New Player Experience

[Mangala]

In M10, new players will now start with 50k sp's, no learners, but 100% experience gain until they reach 1.6million sp.  Also you'll only choose your attributes (those on top of your racial base attributes) during the tutorial.

This will certainly make the creation of specialist alts alot easier

I'll be trying character creation and the npe out myself today on SiSi and will add more as I do so.

[peo]

Hmm...
Will make people even more "forced" to do the learning skills first.

[Mangala]

Hmm...
Will make people even more "forced" to do the learning skills first.

While that may be the case - they'll learn those stupidest of skills alot faster if they use the bonus to do so.  Following which they can then re-assign attributes and focus a touch. The gain increase can if done right get a new player to the fun skills earlier than many would have them believe now.

[Rubino]

depends and it's something that needs testing and figuring out.  a very quick test on a new char (no implants) showed you could get lvl 4 in anchoring in aabout 2 days.

[peo]

Hmm...
Will make people even more "forced" to do the learning skills first.

While that may be the case - they'll learn those stupidest of skills alot faster if they use the bonus to do so.  Following which they can then re-assign attributes and focus a touch. The gain increase can if done right get a new player to the fun skills earlier than many would have them believe now.

Sure they will get skills done faster.

Suppose completely new to EVE person buys the box m10.
He logs in and creates the char (I hope they improve the char creation but anyway).
Firstly it seems aura is gone... So he has to guess what to do (and guess that he must acctually start training something).
Then he has to pick what to learn.
"ohh a choice between gunnery 2 and learning 2"
Etc etc.
If they read the forums they will be told "train ALL learning skills including the advanced (which cost about 20m or so all together) to lvl 4 at least before training anything else or you will be screwed for the rest of your eve career".
So even with a faster learning they will for 2-4weeks do nothing but train learning without any ability to do squat, rookie frig and lvl1 skills.
Sure, works, but what kind of retention will there be?
Most will quit due to no character progression.

CCP isn't doing the new people a favour by increasing their SP gain, it is great to make specialized alts I suspect, but for making a completely new char without guidance it is bad.

[Mangala]

Having gone into game now using the NPE, im inclined to agree about this really sucking for new players - waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay more so than it did back in 04 when I first started.

1 screen for the whole process of char creation (Only base attributes at this stage):




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In game - Aura's gone and the tutorials dont pop up right away. They wait until you undock :/  However so far all new skills I have gotten have been placed right into my cargo via the tutorial.

[Caradir]

Im trying out the new tutorials and i must say they are a lot better than before, Auras voice is missing but thats prob due to the graphical issues, once you do the first endless war parts 1 and 2 , you get sent to 3 agents who offer the 3 different 10 parters and you can do all 3.

So far ive done 5/10 cashflow for capsuleers and have recieved 400k isk, Motion prediction book, Hull Upgrades book, Propulsion Jamming book and an Atron.

2/10 Balancing the books about 250k isk  Diplomacy book, Social Book. NAvitas.

Creation sucks as its 1 screen doesnt really give you any info as to the racial variations except some flavour text.

[Rubino]

They do look very nice - and it's good having a choice of 3 agents after the crash course.

[Mangala]

Aura's voice is an actual honest to god removal by CCP - not an error or omission by accident

Theres a whole thread about it on the Game Dev board and in there a blue mentioned they got rid as she wasnt the most uptodate part of the NPE ever

[Bethor]

the eve lady is called aurra? i love that voice. you cannot warp, becouse your warp is scrambled

back to subject. Dunno what to think. it will be temporary anyway i guess up till the walking on stations thing, if they ever gooing to do that. But i think the current character creation is fine. but that is just my opinion (and i did it like 2-3 years ago so dunno if my current is still THE current)

[Mangala]

Hello all!

Apocrypha is on the horizon and we are getting closer and closer to the final list of changes that will be popping up in March. But as usual, I get to talk about the New Player Experience (NPE).

