EVE Online: Becoming n00b-Friendly

EVE Online developer, CCP Flatboy, has penned a blog about how CCP is reaching out to n00bs to make their introduction into the game faster and less stressful. Find out exactly how that's going to happen below:

This dev blog was brought to you by CCP Flatboy.

As Fear explained in his last dev blog, we reduced the starting skillpoints for new characters to reduce the amount of decisions new players need to make before starting to play the game. I know you have all been waiting anxiously to see how we'll ensure that new characters are still useful in their first weeks.

The TLDR version is this: They train skills faster.

How much faster? We toyed around with all kinds of beautiful graphs for this speed, based on SP or time, from the formula for the water saturation of a sponge gourd (tanh * (4 /h) * SQRT(Dr/Dt)), as suggested by Hellmar, to an elegant 3rd order exponential formula, to a beautiful logarithmic function.

„Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art." - Frederic Chopin

Turned out that all these elegant high-order formulas confused people. They couldn't make heads or tails of what was happening to their skills. All they knew was that their training speed was gradually dropping. So we simplified.

In Apocrypha, new characters train at double speed until they reach 1.6 Million SkillPoints. That is all.

These values were chosen so that an Apocrypha character catches up with a current character in about 6 weeks after which they will be equal in power. The estimation assumes the character has no implants or learning skills, both of which can decrease this time. This does mean that Apocrypha characters will have slightly fewer skillpoints for the first weeks but instead they are a lot more customizable. In a week they are likely to be better in a narrow field than the old ones due to their increased training speed. When they catch up they will be superior in a single function.

The main point here is that this will increase a new player's understanding of his skills. Today it's near impossible to remember all these skills one starts with and how they work. But if you start with less and get most of the skills while experimenting to find your own path, learning about your skills becomes much more enjoyable and you become efficient and useful sooner than otherwise possible.

More choice, more flexibility, more power!

So, you EVE veterans, what do you think of this? Let us know!

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1.6 mill SP is less than a month of skill training. Didn't they make it some time ago that all new players get ~month of pre-learned skills anyway?

Boo.

No sir, I don't like it. It was faster to make a pilot, figure out your mistakes and reroll. Couldn't you get Frigates V right out of the gate if you steered your initial skill tree the right way? I seem to remember that(for Caldari anyway).

People are just going to be training the wrong skills faster, lol. How does this help them understand what they are doing?

Besides, everybody knows you train your learning skills first. Its boring, but makes a HUGE difference in the long run. I guess if you just train learning skills up to the 1.6 mil mark, you will be "more useful" faster.

Seems lame, I don't see this as helping a new player with the game itself. Sounds good for alts though. ;)

Imma make a trial account and see wtf is up.

Edit: It's frigates IV.

After reading a ton of material on the matter, I think this will only benefit veteran players who wish to speed train an alt. You will be able to train your learning skills at 2x speed and once it wears off you will continue to train at 2x speed due to the boost your learning skills give. New players will not be able to do this, since they do not(should not, lol) have the ISK to purchase these skills.

To do it "right" you need to train your learning skills first, they make an incredible difference in the trainging time of your "real" skills. The problem lies in that who wants to train skills that give no real immediate return? I'd rather be out pew-pewing.

The noob of course goes for the latter and trains skills that can get him/her into the fight right off. Then a week or two later finds out that they could have 2x the skill points that they have now and in order to catch up(which they NEVER will), they need to train all of these lame learning skills.

Noob quits cuz this game suxorzz.

Screw all this speed training crap and just give new players basic learning skills to level 4 and advanced to level 3. That way they will in effect be training twice as fast(same as the double rate idea) and won't have to spend the time on "boring" skills. Just give them a few less of the initial skills you get in character creation in exchange for these.

Seems like an easy solution, veterans get to keep the learning skills they invested so much time in and new players don't have to learn the hard way.

I firmly believe that you will not excel in this game without some work and research. But this will help when new players choose a skill that they find is of no real use to them, by speeding up the learning of a different skill.

Knowing which skills to train is another matter....

Further more...

I don't want the game to become TOO noob friendly. A big part of EVE is finding your way and learning during the process. This often poses too great an obstacle to overcome for the more "casual"(read A.D.D.) player.

We absolutely do not want every pwnzor-king-ding-a-ling on the net playing EVE. Blizzard cornered the market on that and has saved me from interacting with a large chunk of the MMO idiot population, since I do not play WoW.

Now, if they have T2 gear fitted and like to travel in 0.0 space then maybe we can work something out... :)