'll come right out and say it: The New Tutorial revamp is still coming up rather short. The following post will illustrate why this is a truth, how it was tested, and (hopefully) a way on how to fix this problem that is dampening the growth of our game and community. But first, some background. (If you don't want to read the text, skip to the bullets)


Four days ago, I convinced my childhood friend to give EVE Online a try. We had grown up together, played the same games, went to the same school and parties; eventually we grew up and apart. He got married, I went into the Army ( then got married), He had a kid, and then I had a kid, so on and so forth. Keeping in touch was never really an issue, however, Eventually the phone calls died away as they naturally do. We all have busy lives after all. Along with the phone calls though, and sadly, his brother passed away and left him in a bad state. Out of the blue, I received a phone call from his wife with the news. I immediately called him to offer my condolences and catch up on the last few years of life. Eventually the conversation drifted to video games and how he wanted to get back into "WoW". Well, stifling a chuckle and realizing he was still in a vulnerable state, I began to tell him about EVE online. He had heard of the game, but only from the peripherals. The stories I had mentioned intrigued him, so he was receptive when I sent him the buddy program invitation. The next day, when the wives were satisfied and the children were in bed, we fired up the game and met in high sec.

I let Funkydil Mikakka (Believe it or not, the first part of that horrendous name has some sentimental value) try the tutorial out for an hour. Funky, being an original Ultima Online pioneer and veteran of just about every MMO out there, I assumed his experience coupled with the tutorial revamp would be enough to get him to commit. A half an hour into the session I get a text message from him: "This is stupid, I'm in the middle of no where, and I have no idea what I'm supposed to do, I want to punch the screen."


I text him back and tell him to accept the fleet invitation and I walk him through getting up on EVE voice (yes, pilots do use EVE voice) and proceed to talk him off of the ledge. The following were lessons learned from the Tutorial based on a member that I can only assume is the TARGET MARKET that CCP is trying to penetrate (30 year old intelligent male, wife, kids, established job, avid video game player and si-fi fan; slightly nerdy).

1. The tutorial does fail to de-program new players, or in economist speak, break a new player from an anchor. A new player does not mean that they are entirely new to the video game world, Si-FI, or even MMOs. It does mean that they are coming into the game with what behavioral economists label an anchor. The anchor they bring into the game could be World of Warcraft, or Ultima Online, or Hello Kitty online. It doesn't matter really, but they come into the game with an anchor to compare EVE Online too. They also arrive in EVE Online with some assumptions about the genre; after all, many of us have been playing online games since Dark Fall Online (TEN!) or Meridian 59, or even DWANGO if you lived in the Dallas area in the early 90's. The assumptions could include the apprehension about attributes and how they affect the performance in game. The association of ships and modules with green, blue, and purple gear and the risk aversion of losing such gear in a universe where anything goes. The bottom line is that Funky was confused during character creation, confused with the UI, and confused with the structure of missions. So confused, he was ready to give up an quit.


Solution: The EVE target market consists of new players with anchors to previously played games. To use an example that Dan Ariely used in the book "Predictably Irrational" Star Bucks was successful of breaking a customers anchor to the $1 cup of Dunkin Donuts coffee by creating an atmosphere of an upscale, world cafe, unlike any Donut Shop on the corner. Starbucks changed the drink sizes from mall, medium, and large and created different sizes: tall, venti, grande, etc; essentially the same volume as a Dunkin Donuts coffee. Because we are human, we could drop our anchor to the $1 coffee and pay $3.50 for the same size at Star Bucks, feel good about it, and set a new anchor; all because Star Bucks created an "experience". Like Star Bucks breaking the $1 coffee anchor, The EVE tutorial needs to break a new players experience from that anchor, and the only way to do that is to create an experience so enticing, and so engaging, that a new player will forget about the WoW interface, or the Guild War statistics, and be immersed in a world unlike anything they had ever experienced. A fleet battle for instance...