Taking One for the Republic

It was the middle of April, 2018, and my house was dead quiet. This was one of those moments where, absent my husband and kids, with the dog asleep in the corner, I could enjoy the peace and spend some time seeking my own fun. I made some coffee, sat down at my computer, and prepped for an upcoming D&D session.

I finished. The house was still quiet. Now what?

While surfing through some websites, I can't across an ad for Eve Online. Bored as I was and not currently playing an MMO, I decided to download the flgame and give it another try. After all, it had been something later in thirteen years since I last played it, and now there exists a complete free play option instead of just a three day trial.

I'm a little over a month in at this point, and I have to give props to CCP and the Eve Community; the experience of starting Eve now is vastly better than in the game's nascent years.

So let's take a look at the new experience. This is how I took one for the Minmatar Republic, and how that experience could have been improved .

New Player Experience

Frequently referred to just as the NPE, the New Player Experience is CCP's attempt to integrate new players into the virtual reality of New Eden without leaving then completely clueless, utterly broke, and so frustrated they never log in again. On a recent interview with Newsweek, CCP Hilmar spoke about the difficulty of integrating new players into the vast sandbox, and I have to agree that the NPE goes a long way to helping, even if it leaves off a lot.

The NPE has something to offer for most aspects of play in Eve Online. It starts you off adrift in space as the very recent victim of one of the main NPC antagonist factions, the Drifters. Your racial fleet commander wakes you with some voice-acted comms traffic and then inlocks your ship's AI. It's the AI, named Aura, that serves as your guide through basic ship commands in the tutorial missions.

In the next hour or two of play, Aura and your fleet commander will introduce you to combat, industry, how to use the regional market, and even death. You'll change ships two or three times and, importantly, be given the chance to learn Eve's hardest hitting lesson: you are an Immortal Capsuleer. To you, death isn't an obstacle; it's a learning experience measured in the ISK (InterStellar Kredits, the in game currency) youve just lost, the shame and hit to your epeen, and the time it will take you to recover.

Death and Loss

Search Reddit, the forums, or an Eve wiki and you'll frequently find this advice: don't fly what you can't afford to lose. Eve is an open PVP game with some occasionally challenging PVE pirate content. You WILL lose your ship at some point. Whether you're just out to mine some asteroids, engage in PVP, or wander around exploring, you're going to experience several deaths. As they say, the only safe thing in Eve is to never undock. Take a moment to contemplate this lesson, reader. "Afford to lose" does not just mean financially. You also need to be able to emotionally let go of that ship.

This is one of the lessons that the NPE tries to teach but falls flat at. It's near the end of the tutorial where you're given an upgraded Frigate gunboat, given the chance to get revenge on the drones that attached you in your opening sequence, and the sent on a literal suicide mission.

Boom. You explode while your fleet wakes up, the you, yourself, come to consciousness on a station, foeced to mourn your gunboat while loading yourself into a mining ship with a single-run blueprint for the ship you lost. Oh, and by the way, it's probably cheaper to just buy a new ship than produce the Frigate on the BPC (blueprint copy).

If you take the time to do the Security and Advanced Military agent missions (and you very much should, but more about that later), you'll be given another suicide mission as well. CCP has tried to make new players understand loss... But the nature of other MMOs has us, as players, trained into a mindset that doesn't work the same way in Eve. Blowing up the ships you got for free, and then getting them replaced by the mission rewards, means that the sense of real risk isn't there.

No, that's not something you'll really take to heart until you're worrying about undocking in something you've actually saved up for.

Agents

Once you're awake after your first suicide mission, Aura will spend some time talking and then tell you that she recommends you seek out either one or more Career Agents or try your hand at a resource war. I highly recommend the first one. The resource wars will pit your mining Frigate against drones that you are not, at this exact moment, equipped to take on.  The career agents, on the other hand,  will give you everything you need to get started on their represented career and you'll walk away from their quests with millions of ISK, a better idea of several aspects of gameplay, and a handful of free ships.

Each of the career agents offers you a short Arc of missions (10 missions per, with exploration being he exception and only having 5). You'll end it with at least one of each of your racial frigates and t a small hauling ship. You'll experience mining, crafting, exploring, being a courier, and, of course, more combat.

After you complete the the security missions, do the advanced military missions. This will introduce you to concepts like tackling (getting near another ship and using modules to restrict their movement) that will help you with PVP. Oh, and you'll once more be killed.  But this secondary arc will also give you your first Destroyer class ship on graduation.

Now What?

This is really the end of the tutorial stage. You've learned everything you need to get into the game, right?

Well, not really.

It may not be readily apparent just yet, but despite the hours you've now put into the game, all CCP has really provided is the equivalent of a thirty minute instructional video for someone just learning to swim. Now they've taken you to ocean, thrown you overboard and wished you good luck.

That may sound scary, but it's the reality to the end of the NPE. Don't fear, though, you have some basic tools at your disposal.

First and foremost, there is an abundance of information and advice out there to get you started.  Take some time to read through the Eve  University wiki. Read the Rookie Help chat that you're automatically joined to for the first 30 days. Engage in the community. If you have a question, someone has probably already answered it somewhere you can find it with a quick search, or some experienced player in chat will help you.

Find some friends to play with. Did someone friendly help you in chat? Talk to them about their corporation and see if it's right for you. Enjoy mining and see someone haunting the same asteroids? Hit them up in Local. Got some time where you are just hanging out in station? Love k at the corporations with offices there. Like PVP? Drop from your NPC Corp and go join Faction Warfare.

Want to spend some time solo? You've already seen the Agents panel. Pull it up and find some more things to do. You can easily make more isk by working for NPCs... Just know that if you're after fat stacks in short order, this is probably not the fastest route.

