There is a reason other games use levels as indicators. It's not just for comparisons, but to make it easy to find content that is appropriate for your skill and equipment level. Most of the content in this game is unmarked.

For open space there are at least two indicators: ship size and number of enemies. For exploration there are ...

I think the various types of combat anomalies and exploration sites do need better risk/reward markings. Players have to consult external lists, or lose ships figuring stuff out on their own. The DED ratings are good on sites that have them, but the "unrated" sites should have... a rating. It could be different rating scale, perhaps fewer bands that could encompass DED 1-3, 4-6 (etc) to preserve a sense of mystery.

This looks good.

Voice acting will be a god send after years of walls of text. How long do you think it will take to work through these missions?

The idea is to capture the attention of the people that EVE was losing in the first few hours. By giving them a story to cling to, the process of reading instructions and figuring out how this game works becomes a little easier.

What CCP wants to do is draw more people into our sandbox and encourage them to stay longer than they do.

I look forward to trying this out next week. I'm hoping it's decent enough that I'll be happy to spruik the game to all my friends.

So they are going to create this snazzy, brightly colored intro sequence to pull people who would normally be put off by the actual game itself.

Surely the numbers will go through the roof after this.

On top of this, they give free SP to new players who will have no clue how to effectively use it and go "HURRR level 4 light missiles".

Dev Blog is nice, but this is 2016 - if you want to show off the new intro sequence you should do it in the form of a "let's play" video.

And those are the ones that currently might stick around.
Everyone else goes "what the **** am I supposed to do now .The **** is going on!?"
That's who this is aimed at.

As Inception is all about working with your Empire, the Research Facility, Assembly Point and Hidden Drifter Zenith are different for each of the 4 major factions.

Seriously? The whole idea, up til now has been encouraging new players to join new player friendly corps - Now you are removing that in favour of role playing with factions?

Bounty rewards "instead" of completion of task rewards - Yeah that's how Eve works, are you rewriting every mission in Eve OR just those for new players?

I do hope you have lowered the damage of Drifters, I can see it now - Rookie X days old arrives at desti, faces off to Drifter gets insta blapped and quits

I am curious, what is the point of existing players testing NPE ? They know the ropes and how to avoid the pitfalls of rookie missions so your not going to get a very balanced review.

OMG what did you do to Aura's voice?????

Building your toon should have meaningful choices, and I think it's critical to the NPE to change this. It's the first thing you do in eve, it should be a polished and worthwhile experience.

1. Before telling us all what a horrible idea it is, how about we wait until the feature is released on Singularity?

2. The current modus operandi for missions is that NPCs provide ISK bounties, but then the mission agent also provides ISK bounties, LP rewards, and sometimes an item reward (especially in the case of the career agents, for example).

3. I suspect that part of the Inception new player experience will be a short story arc that starts with basic flight, manufacturing, exploration, combat, and then segues into a "finale" where the player helps their empire/faction/mentor in a fleet that tries to take on a Drifter and everyone dies (because EVE is designed to be a harsh, cold universe). Following that finale will be the usual advice, including a recommendation to find a social group or player corporation of interest to the new player.

4.Having more eyes looking over the NPE will mean that spelling, grammatical, mission design, lore, and other errors get picked up by the fanatical player base. It also gives experienced players an idea of what new players will know after running through the NPE. You'll remember that advice for new players used to include, "do the starter missions" in order to ensure that the new player has some basic understanding of game mechanics.

5. A long time ago, the NPE for EVE was "here is a spaceship, now go figure it all out yourself." As the game grew, the players grew with it. Then after a while there was enough stuff in EVE that new players would get lost, so CCP added career agents, tutorial missions, and have tried "fixing" the NPE several times. The EVE of Castor was a much simpler game than the EVE of today!

6.In addition, EVE has pretty much captured the entire market of players interested in learning the ropes the hard way. CCP is hoping that providing a little more hand-holding and goal-setting for new players will help recruit more players who aren't so self-motivated to participate in what is really one of the most masochistic game mechanic learning experiences in the MMO genre.

At least Kerbal Space Program has "save" and "load" so blowing up spaceships can be entertaining, and some people go for "maximum Kerbal" to see how badly they can break things while still accomplishing the mission :D In EVE Online, when you make a mistake you suffer losses that can't be rectified by loading a favourable save game.

7. So EVE is a game that has historically appealed to a particular niche. CCP wants to try and grow the niche without changing the basic nature of the game.

But will it work.