One of the big issues that I feel put players off PVP is the cost. This is especially true for new players.

Its a well known fact that pvp cost money, an average t1 frigate is going to set you back about 10m ISK depending on fittings and rigs, yet for new players going to go into low sec to try pvp that ship is going to die.

Now 10m is a lot, -don't laugh- for new players and I suspect for a lot of people it is a lot. New players can't do incursions and their ISK/hour on missions will be low because of sub-par dps or tank. After 6 months in the game I was still going about 15m an hour in a navy raven doing lv4s.

The result is people spend more time engaged in missioning and mining to fund their pvp activity. Now I had a lot of free time then so I could grind missions for hours to do pvp a lot, (about half a billion worth of it if I remember). However now that I'm in work I doubt I could/would.

And people wonder why half the player base ends up mining/missioning?

[stuff

Again, it's a question of accessibility. For new players, you make it super easy to do mining/missions but have them jump hurdles to get into PvP, whether it is the simple cost, the more complex learnings of properly fitting ships and tactics, just getting their butts to a proper place to engage in this activity, and then getting their faces mashed in until they eventually figure it out.

Sure, vets can say to nut up, but I get the feeling that most of you would agree that finding a good system to get new players fully engaged in PvP right away would be a good thing for this game.

Maybe it's too theme park of a concept but maybe it needs to be extended just a little bit for new players to get them more engaged with PvP right away.

The game does nothing to prepare a new user for PVP, and unless the user joins a good corp or Eve Uni, there are precious few players willing to expend the time and effort needed to hand-hold a noob into the PVP world.

What other game have you ever played in your life that didn't come with a tutorial level or instructions to tell you how to play it?

Eve is a *game*, not a second job. I don't think a lot of players understand that. It's supposed to be *entertainment*. It's supposed to be *fun* -- and fun for new players as well as existing ones.

The players who stick around in Eve tend to be self-starters and self-learners, but that still doesn't speak well of CCP that they've neglected such an essential part of the game. (And they do make semi-annual oaths to improve the NPE, so it's clear that they know it sucks too.)

I'm all for making PVP a bigger part of Eve, but in order to do that you need to train new players how to do it. A lot of the risk-averse behavior you see in Eve stems from the fact that players are too scared to lose their pretty ships. (And by no means only new players or hisec players.) Losing should hurt a bit, granted; that's your incentive to learn and get better. But frigates, to a new player, should be as disposable as a tissue -- use it, get it blowed up, throw it out, get another one. Harden them to losing and give them a quick thrill at winning. Don't make losing too painful or winning too rewarding at first. It's got to be fast, easy, and cheap.

Red vs Blue has the right idea, I think, but that thunderdome is too far out of a noob's reach. They do their best to include newer players, but those guys are in it for the PVP themselves; they don't want to babysit noobs as a rule.

Sure, if you don't mind being used as a scout, a bait ship or a cannon-fodder tackler in a fleet fight. I don't find that very fun, but whatevs.

Eventually, though, I got into the groove and realized that for a game like FTL, part of the experience should be experimenting with new things, paying attention, and learning how to maximize your chances of survival on your own. ItGÇÖs not dissimilar to systems driven, sandbox games like Minecraft or Terraria in that way: they just dump you into a system and tell you that figuring it out is half the fun. (The other half is feeling superior to people who complain about it not being spoon fed to them.)

I've often thought that the NPE should do two things: have a "Fitting Your Ship 101" class with cutscenes and dialogue and whatnot, just to familiarize noobs with the basics of EVE ships. Powergrid, CPU, rigs, high-medium-low power slots, etc. Your instructor would be some hard-as-nails combat vet who would walk you through fitting out your first frigate in PVP fashion. Then you'd be released in a noob-only PVP arena where you'd mix it up with other noobs. If you got killed, you'd get a "here's why you died" report that listed some fitting/skill suggestions. I.e., "You might want to improve your gunnery and capacitor skills, pilot. You got capped out and didn't have enough range on your guns!"

Then, after you graduated from that level of PVP instruction, you'd have "EVE Fleet Mechanics 101" where you and other noobs would learn how to operate in fleets under an NPC FC against a rival noob fleet (or NPC fleet).

Just doing that would vastly increase the number of PVP-capable (and PVP-aspirant) players.