I want to get one misconception out of the way. This blog will concern you and everyone else. If you have played for a year, 6 years, 3 months or a week, you will want to read further than this. Chances are there will be changes that will affect you! Although NPE in it‘s very existence focuses on the new player and how they are introduced to EVE, this can have an effect on older players as well. Many believe that the NPE extends only to the first 5 minutes. With some games, this might be true. But as we have all gone through the first months of EVE and often thought; „oh my, this game is too hard!"

This is something we want to help with. Our goal is to ease players into the game and not intimidate them with a hundred choices in the first minute. Start with the basics and then leave them to decide on their destiny. A true sandbox experience. Give them a shovel and a rake, and let them dig in.

Character creation

The biggest change you will probably notice is character creation. For the past few years, the process of creating your character has been a multi-step process with a lot of choices. Choices that were intimidating, to say the least, for anyone who had never played EVE before. You needed to choose a race, sex, bloodline, ancestry, career, specialization, school, and allocate free attribute points. You also had to select a name, read about the 30 skills and the 800K skill points you received from this experience.

For Apocrypha, we simplified this process. We eliminated choices that had no effect on you whatsoever and moved these choices to a more appropriate time where you could make an informed decision. You are in charge of your destiny.

We have simplified the UI, moving all choices into one screen. I think you will be quite surprised with the functionality, as it works quite well. We went through a whole fully functional "new" version of character creation before we re-did the whole thing again. These changes will be on SISI pretty soon (if they haven't arrived already) so I urge you to give it a try.

We have removed the School, Career and Specialization completely. These added quite a bit of complexity. Players were required to select these without knowing what to expect. Many times, people would choose blindly, leading them to feel let down or disappointed later on.

We have moved the allocation of the 5 free attribute points. A new player has no idea what the attributes means and, as many of you probably have done, assigned 3 to charisma because it must be awesome!

Skills received from character creation have been re-visited and removed, many of which were irrelevant to new players. Just to name one skill that a certain path could get - Who needs Siege Warfare when you are fresh out of military school? Are you going to siege a POS in your Velator?

These choices, all important, are better made once you have a true understanding of how things work in EVE. Once you know what you want to do, what you want to fly and so on, that is when you should decide on your career and skills. And it is better that you understand what the attributes do, before you start fiddling with them.

Skills and attributes

In our newest build, a player gets about 50K skill points from character creation. This might change, depending on testing. But we will be reducing the 800K quite substantially. New players should not feel intimidated by their skills, and they should be given a chance to decide, on their own, exactly what skills and path they want to go down. As a result, you will be able to create an alt which is more focused and get there quicker than before, as you can decide exactly what skills to train.

I will talk more about the skills and their effects in my next blog.

Your attributes will be very similar between the races once you start out, but now you will get to change them. A new player will have the opportunity to respec his attributes twice. This allows a new player to change previous decisions they made resulting from not knowing the system.

Once a year, you - and everyone else - can take 14 attribute points, and re-arrange them within reason. Attributes can be set at values anywhere from 5 to 15. This means, that every year, you can take all your spare charisma points and put them into perception if you so please. Or the other way around.

Careers - the sandbox way!

As I mentioned before, in the existing system players chose a career before even the first 10 minutes of play and, as with many games, it is an important choice. But with EVE, as you know, you can become anything you wish. You can move from shooting players to mining at any time. You are not bound by any restrictions by your "career." It gives the false impression that you are deciding on something, which then doesn't mean a thing in the world of New Eden.

However, you can learn about these particular career paths. As before, we will have 10 missions per career, which will teach you the basics of Industry, Business and Military occupations. These have been revamped, and are all available to you. You can go through them all if you want, or just one, or none. Your choice and your destiny.

This concludes the first part of the Apocrypha NPE overview blogs. There will be more from my design counterparts and myself in the coming weeks, so stay tuned.

Until then!

New Dev Blog on the revised NPE/Rookie stuff.

http://myeve.eve-online.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=618