EVE Online Rolls Out New Noob-Friendly Edition

[Tibike77]

Spend your first month learning your stat skills. It helps to get some1 to give u the money to buy the tier2 stat skills too. when u get your Intelligence and Memory maxed then learn everything else.
You'll be a happy camper if u can get to at least lvl4 on all your t2 stats. What use to take 8 hours to learn now only take 2 and so forth. a god send when you are trying to get Battleship 5 (which took mee a month and half)

That's the most horrible piece of advice you can give to a GENUINE new player.

There are so many things wrong with that statement that I don't even know where to start...
Ok... I have to start somewhere, so here goes...

If you WASTE your first month training only your learning skills to near-the-max, you might train your other skills faster later on, but you basically just wasted one whole month of potential gameplay doing basically nothing.
Also, unless you get some noticeable assistance from other players, rounding up the needed ISK for the advanced learning skills or even some of the non-lame attribute-boosting implants will be an excruciating chore if you only have the most basic non-learning skills.

Yes, NOT training any of the learning skills at all is a very bad thing, not only in the long run, but in the short run too... because the first few levels of learning pay off very early on.
So the keywords here are MODERATION and PACING.
A genuine new player should first train the skills he is given out in the tutorials to the levels necessary to complete the tutorials, then use the ISK he gets from those tutorials to buy the basic learnings, which he should train at once ONLY to L1, or maybe L2 tops, if he's coming back later that same day to play more.
After running some of the "career funnel" tutorials and also training OTHER skills that are necessary to complete those missions, the training of L3 learning skills should be done OVERNIGHT, when the player is not around to actively play, and this can stretch over a couple of days or even longer, depending how actively the new player wants to play the game, and optionally also purchase a set of +1 implants.

Instead of spending ISK on the advanced learning skills or the higher-level implants early on, a genuine new player should instead focus on spending those saved-up ISK in skills and gear that will allow him to earn more ISK easier//faster, and only once the player has a relatively steady income should he bother training the learning skills to L4, buying advanced learnings and training those to L3, and maybe also buying some +2 or even +3 implants.
It's only when the player is already relatively proficient in earning enough ISK that he should even consider training the advanced learnings to L4, buying +4 implants or anything more than that.


Of course, if the character is an alt of an older player and receives significant financial assistance while not caring about earning ISK at all early on, or if it's a RL player that isn't in a hurry to play the game "right now" and has RL cash to spend to fund itself with ISK via PLEX sales... then yeah, sure, go nuts with the learnings.
But never, ever suggest WASTING your first gameplay month training up learning skills almost exclusively to a "regular joe" potential player, that's the most surefire way to make him want to never play EVE again after he tries it for a month (or rarely two).

Rule of thumb for "honest" genuine new players : almost never bother having more total SP in learnings than total SP in everything else. Ideally, learning SP should account for at most 40% of your total SP, preferably closer to 30%.

so what's the subscription charge? last time I checked it was in U.S dollars and tbh that means nothing to me.

What and you can't be arsed googling for a currency converter?.

no. I cannot be arsed to rely on fluctuating prices plus charges.

And in what currency, pray tell, would you want the charges expressed if not USD ? And where are you located, in the EU, or outside the EU ?

http://www.eveonline.com/pnp/pricing.asp

If in the EU, you will be charged the local equivalent of ~15 EUR/month for the 30-day plan (or ~131 EUR/year for the 360-day plan, call it ~11/month) - that is, if your local currency is not already the Euro - plus whatever your bank or payment service might charge extra.
If outside the EU, you will be charged the local currency equivalent of ~15 USD/month (or ~131 USD/year) plus whatever your bank might charge you extra.

Alternatively, you can just use in-game currency to buy a PLEX (in-game item traded on the "free market") and apply it to add 30 days of gametime.
Since the market is free, the price varies not just from day to day, but actually from hour to hour, and also from game region to game region at the exact same moment.

 

[Exterminas]

While I like the generall idea, I'm not sure a cheat is the best way to teach players.
When Wow started to soften up the leveling experience (It was already soft, but they made it even shorter and easier, removed most group quests that were very challenging to single players or tested their ability to form a group), it lead to a big wave of noobs that couldn't tie their shoes at level 80.