What the researchers found was that relative to those in other conditions, children who were given instructions on how to make the toy squeak played with it for shorter amounts of time, did fewer unique actions with it, and discovered fewer of the toyGÇÖs other functions.

So if someone pays for a game they should have the dev-given right to hit the skill ceiling the moment they touch the controls?

Yeah, shame on a new player for actually wanting to have fun in a game they paid for. Eesh.

Not exactly a recipe for attracting a lot of today's utes with the attention span of gnats.

It's not so much the entitlement of gamers that expect... no, demand, everything be handed to them right now without having to strive for the achievement and learn what they're doing, but the flippant arrogance behind that entitlement.

Boy, you must be a blast at parties.

Repeat after me: this is a GAME. It's meant as ENTERTAINMENT.

The amount of humorlessness and EVE IS SERIOUS BUSINESS in this thread is just...well, exactly what I've come to expect from a subset of Eve players over the years, actually.

But hey, if you want to treat Eve as a second job that you don't even get paid to do, go right ahead. I'd prefer to have fun with Eve, and for other players to have fun with me, but that's just me.

Good, some of them are like parasites, they infect a game with their instant gratification bullshit, devs cater to them, the game dies because it's become ridiculously easy and thus boring, they move onto the next game and repeat the process.

It's fine as long as you aren't a CCP stockholder. I understand the sentiment though.

See my point above lol.

You use the words game and entertainment in allcaps as a counter to the statement that you don't get to be good on day 1.

This says nothing about games, entertainment, or the post you quoted, but it does say a lot about you.

Pic related

I know. I have a hard time dealing with my own awesomeness most of the time! I thought it summed up the attitudes of many of the people who play EvE but don't get to ride in the FunVee.

We here at the Damien McCandless Institute of Behavioural Science call it "Salvosing"

One of them is that it's really easy to get a rise out of the SERIOUS BUSINESS players. As I have just proved.

Another is that there's a large gap between "making the game fun for noobs" on one hand, and "ZOMG EVE IS TURNING INTO WOW" on the other. It's not a binary choice.

This is an evergreen in Eve, though: the notion that making Eve more accessible to new players amounts to making it a themepark or "dumbing it down". I generally chalk it up to bittervet syndrome -- that since you had to grind up the hard way, new players should have to as well. That attitude makes no sense to me, but then I'm a player who gets a kick out of helping noobs out rather than ganking their T1 frigs at stargates.

In this game? Sure because internet spaceships are a game. Not serious business!

All you are saying is the game doesn't meet your definition of fun, which you have demonstrated is instant gratification nonsense.

I just warped right on top of the same guy with a two month old character ratting in a destroyer in a .4 system for the third day in a row. Today I blew him up, sent him the isk to buy a new ship, emailed and chatted in local that he shouldn't do what he does, and still feel bad about it. He sent me a thank you note in Russian. He then brought out an Oracle and I couldn't shoot him because it would be like clubbing a baby seal.

Are you kidding? It happens every time they buff a non-combat ship. You should have heard the howling when the mining-barge changes were announced. The tooth-grinding from epeener's could be heard from miles off. Or when the Venture was introduced, the attitude was, "Hey, *I* had to mine in a crappy frigate; why are you ruining the game just for these noobs?" You don't have to take my word for it; just go back to the forums.

It happens with every expansion. It happened particularly so in the Retribution expansion, when the security changes got hated on extra-hard by the bittervet contingent. Again, check the forums if you think I'm exaggerating.

Yeah I played football and baseball in High School but I never tackled a five year old on the sidelines who was eating an ice cream cone and reading a picture book which is much like killing a two month old player's destroyer when they doesn't understand that people can kill him while he is enjoying the PVE experience of belt ratting.

Yep American (do they tackle in soccer?). Just because something is legal doesn't make it right. I doubt there is a rule against tackling spectators in American Football, it is just implied!

Why do you think I am looking down on you? Don't be so sensitive.

I feel bad about shooting people with no chance of winning. I have no problems shooting people who have a fighting chance. Thanks again for reading my mind lol.

Whether someone has a fighting chance or not is up to them.

PvP is expensive in general, if it wasn't then many of you wouldn't need alt accounts just so that you could raise the funds to be able to afford to PvP. Which we hear people saying on this form many times over the years.

It's a lot like that in real life too. I grew up with one crummy TV in the house. Now kids are in houses with 5 TV's, Gaming consoles, computers, cell phones, etc. And they still whine...