Jacob Holland
Weyland-Vulcan Industries
292
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Posted - 2014.07.17 20:19:00 -
[1] - Quote
First, to deal with some of the things which have come up in the thread...
Quote:And nothing in this game constitutes bullying, just so you know. There is no such thing as bullying in an online interaction you expressly agreed to, and that is 100% voluntary.
This, here? this is entirely false...
Quote:NPC Buy Orders and Pend. Insurance SRP idea...
I cannot see a way that this can possibly be a good idea. Long ago, shuttles were sold by NPC sell orders, they sold for 500ISK each and you could buy them in almost any station; which of course was very convenient when you bought a new ship, you could pick up a cheap shuttle, go and pick up your new ship and leave the shuttle behind...
The problem was that shuttles are built from Tritanium, so whenever there were few enough miners (or loot refiners) to push the Trit price above a certain level the clever bought thousands of shuttles, reprocessed them and profitted.
The NPC sell orders created an artificial ceiling for Tritanium (and there were IIRC other things which capped some of the other mins).
NPC buy orders which follow the same process would, of course, create an artificial floor for the related materials...
So let's imagine a form of NPC buy order which makes this impossible... Perhaps an NPC order pops up whenever Pend. Insurance give away a ship? Well assuming that the orders are not being sniped immediately by hawk-eyed traders (let's not assume bots) because they are higher than the market average you run the risk of an undersupply - more ships spawned by Pend. than are being sold to them, do they run out? If not then you have an oversupply of destroyers (for example) in the rest of the market...
And that's not even considering the clever... I'm sure there are ways I'm not thinking of which would result in near infinite ISK.
Regardless of how you look at it you have a (possibly) balanced mineral faucet and mineral sink, and then an ISK faucet which is in no way balanced to the ISK sink it's linked to.
Also, given how many ships you can quickly acquire through the career agents, I'm really not sure it's even necessary.
On to the main subject...
I have always tried to keep up with what the NPE was all about, it's not always been easy to do so though the accessibility of the career agents was a boon from that perspective (and, of course, it's difficult to try to get back to the newbie mindset, where everything you do is either explained in text or entirely opaque).
The CD Key in my Collectors Edition recently gave me the first opportunity I've had in a very long while to go right back to the ground floor, to access the very first missions properly, the Rookie Help channel and so forth.
The very first thing I woud suggest is something which has disappeared from the tutorial since I first ran it. In those days one of the first things Aura told you to do (and I think she actually told you to do it rather than putting up a little text box but it was a long time ago...) was to choose a chat channel (you only had local, corp and Rookie Help at the time and all were reasonably sensible) and say hello.
Why is this important?
It's very easy to become insulated from the other players in the game when you're desperately concentrating on what's happening to your ship, watching those white bars turn red (either on your HUD or your locked target) or whatever else you're doing takes a lot of concentration when it's all new to you. And the longer it takes you to make contact with those other players the more difficult it becomes.
If practically the first thing you do is type "The game's telling me to say hi, so hello everyone." into a reasonably populous chat channel and you quickly get "LOL"s and hellos back; not only have you broken your chat cherry but you've also received positive reinforcement for the behaviour. And who knew that talking to people would be important in an MMO? 
I would support the suggestion that it's too easy to miss some of the really important missions - not so much the "Here's a Condor (we say is) full of explosives, now go and lose it"; but certainly the "Here's a Tristan, go and kill some stuff and don't come back until you've lost it". That mission itself is somewhat heavy-handed about it but I like the concept and I think that everyone should have run something like it in their career agent arcs, not just the people who want to be combat pilots.
I would suggest a slightly lighter touch, going from one mercenary frigate who can barely scratch an Amarr's shields to five, crazy sensor damping, cruisers and three spider drones in one hit is a little too Deus Ex Machina - perhaps one frigate to five frigates (one or two of which have webs) to another five and a couple of spider drones, and then roll in the cruisers a couple at a time... the mission should not be survivable but you should be able to boast about how many you killed before they blew you up.
Perhaps the mining version requires you to mine a contested rock full of very valuable minerals, with the people contesting it calling in reinforcements to see off the claim jumper...
And I believe that, if it is possible, these missions should not start out with "Here's a ship" but that the mission objectives and rewards should be obfuscated. That when you lose your ship you get told to report back to your agent and he/she is very sympathetic about your loss and provides you with the real reward, the replacement ship and an appropriate fitting.
I don't believe that new players should be brought out of the universe, to a newbie ark where they can be kept isolated from the world, but I do think there are some things which could benefit from changes...cont. |