I'll tell you like I tell the noobs in the State War Academy channel.
"best" <- don't do that.

Couldn't be bothered to read 17 pages, so my 2 cents (disclaimer: generalisations abound):

New players tend to mission mostly when they start out. Which is hella boring. Most new people don't have an army of multiboxed Tengu alts.

Most new players, at a certain time in their eve career, start to look beyond and go for a corporation and interaction.

Generally speaking, if they stay long enough for this step, they have read a metric ton of background information on all kinds of game mechanics. I'm talking weeks here.

What happens?

1 API is mandatory. What? They can see everything I do now? Even my emails?
2 Fleet Doctrine: you must fly wat wee need, at all times. Back to the skillboard.
3 TS is mandatory. I gotta get online in all kinds of other apps now, and I need IP's and stuff.
4 You're on TS: 100% Jargon, unintelligeble babble: it feels hella awkward. Noob is scared to talk. Everything moving too fast
5 Noob sees a red, finally the BLAP! (by this time, hours if not days have passed). Noob gets pwned in 10 seconds. Probably shot the wrong thing, or at the wrong time.
6 Gang moves on, noob can never catch up. Done. wait till next weekend to rejoin another exciting PvP roam.

The barrier to entry is still too high. Much too high.

Brave Newbies is cool though. They seem to get that they need to lower the barrier immensly.

Couldn't be bothered to read 17 pages, so my 2 cents (disclaimer: generalisations abound):

New players tend to mission mostly when they start out. Which is hella boring. Most new people don't have an army of multiboxed Tengu alts.

Most new players, at a certain time in their eve career, start to look beyond and go for a corporation and interaction.

Generally speaking, if they stay long enough for this step, they have read a metric ton of background information on all kinds of game mechanics. I'm talking weeks here.

What happens?

1 API is mandatory. What? They can see everything I do now? Even my emails?
2 Fleet Doctrine: you must fly wat wee need, at all times. Back to the skillboard.
3 TS is mandatory. I gotta get online in all kinds of other apps now, and I need IP's and stuff.
4 You're on TS: 100% Jargon, unintelligeble babble: it feels hella awkward. Noob is scared to talk. Everything moving too fast
5 Noob sees a red, finally the BLAP! (by this time, hours if not days have passed). Noob gets pwned in 10 seconds. Probably shot the wrong thing, or at the wrong time.
6 Gang moves on, noob can never catch up. Done. wait till next weekend to rejoin another exciting PvP roam.

The barrier to entry is still too high. Much too high.

Brave Newbies is cool though. They seem to get that they need to lower the barrier immensly.

Sink or swim... while being showered in ISK, skillbooks, and free frigates. And when they move up the ladder to doctrine ships, those have ISK reimbursement (which Goonwaffe members get a special cut of, although other member corps are free to do this as well). They're also brought in having already established themselves in the culture of Goons (having made the requisite transaction of tenbux, United States Dollars).

Goonwaffe's NPE is not one that the game is able to replicate on its own. If you were to make an actual sink-or-swim NPE you'd place the player in nullsec with pretty limited support. Can't give people isk - that would be abused pretty hard. Can't give people too many ships - that would be abused pretty hard. Can't really bring a player in with established social groups, because those that can do so are already doing so. Free skillbooks is about it. You dump new players into space with free-engagement and they're just going to get killed with impunity, and quit because they have no chance of fighting back. The same would happen even if you restricted this pvp to the new characters only, since there's no reliable way for the game to tell if a player of a new character is actually new themselves or not. You end up with the same situation.

Mittens could come out right now and say he's trolling. Wouldn't change any of what I've written here.

So... who's going to make the F&I posts for the recommendations mentioned in the article?

Because I, for one, would like to see how CCP responds when all of the goons +1 an F&I suggestion.


edit: Protected Newbie Area F&I: https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=357990&find=unread
edit: Remove high-sec Awoxing: https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=357991&find=unread

the problem is, things like awoxing is playing the game for some people.

If they drive away all the new players there won't be a game left for them to play.

Grrr goons-want-more-WoW-in-EVE...