Most people that started playing in Wotlk never learned how to use Crowd Controll (wows idea of tactic to controll larger groups of enemies and keeping them from tearing you appart), because the end game conent didn't demand it anymore (it's use was justified at the very beginning of the addon) and because it was no longer needed for leverling (which, for some classes, it formerly was)

 

[Ruairi iliffe]

Ahh, god damnit.... I started my alt 5 days ago after holding off for 2 years, AND now they add a boosted Edtion!?

Bleh.. Oh well at least it for my Girl Friend for Incarna Down the line, dont think another boost will improve her Clothing making skills...

 

[Alandoril]

Eve Online had me for two months. In that time, I lost my ship to griefers 2 FRAKKING TIMES. And then, to add insult to injury, the last one posted a line about me on their clan webpage under "Victories." ME: A FUCKING 2-MONTH N00B! I have pretty thick griefing skin, but I dropped my account then and there.

If I wanted to pay someone to beat the crap out of me I'd go to a bondage dungeon, not an MMO. I don't give a shit what they do to make the game "easier for the first 30 days;" if they don't change the broken game mechanics and find a way to get the community either cleansed of the gaping goatse assholes or keep them in check, it's not going to make a bit of difference.

Also, and this is a nitpick since it's not much worse than other MMO's, but the writing blows. Especially when it comes to writing about the freaky corporate libertarian republic. Whoever does the writing for them doesn't understand how capitalism works (which is really weird since whoever designed the in-game economy seems to).

And this is why I play EvE.
Where the carebear tears are most delicious.

You grief somebody in WoW, you know they lose practically nothing.
You grief somebody in EvE, it actually hurts!

Really, you'll be surprised the amount of griefing a two-month old player can do now adays, especially when supported by a more experienced gang. At two months, it could be YOU causing other people to quit the game.

Also unless they override some of the code, there are going to be alot of unhappy newbies.
They are the ones most likely to actually lose their pods.
An experienced player has a near 100% pod survival rate outside of 0.0.
Newbies... not so much.

Which begs the question...why would you want to make people quit the game?

 

[Ruairi iliffe]

Which begs the question...why would you want to make people quit the game?

EvE's nature attacts alot of greifers, who just play the game to watch people rage quit on the forums when they lose their Full officer fitted Carebear mission runner.

Its best just to Find a good corp, learn what you can, except that PvP happens, and just be ready for gits like that.

Giving up only makes them happy.

 

[Ruairi iliffe]

While I like the generall idea, I'm not sure a cheat is the best way to teach players.
When Wow started to soften up the leveling experience (It was already soft, but they made it even shorter and easier, removed most group quests that were very challenging to single players or tested their ability to form a group), it lead to a big wave of noobs that couldn't tie their shoes at level 80.

Most people that started playing in Wotlk never learned how to use Crowd Controll (wows idea of tactic to controll larger groups of enemies and keeping them from tearing you appart), because the end game conent didn't demand it anymore (it's use was justified at the very beginning of the addon) and because it was no longer needed for leverling (which, for some classes, it formerly was)

The thing is there already WAS a boost to new players of 100% up until they reached 1 million skill points, while i can see certain skills reaching into the 25+ days, the rest can be easly managed with Knowing to learn the core Learning skills first, but most new players dont know this, and thus even with a boost, they will still get to the point where learning a new skill will take 12 more days than it really should.

Now a Really really good Tutoral, that is worth far more than a smiple boost.

 

[Plinglebob]

Now a Really really good Tutoral, that is worth far more than a smiple boost.

I've recently done the tutorial (started a month ago) and it is pretty good now. Still doesn't replace having someone show you what to do, but nothing really will in Eve.

 

[Ruairi iliffe]

Now a Really really good Tutoral, that is worth far more than a smiple boost.

I've recently done the tutorial (started a month ago) and it is pretty good now. Still doesn't replace having someone show you what to do, but nothing really will in Eve.

It covers the basics really well, but it doesnt really explain in my personal opinion the Learning skills, which as a pilot for 3 years it really stings when i see that before i got every one of them up to lvl5, i lost out on about 20 million skill points.

But the new one is far better than the orginial i have to admit.

 

[Fearzone]

Lemme see... how can EVE attract more new players? I know! How about they add some content?

 

[Direwolf750]

DO NOT WANT. i need my money for portal 2 anyways

 

[Catalyst6]

If this is implemented anything like that whole PLEX system, then all I'm seeing from this is a whole lot of stolen Cerebral Accelerators and a lot of sad, confused, former-owner-of-Cerebral-Accelerator newbies.

