What to do in the meantime?

I recently read this blog http://podlogs.com/ztikara/2010/04/19/eve-blog-banter-the-girls-who-fly-spaceships/ and it made me think of the complaints that I received when trying to get my friends to play Eve Online.

It struck me as odd that Eve was having a hard time getting girls to play the game. When I met my wife she wasn’t a gamer at all but I changed all that when I introduced her to Cities of Heroes. Surprisingly she played the game for more than a month. Costumes, super groups/guilds were things that I didn't get into, but were things that I think kept her in the game.

I started playing eve because I never liked EQ or Wow. When I played City of Heroes I played a defender that essentially made my friends character more efficient due to less down time with my mana generating and healing abilities. If I didn’t have these abilities he would have left me in the dust. When he reached the level cap of 50 I was around 45 and that’s with him dragging me along. Needless to say I am not a hard core gamer. So searching for a fun game to play I took the time to read an article that defended Eve from all those people who said how can you have fun playing a game when you’re in a space ship all the time. This article which I can’t find now was so convincing I started a trial account which has turned into 3 full accounts.

Naturally since I found Eve to be great I tried to share it with my friends to see if I could get them hooked as well. The first obstacle was my wife since I wasn’t playing City of Heroes anymore I pushed it on her but wasn’t hoping for anything. In spectacular fashion my wife fell in love with Eve and is now a hardened pirate with 2 full accounts! My confidence heightened by my wife liking the game I ventured out to my friends in hopes of hooking them in as well.

Three of my friends are computer science majors, one art major, one network administrator and all of them hard core former EQ players. Only one of them ever played Wow and the others thought of Wow as a children’s version of EQ. In addition we all loved to play MOO2, we all loved Firefly, Star Wars, Star Trek etc... I never thought for a second if I could get my wife to play Eve I would have a problem getting my friends to play it. Not a single one of them stuck with it after the trial period.

The complaints that I heard the most from them were:

1. Given equally skilled players the linear nature of skill training would always favor older characters. Since it takes years to max skills they felt there was never a period when they would be equal except of course maxing out their combat skills.

2. It is hard to learn the game when limited by your skills. In pvp if you wanted to fight in a frigate in low or null sec chances are you will be out numbered or met with larger ships. Due to the hard core nature of the game no one wants to lose their ship so they rarely fight a fair fight.

3. The user interface was a night mare.

4. The hotkey system was major fail. (Getting fixed hurray!!)

5. Directional scanner was cool but they hated how it was implemented. They hated that they couldn’t bind a key to a specific angle of search or a key to scan. The mouse driven nature of most of the UI frustrated them beyond their ability to put up with it to play the game. And like one of my very stubborn friends put it “it’s a game, if it frustrates me more than it provides entertainment then I won’t play it and I certainly won’t pay a subscription fee on top of it”.

The question that became the common denominator of my friends experience with Eve was; what to do in the meantime? Setting aside all the complaints mentioned above, playing the game became frustrating because they didn’t know what they could do while they waited for their skills to train or in addition what skills should they train. This question always came up because they felt so constricted in the game. The tutorials were instructive but the depth of this game requires more than just tutorials. The thing that is missing is how the players get this information in a friendly in game environment without becoming a forum troll.

I can say from my experience that if it weren’t for the meta-game in Eve I don’t know with certainty if I would have continued to play the game either. I was lucky in this regard. I was recruited by a player that was running a scam basically. He recruited about 30-40 noobs and had us all mining and selling the ore to him. Of course he had multiple accounts and characters all in a nice chain to sell the refined minerals at a huge profit. His pvp ops were made up of Merlins and whatever larger ship he decided to run with. These ops were diversions for pirates so he could move his freighter through low sec to sell the minerals.

A pirate corporation declared war on us because we were such a juicy and ignorant target. During this war we were kindly informed of this scam we were in the middle of. The selling of corporate shares for 100 million isk a share was brought to our attention as ridiculous, not to mention that we were selling our ore instead of the minerals. My wife and I left the corporation and soon after everyone else wised up as well and it all fell apart. Don’t feel sorry for the scammer though he made out like a bandit.

The point is before we figured out that we were being scammed, being in the corporation was fun and exciting. Mining was boring, but the social aspects of mining ops were fun. Friends were made; some aspects of the game were getting learned by a collection of noobs trying to fill different roles in the corporation. Even after we were told of the scam the intrigue and meta-game of playing both sides in a war declaration was exciting as well. Looking back this CEO’s most valuable commodity was the people in his corporation but he didn’t realize it.

My friends didn’t get this experience. They were alone most of the time and only had me to guide them. The social aspect of Eve wasn’t readily apparent to them. To a new player in Eve no matter how good the tutorials, many players feel disconnected from the community. Some are lucky and find communities to play with but if a player doesn’t find one quickly it contributes to them leaving the game.

Why does this matter to the question of what to do in the meantime? For me the social part of being in a corporation filled the “meantime” gap. I wasn’t alone, other players were trying to figure out goals as well and those that were further ahead helped the newer players with their training plan. In the meantime we did mining ops, ran complexes, did missions, learned to probe etc…

I support the point; the lack of a readily available social aspect is missing in the beginning of a players experience and so, many players feel alone and never come back to the game.

CCP knows this already: http://play.eveonline.com/en/getting-started/working-with-others.aspx  so when trying to get new players into EVE make sure to inform them that the game is completely different when they join a corporation.