Jester was thinking about the lack of new blood in EVE. He isn't alone in this. The people guess that it's the "too hard" or "there is one style left (the min-maxed)" are the reasons.
This is a topic where I can write from experience, as a 6 weeks old newbie. EVE is not hard to start at all. Maybe holding 0.0 is hard, maybe getting to the top of killboards is hard, maybe financing a war is hard, but starting the game, getting your starter ventures and first ships is easy as WoW. The same applies to the min-maxing. Maybe the titan-killer fleets need to be min-maxed, but you can do starter stuff in practically anything that flies. I literally hauled 1B/month profit with a Badger II and a T1 frigate, both fitted with modules below 1M.
Funnily, the one who got closest to the truth is The Mittani, who wrote that there are "community born" people who knew other players before started playing, probably exactly to play with them and there are "EVE-born" ones who started playing EVE as a game and met people there. The "EVE-born" players has it hard way all the time: they start poor and alone in the highsec, knowing nothing about the game and can only trust in their hard-earned resume, while the community-born ones join their buddies at day 1, can learn from veterans and showered with ISK.
While he mentioned the problem, did not notice which part is important in it. The problem is not that it's hard to progress without knowing anyone, it's not. The problem for an EVE-born newbie is loneliness. If I, the preacher of anti-sociality call something lonely, you can be sure it is. During my 6 weeks of EVE life I encountered people three times. Of course it's not true in the sense that the buyers and sellers of the goods I trade and the ones who ganked me at a low-sec gate were people too. However if they were bots or NPCs, I couldn't tell the difference. To make it worse, both of my human interactions were "community born", as they happened with members of my chat channel "goblinworks" which couldn't exist without this blog, which is just as an outside-EVE community as somethingawful.com, the birthplace of the goons. All interactions were short: I paid them 10-10M for completing me a L3 security storyline mission that I got after distribution ones, which they performed with their battleships in 3 minutes. We also chat on this channel about economics and EVE mechanics but this is also unpersonal, I could read the same information on a Wiki.
Social people derive fun from social experiences. They are weird people, I mean how could any idiotic chit-chat be more fun than this:
However the socials won't change and if the game want to have them, the game must change.
What makes the starting experience lonely? At first that you don't need any people to progress. Missions, ratting, trading, hauling, exploring are the activities available to new players. You can't do either of them in a group. The fact that endgame operations will need group won't help newbies. They are lonely now.
Secondly, unlike in WoW, there is no visible indicator of progress out of "the grind". WoW leveling game is also lonely, even if you can spice it up with random dungeons and battlegrounds. But you see the "dings" showing how far from you from the other people. They say that "the fun begins at max level". I disagree, exactly because I'm not social. For someone who derives fun from other people, the statement is obviously true. In EVE there is no such indicator. Also, you can't grind harder to get the necessary skills to be acceptable for a 0.0 corporation, as skills come in real time. So as a newbie you are not only alone, but you can't even see the way out of it, and you can be sure you won't get out in the next 3-6 months.
Thirdly, the scamming and non-consensual PvP make new players look suspicious. They can be scammer alts. My only human interactions, when people helped me for a price with the L3 securities would be impossible without my "community born" nature. If I'd spam some open channel for such help, everyone would assume that I'm a ganking bait.
How to fix these, without destroying what makes EVE EVE? Above all, the solo nature of early play must be changed. The missions must be either completely removed, or reworked into some group activity. They should be acceptable and completable for a fleet of 3. 3 is more than 2, which is a bad number (your fault, no yours!), but not too big to let one just AFK leech. Mining could also be more preferred, due to it's group nature. An UI interface for jetcan-selling would be wonderful to help that: the one who places the container sets a price. Anyone opening the crate is given a dialog box telling "this can contains Y pieces of Z and costs X ISK (W ISK for one piece)" and he can pick "pay" and "steal". This would remove the overhead of mining operations and allow pickup-group mining. Since there isn't much to do during mining, people could socialize.
Red vs Blue and the Faction Warfare are also great places to let a newbie start. They should get more developer support (voted for Hans, that's all I can do here, I won't fire a gun in my EVE life besides starter and storyline missions).
