The tl;dr is
-There should be a career agent for PVP which walks players though building a simple pvp frigate (like a brawling frig) similar to the current military agent but...
-It should involve real pvp experience via the duel system
-New
players should be directed in the career agents--somehow--to the eve
recruitment page and the community spotlight organizations where they
might find, e.g., pvp corps who help newbies.
-They should also be
notified about faction warfare, and FW should potentially be opened to
players and perhaps should involve boosted insurance payments for ships
lost (so as to reward PVP but not exclusively winning at PVP in FW)
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One thing I have learned from recent
reports about new players entering EVE—such as the new player
experience presentation at fanfest—is that, statistically, the vast majority of new
players enter EVE 1) after hearing about some highly publicized PVP
event, such as a major fight in null, and 2) join EVE hoping to at
least see about taking part in similar content.
Some of my current friends in EVE
joined right after B-R, and that was explicitly why the gave EVE a
try. Their goals were framed around taking part in such content.
Few of those new players I met (who've also stayed with EVE) still
have "be in major null sec fights" as their goal (though some of them do—e.g., one just
joined one of the major null sec blocs after beginning training in
their fleet doctrines starting as early in his first month of
playing), but it is clear that taking part in PVP is a primary reason
for trying out EVE.
Here's another example. Today, the new
player systems were unusually populated. This likely has to do with
the combination of it being a holiday for some players, the end of
school for others, and from EVE being featured on the humble bundle
right before. I was restocking items I sell in some new player
stations and found a group of new players dueling and chatting about
it in local. Other new players in system got interested, and a
conversation ensued about fittings, tactics, and how to go about
dueling, etc. One day old player had built his Atron largely out of parts he acquired from the players he destroyed, which was cute. Sadly he lost the ship eventually, but seemed to have a fun time doing so. This was pretty encouraging to see, and I wished at the
time that this experience they were having could be more than a mere
accident.
As the statistics of new player paths
in EVE presented at fanfest suggest, these anecdotes about new player goals are the norm,
and the people who enter EVE for the “PVE” are few and far
between. After all, monumental “PVE” accomplishments of EVE have
never been featured in main stream media, and I doubt anyone has ever
started EVE by saying either that they heard it has a great mining
system or that they are enticed by the possibility of running the
same handful of PVE missions for the next few years and learning how to do so afk while playing DOTA. (I happen to
think the PVE in EVE is far better, for some player types, than its
terrible reputation deserves, but that's another topic.)
As is also pretty well recognized
though, new players do not have great systems in place for even
starting the path to making those goals a reality. The players who
stumble on the duel system—and without getting baited by an older
player—are few and far between, as are those who manage to piece
together tactics for successful PVP. In the first days of playing,
they are presented with a set of career agents which suggest that 1)
their goals will be provided for them by NPCs—that EVE is not as
much of a sandbox as they may have heard, and 2) that the available
“career” paths in EVE actually involving fighting NPCs in highly
structured, scripted environments, much like every other MMO on the
market.
These career agents—even the “combat”
ones—do not necessarily teach skills relevant for PVP, nor do they
even usually teach skills necessary for PVE in EVE. Something needs to be added in the new player system
to better help this vast majority of new players both learn the
basics of PVP and learn how to get involved in PVP after the
tutorials.
Of course, we can day dream and imagine
some pretty amazing ways of having a new player PVP tutorial, but
they would very likely take up a massive amount of developer time if
seriously implemented. And, as a result, they probably won't be
implemented.
So our goals are to come up with a new
player PVP tutorial which fits into the current career agent system,
consisting of a set of training missions which both teach the player
the basic elements of PVP and rewards them with the basic ships,
skill books, and modules needed for PVP. The tutorial should:
Teach the basic elements of
fitting a ship (most likely, a frigate) for PVP.
Teach the basic methods of PVPing
in such ships.
Actually involve some type of PVP,
so not just involve fighting rats.
Direct the new player, upon
completion, to different PVP organizations and systems within EVE.
And finally, the tutorial should
take up as little dev
time to create as possible. So nothing fancy, and ideally nothing
that would require the programming of an entirely new system in the
game.
The
importance of goal 5 should not be underestimated and it structures
every one of my suggestions to follow.
Teaching Skills
We
can model much of the PVP tutorial on the existing career agent
tutorials (particularly the military career agent) which are not ideal but they'll have to do unless massive dev time is going to be spent. The majority of the missions will be straight forward,
step by step instructions on how to fit a ship for PVP. To keep it
simple, the tutorial should focus on brawling (kiting is probably a
harder skill to teach a new player still getting used to the game's
controls and environment). That includes 1) orbiting within the
optimal range of the relevant type of guns/missiles and using an
afterburner, 2) the importance of using a scram and/or web to pin the
target, and 3) tanking a ship to its strength, rather fitting a
random assortment of tanking modules. It can build on the foundation already present in the military career agent missions, perhaps with more explicit recommendations for using those skills in PVP rather than in PVE.