They'll probably be "born" with the accelerator plugged in their heads, to prevent exactly that.

Good that they make it more noob frienldy but i arent going to start playing this. To busy playing Aion.

People are still playing Aion?!?! Last time i logged on my sever had damn near self destructed with the quitings. they fixed the Fort lag yet?

Heh, not by a long shot. Pretty game, terrible lag...

 

[DTWolfwood]

That's the most horrible piece of advice you can give to a GENUINE new player.

There are so many things wrong with that statement that I don't even know where to start...
Ok... I have to start somewhere, so here goes...

If you WASTE your first month training only your learning skills to near-the-max, you might train your other skills faster later on, but you basically just wasted one whole month of potential gameplay doing basically nothing.
Also, unless you get some noticeable assistance from other players, rounding up the needed ISK for the advanced learning skills or even some of the non-lame attribute-boosting implants will be an excruciating chore if you only have the most basic non-learning skills.

Yes, NOT training any of the learning skills at all is a very bad thing, not only in the long run, but in the short run too... because the first few levels of learning pay off very early on.
So the keywords here are MODERATION and PACING.
A genuine new player should first train the skills he is given out in the tutorials to the levels necessary to complete the tutorials, then use the ISK he gets from those tutorials to buy the basic learnings, which he should train at once ONLY to L1, or maybe L2 tops, if he's coming back later that same day to play more.
After running some of the "career funnel" tutorials and also training OTHER skills that are necessary to complete those missions, the training of L3 learning skills should be done OVERNIGHT, when the player is not around to actively play, and this can stretch over a couple of days or even longer, depending how actively the new player wants to play the game, and optionally also purchase a set of +1 implants.

Instead of spending ISK on the advanced learning skills or the higher-level implants early on, a genuine new player should instead focus on spending those saved-up ISK in skills and gear that will allow him to earn more ISK easier//faster, and only once the player has a relatively steady income should he bother training the learning skills to L4, buying advanced learnings and training those to L3, and maybe also buying some +2 or even +3 implants.
It's only when the player is already relatively proficient in earning enough ISK that he should even consider training the advanced learnings to L4, buying +4 implants or anything more than that.


Of course, if the character is an alt of an older player and receives significant financial assistance while not caring about earning ISK at all early on, or if it's a RL player that isn't in a hurry to play the game "right now" and has RL cash to spend to fund itself with ISK via PLEX sales... then yeah, sure, go nuts with the learnings.
But never, ever suggest WASTING your first gameplay month training up learning skills almost exclusively to a "regular joe" potential player, that's the most surefire way to make him want to never play EVE again after he tries it for a month (or rarely two).

Rule of thumb for "honest" genuine new players : almost never bother having more total SP in learnings than total SP in everything else. Ideally, learning SP should account for at most 40% of your total SP, preferably closer to 30%.

ok i guess i should have mention that when you are playing the game you train for skills you need to use immediately since those don't take more than 2 hours. And when you arent playing you train your attributes. but what can a noob train up to in the first month? (it was a destroyer for me) and that can be done in a week. you run missions with frigates and destroyer, learn how the game work in more detail, all the while you train your attribute. Anyone who ignore their attributes will leave the game after month one.

 

[Tmc_Sherpa]

I realize the irony of posting this in a thread about a ccp announcement so lets just get that out of our systems now OK? HAHA! Can we move on? Good.

WOW news is news about what Blizzard is doing, EVE news is about what people who play EVE are doing. Or the lag monster *shakes a server hamster poking stick in the air* but I'm going to conveniently ignore that for now.

People flying dangerously and losing. EVE University still training new pilots after, what is it now four-five years? Goons destroying BoB with an inside job, Goons(?) destroying Goons with an inside job. Agony Empire training PvP pilots for isk. EVE Bank running for ages before it turns out to be a scam. Red vs Blue training PvP pilots with a 'friendly' perpetual war. Seemingly random alliances rising to power and glory only to fade away or explode in a fiery death. Wars against miners, EVE tournaments, a player run graveyard, piracy, anti-pirate corporations, player run lotteries, EVE racing league, player created tools hooking up to the EVE server API to make life easier inside and outside the game and probably a few really big ones I'm forgetting at the moment.

Does PVE suck? Yeah. The sleepers in wormhole space are better but not great. PVE is not the focus, it's just a means to an end. Do you play GTA to take your idiot cousin to the bowling alley or jack cars and murder people with baseball bats?