Finally my suggestion is to allow the creation of "peaceful corporations". They would be exactly like the starter NPC corporations: can't get into war, can't own 0.0, pay fixed 11% tax to CONCORD. But it would allow players to start their way into corporation life and be with like-minded people. The current NPC corporation chat is the mixture idiotic spam and scamming spam, everyone starts his EVE life by turning that abomination off. New players are not welcomed in real corporations as they can't contribute and can be spies, while the corporations that would take them are either scams or a "we take every1 and hepl new friends lol" idiocies that are no different from the NPC corps besides can be wardecced. A "peaceful corporation" could be governed the same way as real corporations, providing structure and a friendly atmosphere.
While I'm not starting a corporation yet, exactly because of wardecs (and to let you scam without second account), I recalculated my plans about the Perception-willpower remap once again, prioritizing the Orca over the Charon so I'll be able to run proper mining fleets in 6 weeks. And will do so, even if its ISK/hour is below my normal. I'll get my Basilisk in 4 months, then I'll join and even lead incursions. This timescale is mind-boggling from someone coming from WoW where knowing what you'll do the next day is considered decent planning.
The point: I think I found another purpose in EVE, because the old one (surviving in this "harsh and evil world") turned out to be trivial, despite many people considering it hard. The new purpose: to prove that an asocial, profit-oriented organization is more welcoming to people than the friendly social ones in a realistic environment. In most games the friendly social groups are supported by design choices that make profitable betrayal impossible (you can't loot the corpse of a groupmate you lured into a gank in WoW) and/or punished by GMs. The games also remove the costs of leeching (if one guy does a dungeon on /follow, you don't get less valor point than 4-manning it, his points are generated independently). In EVE and the real world you can be hurt by letting "bad" people into your circles, so people rather go solo (and whine about it). I'm going to prove that being an unfriendly, unhelpful, money-counting goblin is the best way to get into mutually positive relationship with people when you could be hurt.
Remember that you can already participate on the goblinworks channel, discussing info and finding groups.
Business report: buy+sell+cash = 1.75B (0.49B gift)
And to make sure you are never without morons, take this one! If you see such, please send me comments. I won't publish them, but include it to next days morons of the day!
PS: my girlfriend found her interest in the game, exploration. She scanned down a wormhole, and against my advices, entered. Of course it was populated. But the guarding player just escorted her out and even explained what a WH corp doing there. Another proof that in EVE most people are not griefers. I mean he wouldn't even lose sec status in WH space but instead of killing her, spent some time educating the newbie.
This is a topic where I can write from experience, as a 6 weeks old newbie. EVE is not hard to start at all. Maybe holding 0.0 is hard, maybe getting to the top of killboards is hard, maybe financing a war is hard, but starting the game, getting your starter ventures and first ships is easy as WoW. The same applies to the min-maxing. Maybe the titan-killer fleets need to be min-maxed, but you can do starter stuff in practically anything that flies. I literally hauled 1B/month profit with a Badger II and a T1 frigate, both fitted with modules below 1M.
Funnily, the one who got closest to the truth is The Mittani, who wrote that there are "community born" people who knew other players before started playing, probably exactly to play with them and there are "EVE-born" ones who started playing EVE as a game and met people there. The "EVE-born" players has it hard way all the time: they start poor and alone in the highsec, knowing nothing about the game and can only trust in their hard-earned resume, while the community-born ones join their buddies at day 1, can learn from veterans and showered with ISK.
While he mentioned the problem, did not notice which part is important in it. The problem is not that it's hard to progress without knowing anyone, it's not. The problem for an EVE-born newbie is loneliness. If I, the preacher of anti-sociality call something lonely, you can be sure it is. During my 6 weeks of EVE life I encountered people three times. Of course it's not true in the sense that the buyers and sellers of the goods I trade and the ones who ganked me at a low-sec gate were people too. However if they were bots or NPCs, I couldn't tell the difference. To make it worse, both of my human interactions were "community born", as they happened with members of my chat channel "goblinworks" which couldn't exist without this blog, which is just as an outside-EVE community as somethingawful.com, the birthplace of the goons. All interactions were short: I paid them 10-10M for completing me a L3 security storyline mission that I got after distribution ones, which they performed with their battleships in 3 minutes. We also chat on this channel about economics and EVE mechanics but this is also unpersonal, I could read the same information on a Wiki.
Social people derive fun from social experiences. They are weird people, I mean how could any idiotic chit-chat be more fun than this:
However the socials won't change and if the game want to have them, the game must change.
