" items he'll be able to use in the future. They are civilian modules. He becomes curious about all the toys and opportunities ahead with real items.

It's Saturday evening and Tommy's been playing Eve almost non-stop since Thursday. He's put in about 20+ hours and doesnt care to stop.

Tommy is starting to face some choices. He has to consider how much time to spend doing PvP for pure fun vs advancing and making money. He's happy that Eve allows you to gain skills passively, so this makes him feel better about just doing PvP for the fun of it. He realizes it's expensive to replace ships and starts thinking about how he might want to make money. He is unsure the best way to make money, but his experience tells him it's doing missions. He's still curious about trading, exploration, manufacturing and mining.

He finds himself spending more and more time looking at all the cool toys in the Ship Information Repository and wondering about them. He starts asking better questions in newbie chat and CAS chat. He decides that he should get a destroyer next.

He starts to finish the Advanced CAS Agents' missions. He gains more Decorations.

Several more experienced CAS players tell him to stick with the missions until finished and then to go back to his Advanced CAS Advisor at the station when done. Tommy follows this suggestion and plays deep into the evening, doing more of the missions. He sadly has reached the end of the Advanced Combat missions, but he ends up finding his CAS pvp buddies and they spend hours with their little fleet running around killing other players in newbie w-space. He stops caring about standing and just enjoys blowing ships up and having fun doing pvp with these people. He isn't bothered at all about getting blown up either, but feels pressure to make ISK. The 1million ISK loan by his Veteran PvP friend helped keep that pressure off for now.

Sunday morning, Tommy wakes up and heads straight into Eve. He gains an awesome CAS Decoration for lots of PvP kills. He is also trained for a Destroyer(catalyst) and is excited to try it out in pvp. He is doing ok on ISK because of all the missions he did with the Advancement and Industry agents. He finds he's gained a lot of LP but doesnt know which items to spend it on. He picks a BP for a catalyst from the LP Item store, since he knows he's going to be losing many of them. He's learned that blasters are excellent for his style of play in PvP but that Rails work better for missions. He's excited to try his Catalyst in both.

His standing has gone up tremendously. He decides to spend the quiet day trying to finish up the other agent missions so he can have a Jump Clone, although he's not exactly sure why he needs it! He also wants to start looking into other NPC corporations for missions. By early evening, he's finished all the Advanced missions and is starving. He'd eat but he's having too much fun arguing about something stupid in CAS corp chat. He fails to notice right away that he's achieved 8.0 standing with CAS having finished all the tutorial missions and gained another set of elite Decorations.

He talks with the Advanced Advisory Agent who begins going over a tutorial which explains the difference between empire-based newbie corporations, player-run corporations and NPC corporations. It's reviewed how he might seek standing and LP rewards from a big and widely spread out NCP corporation like Federation Navy. He's shown how to open the corp's info and browse available agents. He's told he can also open the star map and see agents that way.

The Advisory Agent recommends staying within CAS and heading off to either Fed Navy or something more industrial oriented. He's also told some vague story about some events surrounding the Sisters of Eve and to keep an eye open for opportunities.

The final reward for finishing all the Advanced tutorials is a set of tier1 Learning skill books.

Tommy can't decide if he wants to move onwards or to keep doing pvp in the newbie w-space. He's told that he can keep doing pvp in there as long as he has under 800 Skill Points and uses a frigate/destroyer. His CAS buddies tell him to set a jump clone there at the CAS station so he can more quickly come back for pvp!! Tommy is in love with this game... and spends several hours in fleet with his CAS buddies, ganking noobs. They really enjoy killing the Caldari players who dont seem to know what to do once you get in close.

He comes home Monday and decides to look for a L1 Fed Navy agent. He finds out that he has access to a few Quality 0 agents not too far away. He does a few missions, but then he goes to meet up with his CAS buddies for some more pvp. He continues this cycle every night, eventually hitting L2 during the week and realizing he can start making a lot more ISK by running L2/salvaging than by doing most other things. He also noticed some trade opportunities between the 2 regions he spends the most time within.

He regularly browses the ingame ship model thingy and has learned to use Evemon outside of game to figure out training. He is a newbie but he feels comfortable with the steep learning curve because between the PvP, the simple trading he's done and the Fed Navy missions he has plenty to do. He also decided what he wants to focus on over the coming 3-6 months having had much more of a sense about what's out there.

• He has a sense of achievement throughout the first few days.
• He understands Certs and has a better grasp of skill goals.
  
• He understands the Map.
• He understands Corps.
• He has a basic intro to exploration and the professions.
• He has simple grasp of the toys available.
• He has had a taste of PvP.
• He has enough basic information and experience to comfortably make the hard decisions ahead in the first few months.

Tommy decides to make a 2nd character to try things from another race. Eve allows him to train a 2nd character at 50% speed, which is very frustrating since it's a lot more constraining that other games, but he figures it's better than nothing (which is how it used to be for Eve). He makes a new character. A minmatar character that looks BADASS. He wants to fly the Rifter because he heard it was awesome and he was shot down a few times by them. He sets his first character to 50% training speed and gets started on the new character. He gets setup to join with his CAS buddies for pvp right away and loves how you can make fleets across races.

Tommy decides he is going to subscribe to Eve online for sure and can't believe he hadn't tried Eve a lot sooner...

His roommate insists Eve was boring when he tried it, but Tommy tells him it's really fun and that he should try it again.