The Most Important Commodity in New Eden

A three post series exploring the new player experience in Eve Online.
1. The Most Important Commodity in New Eden < You are here.
2. Making Your Own Goals
3. New Player Choices

What is the most important commodity in all of New Eden? More important than moon goo, a better investment than PLEX and the main reason I started this blog? Players and pilots in New Eden buying and blowing things up.

I started this blog in hope of enticing my brother to play Eve (he never got past the 14 day trial). Creating simple, quick guides in such a large expansive game has always been my goal. Tying back to markets helping people make investment decisions, helping stimulate the economic engine which drives the core of Eve. As more and more people play Eve that constant cycle of destruction and creation gives everyone more of what they want. Traders gain liquidity, pvp players find more targets and everyone has more content interactions.

But we have a problem:

I am not the only one that has been thinking about this problem.
Jester Treks Seven Percent Solution
Greedy Goblin's The graph that didn't shrink
Eve News 24: Hona's Corner: New Player Experience

All of these articles and posts outline the problem: getting new players and keeping them. All of these articles outline potential solutions to these problems. My aim here is to point out not a solution but whose problem is this and who is going to solve it?

Making your own goals...

New players need to understand several important things about Eve the first is that Eve is a simulation(or sandbox) similar to minecraft. In minecraft you have no goals you start in a sandbox environment and are given the opportunity to create tools to create your dreams and goals. The main difference being Eve's single shared server(hence the subscription fee), spreadsheet focused mechanics and epic space scape. I will talk more about goals in the next post in this series.  The important thing to remember is goals in Eve can be grouped into two categories making isk and enjoying the game. Sometimes these are one in the same, sometimes you do one to accomplish the other. You as the player define them no one else will.

The tools to accomplish those goals...

A player is given a wide variety of tools, or game mechanics, to accomplish these goals. Just like in minecraft where you have the ability to create tools to create things. In Eve you have all sorts of different game mechanics to interact in an ever changing space scape(a sandbox). I will explore the unique opportunities in Eve to create tools in the last post in this series but take a look at this PDF to get an idea of the amount of things you can do in Eve. It isn't a comprehensive list either it does provide a categorized list of possibilities to accomplish one of the two goals stated above. Players come up with new ideas everyday, you could call that the nature of the sandbox.

The failure of the new player experience whose fault is it anyway?

You need to understand the tools needed to accomplish your goals in Eve. Enter the nasty learning curve pic here. A lot of the understanding comes from reading and watching videos of how people use in game mechanics. The in-game starting tutorial and career agent tutorials do not touch on even a tenth of what is out there. So the question that begs to be asked is: whose responsibility is it to train new players and create content for them? The new players themselves to read and learn then go play? The current players who create guides, videos, and player training corporations? Or CCP, the game developer, whose game this is that they run for-profit? 

A populated New Eden is a good New Eden.