What makes the starting experience lonely? At first that you don't need any people to progress. Missions, ratting, trading, hauling, exploring are the activities available to new players. You can't do either of them in a group. The fact that endgame operations will need group won't help newbies. They are lonely now.
Secondly, unlike in WoW, there is no visible indicator of progress out of "the grind". WoW leveling game is also lonely, even if you can spice it up with random dungeons and battlegrounds. But you see the "dings" showing how far from you from the other people. They say that "the fun begins at max level". I disagree, exactly because I'm not social. For someone who derives fun from other people, the statement is obviously true. In EVE there is no such indicator. Also, you can't grind harder to get the necessary skills to be acceptable for a 0.0 corporation, as skills come in real time. So as a newbie you are not only alone, but you can't even see the way out of it, and you can be sure you won't get out in the next 3-6 months.
Thirdly, the scamming and non-consensual PvP make new players look suspicious. They can be scammer alts. My only human interactions, when people helped me for a price with the L3 securities would be impossible without my "community born" nature. If I'd spam some open channel for such help, everyone would assume that I'm a ganking bait.
How to fix these, without destroying what makes EVE EVE? Above all, the solo nature of early play must be changed. The missions must be either completely removed, or reworked into some group activity. They should be acceptable and completable for a fleet of 3. 3 is more than 2, which is a bad number (your fault, no yours!), but not too big to let one just AFK leech. Mining could also be more preferred, due to it's group nature. An UI interface for jetcan-selling would be wonderful to help that: the one who places the container sets a price. Anyone opening the crate is given a dialog box telling "this can contains Y pieces of Z and costs X ISK (W ISK for one piece)" and he can pick "pay" and "steal". This would remove the overhead of mining operations and allow pickup-group mining. Since there isn't much to do during mining, people could socialize.
Red vs Blue and the Faction Warfare are also great places to let a newbie start. They should get more developer support (voted for Hans, that's all I can do here, I won't fire a gun in my EVE life besides starter and storyline missions).
Finally my suggestion is to allow the creation of "peaceful corporations". They would be exactly like the starter NPC corporations: can't get into war, can't own 0.0, pay fixed 11% tax to CONCORD. But it would allow players to start their way into corporation life and be with like-minded people. The current NPC corporation chat is the mixture idiotic spam and scamming spam, everyone starts his EVE life by turning that abomination off. New players are not welcomed in real corporations as they can't contribute and can be spies, while the corporations that would take them are either scams or a "we take every1 and hepl new friends lol" idiocies that are no different from the NPC corps besides can be wardecced. A "peaceful corporation" could be governed the same way as real corporations, providing structure and a friendly atmosphere.
While I'm not starting a corporation yet, exactly because of wardecs (and to let you scam without second account), I recalculated my plans about the Perception-willpower remap once again, prioritizing the Orca over the Charon so I'll be able to run proper mining fleets in 6 weeks. And will do so, even if its ISK/hour is below my normal. I'll get my Basilisk in 4 months, then I'll join and even lead incursions. This timescale is mind-boggling from someone coming from WoW where knowing what you'll do the next day is considered decent planning.
The point: I think I found another purpose in EVE, because the old one (surviving in this "harsh and evil world") turned out to be trivial, despite many people considering it hard. The new purpose: to prove that an asocial, profit-oriented organization is more welcoming to people than the friendly social ones in a realistic environment. In most games the friendly social groups are supported by design choices that make profitable betrayal impossible (you can't loot the corpse of a groupmate you lured into a gank in WoW) and/or punished by GMs. The games also remove the costs of leeching (if one guy does a dungeon on /follow, you don't get less valor point than 4-manning it, his points are generated independently). In EVE and the real world you can be hurt by letting "bad" people into your circles, so people rather go solo (and whine about it). I'm going to prove that being an unfriendly, unhelpful, money-counting goblin is the best way to get into mutually positive relationship with people when you could be hurt.
Remember that you can already participate on the goblinworks channel, discussing info and finding groups.
Business report: buy+sell+cash = 1.75B (0.49B gift)
And to make sure you are never without morons, take this one! If you see such, please send me comments. I won't publish them, but include it to next days morons of the day!
PS: my girlfriend found her interest in the game, exploration. She scanned down a wormhole, and against my advices, entered. Of course it was populated. But the guarding player just escorted her out and even explained what a WH corp doing there. Another proof that in EVE most people are not griefers. I mean he wouldn't even lose sec status in WH space but instead of killing her, spent some time educating the newbie.
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