Wait, what?

You know that people have been saying that since 2003 right. Every time I hear it I imagine a dude with a long white beard watcing his wrist watch and saying "any time now".

Nothing can chase away 'all the new players', it didn't chase you or me away, and we were new once.

I think the possibility to infiltrate a corp and awox the members is a fun gameplay aspect of EVE you find in no other game. It also makes trust in EVE a real and important thing and adds to the social fabric of the whole game.

CCP always struggles to implement meaningful gameplay into their games, so why should they remove such a gem that has emerged from the sandbox and was probably not even intended in the first place.

Old players say, "I was new once" and then go on to defend their stale gameplay. Story at 11.

Face it, you don't want to have to out think experienced players. New players are easy targets. But griefing, or doing things that are perceived by the inexperienced as griefing, is a zero sum game that cannot support itself in the long term. The Mittani realizes it, why can't you?

Goons being anti-awox is very indicative that they don't like the dangerous side of EVE, and they want the game to be even more carebear in their cute little blue donut resort in nullsec.

EVE is supposed to be dangerous and unforgiving. When that gets removed more and more in favor of whatever the Goons or anyone else wants EVE will have lost its main catch. My proposal of vastly improving the PVE aspect of the game and its story would not harm that however and wouldn't also require throwing new players into a padded system where GM's and whoever else kiss the new players butts giving them false impressions of EVE. I mean what in the hell do you think those players are going to think when they leave that system that was all nice and rosy and jump right into their first smartbomb gate camp? Yeah, that little padded safe system would do nothing to retain new players then.


The truth is you can't improve player retention by making the initial experience easier because that just gives those players a false idea of what the game is really like. If you REALLY want to help new players out then revamp the starting missions to be HARD and require tactics like those that are used in pvp. Give them a fighting chance by training them up yourself CCP in how to win at pvp via mission training.

Free awoxing doesn't make any sense though it's counter intuitive. It's not immediately obvious that your corpmates can kill you without CONCORD intervention, because it doesn't make intuitive sense why that would be true. Corp theft is already a big enough threat to corp security that people still need to be careful about who they hire and what roles they assign, all hi sec awoxing does is make people even more paranoid about who they let into their corps.

I think the only real problem with the NPE (I recently had a go at it) is that it still gives a new player the impression that they're going to be a Big Hero out of the gate. It's still misleadingly giving the impression that the game is like any other MMO, only in space.

The mission in the NPE where you lose a ship is a step in the right direction, but it ought to be your ship, the one you've lovingly cared for in the first few missions, not one given to you specially to lose. And you shouldn't be warned about it, it should be a "no win scenario", and it's explained to you afterwards that this is the nature of EVE (you will get blown up).

Also, after you do the missions where you get the hang of basic controls, shooting and mining, etc., there ought to be a couple of missions where you're thrown into a PUG with other newbies to do some task (group mining or waypoint patrol or something like that), led by an AI commander who's explaining stuff as you go and assigning tasks in the way an FC might.

Then after that, another kind of group mission (again, randomb PUG of newbies), this time with no AI FC, but with the difficulty pitched so that the team can just about squeeze through if nobody communicates, but you can get a nice reward if the team happens to get it together to communicate and co-ordinate.

IOW, the NPE needs to reflect the range of options in the game - of which solo play is more of a minority sport, with various kinds of teamwork being more the norm.

Or, in other words, if you want to mine in high sec or run level 4 missions, "get the **** out of our corp". (And, good luck getting all your stuff back to high sec by yourself.) You have made my point for me.

The mission in the NPE where you lose a ship is a step in the right direction, but it ought to be your ship, the one you've lovingly cared for in the first few missions, not one given to you specially to lose. And you shouldn't be warned about it, it should be a "no win scenario", and it's explained to you afterwards that this is the nature of EVE (you will get blown up).

I think putting the Kobayashi Maru in NPE will cause more new player fallout than less. But maybe having an un-winnable test is what ensures Starfleet trains the best officers.

Le Martini desperate for clueless noobs making it to the nulsec phase so his zerg has someone to shoot at.