Is the economy robust? They have a frick'n economist with a PhD looking at a mountain of data to see what's going on inside the game, there are quarterly reports and everything http://www.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=author&p=CCP%20Dr.EyjoG Virtually everything you can blow up was created by another player, almost everything except skill books and implants and I suspect implants will be the next piece to fall into our hot little hands. Unless they get rid of them skill books will probably always be NPC items, I'm OK with that.

Mining is boring! Then don't do it, there are plenty of other ways to make money. Most long term miners I know hook up with a few other people and sit around shooting the baloney while shooting space rocks. You can buy minerals on the market, cut a deal with a friendly miner and have him deliver stuff to you, join a corp that already has a strong mining base and earn enough trust to play with their stock or take it from other miners. Pro tip, you would be surprised how little some modules are sold for. You can make money just buying them, reprocessing and selling the mineral value even with crappy skills. Or use the minerals to make something people actually want/you use all the time like ammo. EVE has a built in calculator for a reason.

Hauling is boring! Kids today. You have warp to zero now so I don't want to hear anything about how long it takes to make 15 jumps. Get off my lawn! If your going to move, figure out if its worth hauling it yourself, letting a corp mate do it for you (for a nominal fee of course) paying someone else to do it with a contract or selling it off and buying new toys when you get there. Time is money.

PVP is boring! Like everything else in EVE it depends. Hi-Sec wars, gate camps, baiting new players, deep 0.0 space, yeah you could be waiting awhile before something shows up. There are plenty of people out there willing to shoot at you but not very many looking for a fair fight or to lose. If I had an isk for every time I heard someone say I can't get into PVP I'm too new I could buy Jita 4-4 (the main trade hub in EVE) and charge admission to dock. [Please note that I know this is currently impossible but it would be fun] It only takes a few hours if that to learn enough skills to be a tackler. It's not as glamorous as being top of the kill mail but if the target can just fly away everyones hard work just got flushed down the crapper.

Grr, work getting in the way of my, er, work. Short version, EVE will give you what you put into it, ccp is just there to make the toys and see what you do with them.

 

[Tibike77]

ok i guess i should have mention that when you are playing the game you train for skills you need to use immediately since those don't take more than 2 hours. And when you arent playing you train your attributes. but what can a noob train up to in the first month? (it was a destroyer for me) and that can be done in a week. you run missions with frigates and destroyer, learn how the game work in more detail, all the while you train your attribute. Anyone who ignore their attributes will leave the game after month one.

You could be training some smidgen of social skills (like, say, Social L3 and Connections L2) on top of the bare minimum skills needed to outfit a Kestrel frigate with standard missile launchers in the first day or two, and breeze through L1 missions and L1 storylines while training for a passive shield-tanked Caracal in-between some more core skills and a bit of learnings.

Then you use the Caracal to run the recently available L2 missions before the first week is even over, then save up the ISK you get running some more L2s while training for a Drake interspersed with some more learnings (but not over L4 basics).

By the time you can afford to buy a Drake some time in late second week or early third week you would have already gained access to some L3 agents and have some more useful skills for it... so by the time the first month is over, you would already have access to L4 agents while also being able to earn enough ISK to buy most of the stuff you could possibly want, including but not limited to PLEX, advanced learnings, higher level implants and so on and so forth.

Yes, there are plenty of "new players" that listen to the "focus on learnings first, and FOCUS HARD, for a months or so" advice... and it's THOSE players that tend to leave the game sooner rather than later because of sheer boredom, because all they can fly after one month is at most a pathetically fitted destroyer instead of a decently fitted battlecruiser.
Heck, if you rush for it, you could even (just barely) make it directly into a battleship which struggles heavily in L4s. Granted, you'd make more ISK if you went directly for fast L3s in a battlecruiser, but give it another month and that battleship (if flown with decent PLAYER --not character-- skill) will no longer have much of a problem with L4 missions.


True, COMPLETELY ignoring your attributes = bad.
But focusing mainly on just attributes too long early on = almost just as bad, if you are a new player and this is your only account.

