New Player Choices

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

Your choices are many in Eve. It may seem a daunting task, because of the sandbox nature of Eve, to both choose where you want to go and what you want to do. The thing you will quickly find is that you need some kind of income source as a new player. This is where your choices start to become limited.

As a new player you only have so many skills under your belt and while you can fly off into the wild and have some fun sooner or later your going to need to do something to make isk. Which leads us to two choices most players turn to in their first couple weeks of play:

Mining
Missions

While both mining and missioning are great, and they have very limited barriers to entry, both are quite boring. What else is there a new player might ask? This 82 page pdf attempts to cover all of them or maybe you run through the personality analyzer. During the career agent tutorials you are presented with a couple other options:

Manufacturing
Exploration

These options are not explained in any great detail, but at least they are mentioned. You still have a lot of other options out there. So a few of the more lucrative and new player friendly game mechanics out there are not included in the tutorials:

Planetary Interaction
Ratting
Salvaging
Faction Warfare
Etc...

It quickly becomes the new players responsibility to learn more about the game. This kind of hand off is why the new player learning curve looks like it does. You the new player have to make your own goals and choices. This is why CCP's little Fanfest graphic looks like it does. Half the people quite, half the people run some missions because they were trained to do so by the in-game tutorial. The last 10% want to learn they go looking, reading and studying the game mechanics and stick.

You have to make your own goals in Eve. That is how the game is played a space sim and a sandbox(no one tells you were to go or what to do in minecraft, kids seem to figure that out). Eve isn't going to change, making your own goals is Eve. So how do we(new players, old players, and CCP) help people transition players into the game?

Show them what choices they have in a clear and simple way. I think at the end of the career agent tutorials it quickly states in a quick pop up to go check out the sister of eve epic arc. No mention of where the hell that is or how to get there. A menu similar to ISIS(Interbus Ship Identification System) should pop up and say learn more about xyz game mechanic, want to keep doing missions head to the soe arc here, faction warfare head here. Want to join a corp have a link to open up corp recruitment. Keep this window in the sidebar until they take it off because there is nothing like loosing things in the menu the first week in Eve. If they click on a game mechanic have it run through a quick tutorial of how to get started in that direction and leave it at that. Now the current help icon is similar in function but for the most part it sends you to the EVElopedia articles which are typically very dated. Show new players their choices of different game mechanics available to them in a clear and simple way.

Just my two cents worth.

Thanks Jester

Sorry I should have posted this a month ago. Better late than never.

Thank you Ripard Teg of jestertrek.blogspot.com for all of your contributions to Eve Online. Also thank you for the great influence you have been to the blogging community surrounding Eve Online. We have been influenced by your great work and wish you the best in all your future endeavors.

Recently he announced that he would be stepping away from his blog Jester Trek to spend more time having fun in-game and I am sure a we'll deserved break from blogging. He has just finished up his term on CSM8 and this past month of May posted over 57 blog posts. To put that into perspective I post maybe that many times in six months.

His writings have encouraged I am sure more than one Eve Online themed blog over the years, including this one, and his musings will sorely be missed.

Making Your Own Goals

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

After almost two years of playing Eve I think I have finally figured out what it is I like doing the most, blogging and reading about the game. I like to trade and do industry but that's not what keeps me coming back.

I was reading in the new player forums, a few days back, when someone committed to a new players plea why won't any one do XYZ with me, you have to look at Eve as a simulator the poster replied. I find this statement to be very profound. Eve is a simulation game where you have elements of creation and destruction based in real time with real players. Yes there are some NPCs floating around but their functions are limited to a few basic game play elements.

What this poster needed to understand, as a new player, is to play in the simulation you are required to create your own goals based around this cycle of creation and destruction. If you want to play with others, as this new player did, you better convince them that your goals are more important or just as important as others goals(which in this situation they weren't, the poster wanted to go gank some players for blowing up his T1 frigate).

The truly unique aspects of the Eve simulation are its single shared server, nearly complete player run economy and lack of other MMOs theme park style progression. With a single shared environment butterfly effects, like those mentioned in this promotional trailer, become reality day in and day out. When people make mistakes or forget to pay bills big things happen and they impact everyone.

The point being it is your goals as a player that are important that drive the simulation that shape the sandbox nature of Eve. So as you begin playing Eve set some goals and learn how to use the mechanics of the simulation find creative and out of the box ways to achieve them.

This is a follow up post to:
The Most Important Commodity in New Eden

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.

First Look Video of the Industry UI Changes

Check out this video covering a first look at the industry UI changes on the test server.

Or just link straight to the video on youtube here.

Two Years of Playing Eve and Counting

I have been playing Eve Online for two years now. I started out hauling minerals from out lying systems to trade hubs, from there I saved up enough to buy a Retriever back when they were only 10 million isk a piece(Ventures weren't even in the game yet). I mined for a couple months and saved up a couple hundred million isk. After that I started investing in some small trades and manufacturing. I slowly built up my manufacturing operation until I had about 2 billion isk when I built my own freighter. Also during this time I started into pi which has been a modest high sec income of 100 to 150 million isk a month. Since that point I have kept manufacturing and trading, where I have kept about half my earnings in each endeavor. During that time I have typically doubled my income every six months. If that gives you any indication as to how much I really play(Not a whole lot).

After a few months of playing Eve Online, I had to take a break for awhile as school was starting other real life things distracted me but I kept reading. I kept learning. I was really intrigued by the blogging community. I had some experience working with blogs so I thought to myself what can I do, what do I have to add to the community. My first thought was a new player perspective. So I ran with it. I have been writing commentary and guides for new players ever since.

So if anyone out there is thinking to yourself right now, what do I possible have to add to the community? What could I come up with? Just start where your at and roll with it, learn for yourself what you need to do and take it on. Whether you have been playing for a week and think you can tackle a large manufacturing operation or you want to live on the edge and try a hand at pvp go for it. You have all the potential you have all the possibility. Who cares if you lose stuff along the way? Your new you don't have that much to lose anyway.

I have been blogging for a year and a half now and feel my contributions here as my greatest accomplishment in Eve. I hope everyone has found a good read now and again and maybe a guide or two.

Operation: Summer Fun

I thought I would give you a little update as to what I have been doing in-game and on the blog here. In-game I have been messing around in low sec doing some ratting and just having fun. Everyone should enjoy summer by getting out and shooting something in New Eden. I have been doing a lot of trading and general positioning as we wait for more specific information on the industry changes. I may be taking a break this summer as vacations and nice weather roll in. Even with the patch hitting July 22nd I already have a lot of fun planned that doesn't involve New Eden.

A couple weeks ago I went back through my Links tab at the top of the page and add a bunch of useful information. With links covering topics such as news, markets, killboards, online tools etc. I think it will provide a great way for you to link to and discover loads of information and I will be able to continue to add and update it easily.

I have several lengthy posts(well lengthy for my typical posts) in the wings covering some of my thoughts on new players and the new player experience. Those should drop sometime next week I'm thinking. This weekend will be the two year mark of my stumbling into Eve Online and I have a little nostalgic post rolling out then.