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.