L4 basics plus L3 advanceds (~391k total SP) take around 25% of the time you need for L5 basics and L4 advanceds (~2214k total SP) while providing you with over 75% of the benefits - in fact, thanks to the early double-traning-speed bonus that ceases to apply at 1.6 mil SP total, it's more like 20% of the time for nearly 80% of the benefits. And in the grand scheme of things, after you figure in base attributes and implant bonuses, that 20-something% of the rest of the benefits is actually more like less than 10% of your total potential learning speed.
Those L4bas/L3adv levels will only take up a few days of your first month, and you seriously do not really need anything more than that for a while... they'll pay themselves off in a month or two, whereas pushing to L5bas/L4adv will take over one year to pay off.
So unless you already paid or plan to pay for one year's worth of subscription time, don't bother with any L5 learnings near the very start... and even L4 advanceds are not so urgent either.

 

[Inglonias]

Meh. I played EVE on and off for about six months. Always got bored.

The problem is that you can't go it alone. At least, thats my problem.

I made more in ten minutes with a corp than I did in two weeks by myself.

That put me off.

Also, MMO games are hard for me to get into, because I don't like to talk to people. I don't have many friends, and none of them play MMOs (which is the main reason one plays them.)

 

[DTWolfwood]

Spoiler

ok i guess i should have mention that when you are playing the game you train for skills you need to use immediately since those don't take more than 2 hours. And when you arent playing you train your attributes. but what can a noob train up to in the first month? (it was a destroyer for me) and that can be done in a week. you run missions with frigates and destroyer, learn how the game work in more detail, all the while you train your attribute. Anyone who ignore their attributes will leave the game after month one.

You could be training some smidgen of social skills (like, say, Social L3 and Connections L2) on top of the bare minimum skills needed to outfit a Kestrel frigate with standard missile launchers in the first day or two, and breeze through L1 missions and L1 storylines while training for a passive shield-tanked Caracal in-between some more core skills and a bit of learnings.

Then you use the Caracal to run the recently available L2 missions before the first week is even over, then save up the ISK you get running some more L2s while training for a Drake interspersed with some more learnings (but not over L4 basics).

By the time you can afford to buy a Drake some time in late second week or early third week you would have already gained access to some L3 agents and have some more useful skills for it... so by the time the first month is over, you would already have access to L4 agents while also being able to earn enough ISK to buy most of the stuff you could possibly want, including but not limited to PLEX, advanced learnings, higher level implants and so on and so forth.

Yes, there are plenty of "new players" that listen to the "focus on learnings first, and FOCUS HARD, for a months or so" advice... and it's THOSE players that tend to leave the game sooner rather than later because of sheer boredom, because all they can fly after one month is at most a pathetically fitted destroyer instead of a decently fitted battlecruiser.
Heck, if you rush for it, you could even (just barely) make it directly into a battleship which struggles heavily in L4s. Granted, you'd make more ISK if you went directly for fast L3s in a battlecruiser, but give it another month and that battleship (if flown with decent PLAYER --not character-- skill) will no longer have much of a problem with L4 missions.


True, COMPLETELY ignoring your attributes = bad.
But focusing mainly on just attributes too long early on = almost just as bad, if you are a new player and this is your only account.

L4 basics plus L3 advanceds (~391k total SP) take around 25% of the time you need for L5 basics and L4 advanceds (~2214k total SP) while providing you with over 75% of the benefits - in fact, thanks to the early double-traning-speed bonus that ceases to apply at 1.6 mil SP total, it's more like 20% of the time for nearly 80% of the benefits. And in the grand scheme of things, after you figure in base attributes and implant bonuses, that 20-something% of the rest of the benefits is actually more like less than 10% of your total potential learning speed.
Those L4bas/L3adv levels will only take up a few days of your first month, and you seriously do not really need anything more than that for a while... they'll pay themselves off in a month or two, whereas pushing to L5bas/L4adv will take over one year to pay off.
So unless you already paid or plan to pay for one year's worth of subscription time, don't bother with any L5 learnings near the very start... and even L4 advanceds are not so urgent either.

difference in play styles. Going it alone sure, i guess what u suggest should work.

But for anyone who doesn't play this game alone, train your attributes first. All the fun comes from your fleet commander using you as bait! First month was a blast, literally. (assuming youre not in a corp that cant even afford a few dozen frigate loses <.<) mission whoring is for carebears!

p.s. only considering those that use this stat boosting newb package. If you don't use that do what Tibike77 rants about.

 

[Dexiro]

It's tempting but I'm generally not into MMO's that much anymore. If this sprung up a year ago I would have gone for it :3