Oh, and whatever you do... Remember the Sisters of Eve you worked for in the tutorial? Maybe you should go check on then again and get yourself introduced to your first Epic Arc on Eve. It's a lengthy series of missions that will net you a sizeable sum of ISK and reputation.

Improvements Needed

As much as I enjoyed the NPE, it's not perfect. I agree with Hilmar that it's nearly impossible to teach a new player everything they need to know about the game in a short, fun method. There's just too much information and skill that you need to cram in. With that in mind, there are some things that could be improved to make it all a little better.

During the initial NPE, the first off-putting moment for me, as a new player in this otherwise gorgeous space game, was bad textures. The Sisters of Eve needed me to fly out to their research base and...it had been utterly destroyed. Setting course for their data shard, my little ship began to push through the flotsam left behind. Large panels of debris came towards me, looking large on the display.

And they were ugly. I'm not talking the ugliness of the lives destroyed by the attack. The actual objects werenlow resolution graphics that look like they were part of the original object collect from Eve's launch fifteen years ago. In a game where I had been impressed with the details place on the ships being flown, suddenly have blurry, pixelated graphics flying at me was jarring. A quick texture update to bring the NPE into the current standard could help show that CCP really cares about the new players in their game.

While I didn't know it at the the time, the NPE was also setting me up as easy prey for gankers. You see, Aura, my trusted AI guide that my fleet commander assured me was an advanced development that she was breaking protocol to give me access to, had been giving me bad information. Any time long travel had been required in the NPE, Aura had instructed me to set the destination and then turn on autopilot.

There are two problems with this method of travel, and the first leads to the second. Anytime you use autopilot to get to/through a jumpgate, your ship will come out of warp around 15 km from the gate and then turn into range.

Assuming your subwarp speed is around 250 m/s, this, leaves you exposed in space for a full minute. If you're in something like a freighter that moves even slower then this could increase to as much as 2-3 minutes in space.

Not only does this method of travel add minutes per jump to your travel, it makes you easy prey. For minutes you're sitting there where a gate ganker could target you, destroy your ship, and loot the wreck with impunity. This is compunded by the feeling that flying on auto makes you feel that you don't need to pay attention. After all, the ship is flying itself. You can go cook dinner while flying across the cluster, right?

AFK flights are an invitation to lose all you're flying with.

Teaching new players to rely on Autopilot by having them use it for every system jump is just a bad idea and an easy fix for the NPE.

Chat channels are another area that could be quickly improved. As a new character, you're automatically joined to two new channels. One will be the channel for your NPC-owned corporation. This comes based on your character generation choices of race and education.  For example, I'm a member of Pator Tech. The second channel you're auto-joined to is Rookie Help.

Ostensibly, Rookie Help is a moderated channel for new players to get help. You're forced to remain on this channel for thirty days. It's hundreds, if not thousands, if characters at any given time ranging from new alts if experienced players to brand new players to the game. And I say ostensibly moderated because the official player volunteers (know as ISDs, or Interstellar Services Department) are frequently there to watch the channel. You can spot these volunteers by the ISD tag in front of their name and the cyan text they talk in.

ISDs will warn people when they have infracted the rules of the channel, and then ban them from the channel if the bahvior continues. This ranges from obnoxious behavior like trolling or begging, to things like speaking in a language that the channel doesn't support. ISDs will provide advice, link to sources, and call out bullshit if they spot it. Really, I give huge kudos to these folks, answering the same questions day in and day out. I've worked at an IT help desk and know what that can be like.

What the Rookie Channel lacks are enough ISDs to ensure it always has one of these volunteers moderators. I've spent hours in this channel and seen long stretches where the kids were left unspervised, as it was. There are way too many experienced players in that channel with a willingness to scam, mislead, and troll new players to leave them alone with the rookies without supervision. This makes the channel occasionally toxic or just not useful.

There are a couple of changes CCP could make to improve this. Most obvious would be to add more ISDs. This community of volunteers are recruited based on their applications to the Volunteer System. If CCP wanted more volunteers to supplement their taxed staff, then they will need to improve the ease of finding out about the volunteer system. Next, update the site with more information about what each group does. And third? Spell out the requirements.  While navigating to the application, for instance, I was given an error that I wasn't eligible and then provided a, block of text indicating it was for one of three reasons. Maybe I don't have a paid account in good standing (I do). Maybe I haven't been here long enough (fair, but how old my account needed to be isn't spelled out). Or maybe I'm under investigation for breaking the rules (!!!! What?!).

Help me help you CCP.  Stop obfuscating simple information.

Second, the channel could be improved by not dumping all new characters there. Set it to new accounts only. This won't help a ton, as so many people have multiple accounts for various reasons, but it might keep out the laziest level of trolls and offer a quick, if short, reduction in bad advice.

Alternatively, the ISDs could be harsher and more readily willing to use the channel ban hammer.

The Adventures of Erika Fidard

Despite the occasional frustrations I've experienced in the game, I've found that engaging with the community via Twitter (search for #tweetfleet), Twitch, YouTube, and the forums has made Eve a game I want to play for a while. I've found it relaxing to come home from work and go exploring wormholes, having cans, or helping my husband hunt pirates.

So what's next? As with any sandbox you have to set goals for yourself and work towards them to have fun and a sense of accomplishment. For me, those goals include finding a good corporation my husband and I can join to be part of a fun and moderately close knit community, and to use the inspiration I get from Eve to create more content.

Stay tuned to this blog to see more articles on my experiences, new player help, and roleplay fiction based on my adventures. If you want to see me cover any particular topic, the reach out at erikafidard at gmail.com or find me on Twitter @efidard.