Real Experience
The
key to this tutorial, though, is that it has to involve some type of
PVP where these skills would actually be used. So, I suggest that
toward the end of the tutorial, once the player has a sufficiently
built PVP ship provided by the tutorial (e.g., an atron with blasters
and ammo, afterburner, scram, web, and at least a damage control), the
mission instruct the player to take this ship and request a duel from
another player and attempt to destroy their ship upon acceptance. In
the process, it can explain the difference between types of
flags—e.g., the light blue flag indicating a limited engagement
with another player where both can freely attack—and it can explain
the use of the safety settings.
The
player should be warned that if they choose to accept this mission
and request to duel another player, they risk losing their ship if
the other player wins, but they also face the possibility of 1)
destroying the other player's ship and 2) getting to freely loot that
player's cargo which happens to drop when they explode. Perhaps the
players could also be instructed about the ability to look at the
other player's biography and see their character's age, and then be
given a recommendation to request to duel newer players like
themselves.
The
tutorial would be complete when the other player accepts the duel—so
win or lose (or run away or dock) the player would get at least a
potential experience in PVP. I also suggest that the tutorial give
as part of its reward the same ship and all its fittings previously
given, so that if a player loses the ship in the process of dueling
they have a full replacement ready.
Some
players and developers might be worried about new players requesting
a duel from older players who will gladly destroy them—perhaps
older players waiting for just such an opportunity. I find this a
strangely paternalistic attitude in a game which is marketed in the
mainstream press as one of the few games ever made where you can
destroy (or have destroyed) anything you or anyone else flies. There are rules in
place prohibiting players who want to grief new players in starting
systems, for one, and these should continue to be enforced,
obviously. However, given the fact that so many players start EVE on
the basis of hearing about its PVP and wanting to experience
something like that, one might—rightly, I think—begin to think
that the new player system as it currently exists is a deliberate
attempt to direct players into anything butPVP experiences with other players. Not a word of “PVP” is so
much as mentioned in the new player experience, so it is no wonder so
many go on to mission and mine and leave. Where, indeed, would they
even find PVP if they wanted to? Where, furthermore, would they find
rewarding PVP?
Where to Find Rewarding PVP
That
leaves one final requirement of the PVP career agent: it needs to
direct them to player organizations and game systems which can teach
the new player how to PVP. Here, my recommendations are blatantly
clear:
There
is a long-running debate about how CCP can direct new players to good
organizations without “favoring” some organizations or putting
themselves at risk should some continue to exploit players.
There
is now a concrete solution to this problem: the community spotlight
series. In doing a community spotlight, CCP has given public
recognition for certain organizations—Brave newbies, RVB, and
recently the smaller open university of celestial hardship, for
instance—and rightly so, yet they give recognition and important
information without explicitly saying new players should join these
groups. Thus, the PVP career agent tutorial should direct the player
to the series and indicate that many new player organizations are
featured there. That gives CCP the ability to externally modify the
list and add or remove organizations as needed.
Second,
the new player tutorial should direct players, with a link, to the
EVE forum recruitment page as a place to find current organizations
involved in PVP who recruit new players.
The
tutorial agent should then also direct new players to faction
warfare. If you think about what it takes for a new player to engage
in PVP in EVE, many of them are virtually unavailable due to the
existing game systems. Should a new player go to low sec and PVP,
they will either only fight much better pirates they can freely
engage, or they will lose security status fighting non-pirates.
Eventually, the latter bars them from high sec, where they are used
to living and making isk. What's worse, almost every PVP system in
EVE (open to new players) involves losing isk rather than making
it—besides faction warfare.
So,
I suggest that new players be directed to faction warfare in the
tutorial and be encouraged to find FW corps to join on the forums.
This raises a complicated issue. If players on the trial were
directed to FW, they would either have to be told that,
unfortunately, they could not do it on a trail, or the ban on new
players doing FW in a trial would have to be removed. I am not
exactly sure what justifies the ban on trials entering FW any longer.
It is becoming harder to farm plexes in Kronos. Sure, it would
exclude the new player from half of empire space, but they informed
about this and consent to entering (and can leave at any time).
There's a worry that existing players would repeatedly create trial
accounts to farm FW for isk for their main account, but 1) there is
still an inability to run a trial account and a regular account at
the same time, and 2) there is already a general ban on players
exploiting the trial system with possible bans if found, so I don't
see this problem as a justification for removing a potentially
worthwhile and relatively safe source of game play from new players.
Finally, I think
FW should have an automatic type of insurance, where losing a ship to
another player ship in FW gives you an automatic “FW insurance” refund for a decent portion (obviously no more than 100%) of the cost of the hull.
This would be like an NPC version of a Ship Replacement Program that
so many large corps run, and would reward PVP without
exclusively rewarding winning as it currently the case.
What's
clear, even if my suggestions are not ideal (they probably aren't),
is that the current new player system in EVE does not
cater to the real reason why many players enter EVE, and it is likely
that any changes, even if not ideal, would be for the better.
