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A Book or the Library?

"Thankfully I have never done the tutorials, but can I assume that at the point where,
"He turned in the mission and now could not get back to his wreck." the tutorial has not gone over making bookmarks? Or even if it has, why did the game not make him bookmark his wreck?
To me, this case isn't about survival or even loss, it is about bad instructions. Eve is a product and the worst thing you can do is give bad or no instructions with a new product. People will assume their frustration is the products fault. If this guy could have gotten half his loot, maybe he could have blamed himself for not reading the mission, but instead EVE kicks him when he's down right from the start. I get that we are getting into how learning is painful and most people don't have a tolerance for that pain, but maybe they could spread the sting out a little more?"
Anonymous @ December 20, 2013 at 4:33 AM

I will admit, it has been a while since I did the training missions. They take me forever to do, so I avoid them. I think it took me about four days to finish them all with Chella and head out into the world my first time. Sugar made it halfway and I asked myself, "Don't I know enough to skip this?" Obviously I did. I'd been playing for almost a month by that point.

Yesterday while reflecting on personalities and the frustration of a newbie it as pointed out to me that some of the information that might have helped him out or made the mistake more his own fault was missing from the tutorial missions. I thought about it and nodded at the validity of these statements.

The dumbing down of Eve is one of the great fears. There are others (goonswarm, Eve is dying, CCP is going to turn into Blizzard and Eve into WoW) but dumbing down Eve is a knee jerk reaction that I have to admit I have felt.

The creation of a more accessible Eve and the dumbing down of Eve is not the same thing. Every time I feel myself puff up and feather, I remember the first time I put my POS up. I was almost in tears when I finally asked Razor, after three hours, how to make my reactions actually start to react. Nothing had hinted at or made me aware that I needed to drag and drop icons. Nothing.

The subject of losing ones wreck was part of the situation. If he had been able to get back to his wreck he would have learned about loot drops. However, he would not have had to do th "to bad so sad" wave that so many of us have had to do for a wreck.

The newbie missions do not discuss bookmarks. I do not think I learned about bookmarks until after I moved to low sec. Book marking from inside of the People and Places menu was another discovery. I did the jet can and bookmark the can thing for a long time before I learned about bookmarks in warp.

I believe there is a CSM member who ran on the platform of the new player experience. This would be their territory. I will be honest in that my disappointment with the last round of elections when it came to focus of the members has left me apathetic to the entire thing. However, whenever we discuss accessibility there is also a discussion of force feeding information. How much should be there? I find that I waft back and forth about this.

Should we try to list all of it? That is unreasonable. Some? How much help should be there? My fluffed up peacock ego says, "I know how to play" and that "enough" information should be there. My rational side says all of it. If someone wants to read what to do they should be able to. They should not have to leave the game and go to goggle and type things in. The instructions on how to do things should not only be found in 10 years of patch notes.

If someone can skip out of the tutorials at any time there is not a need to have less information. They are not trapped. When I re-installed Skyrim this last time I picked a mod that let me skip the very long intro interactive movie. I didn't need it and sitting through it was irritating.

Eve really does need better help files and an updated Wiki. In this fight for accessibility as they clean up the UI, Polish and add functionality that things scream for, create sounds to increase our awareness through a broader range of senses, why have the help  files and the Wiki stayed so far behind?

I am reminded of why people lose their pods their first few times in low sec. If I remember there is one line or comment about warping your pod away after you lose a ship and that is it. People dont warp them out before they have never had to and there is only a vague refrence in one mission they may not have done because it is one of the advanced combat missions.

It is that line between what the game should offer. googling is an option. I use it frequently but when in the middle of a teaching section one doesn't expect to google for supplementary information.

A funny thing is that I was reading some posts by CCP Affinity who is a content creator for Eve and does this type of thing. hmm. I will leave others to be critical. I'll take the path that it may not have been through about. There is a lot of things to write about and update in Eve. I didn't really think about it despite the fact that bookmarks are a part of my daily life. I don't think an entire tutorial needs to happen but something as simple as teaching people to bookmark wrecks (especially theirs) wouldn't be terrible.

Thank you Anonymous for the good, productive comments. I can't give you name credit or I would.

Comments

  1. The game couldn't bookmark his wreck. It was in a mission deadspace pocket, behind an acceleration gate. If you complete the mission, you can't return there, as there is no gate.

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    Replies
    1. Yes you can. Dead space rooms are just marked spots with gates and temp restrictions. You can fly from one room to another if you are willing to take the time. I always book mark one wreck in each room. Once the site despawns you can warp directly to each bookmark. Its a great way to make safe spots too.

      Delete
  2. I don't think people need to be so hard on CCP Affinity. Writing instructions can suck the life out of you. My boss had considered it a waste of time until I started doing them for the more complicated products and he saw how much better the product was received, and how much it reduced tech support.
    It is difficult, because you look at the thing you know inside and out, and wonder how anyone could not figure it out.
    In EVE, instruction is even less appreciated because most of us are the types of kids that threw the instructions away, figuring things out is the fun part. Also, knowledge is a big part of what separates good from bad in this game.
    As I understand it there are many people in game who are willing to teach, so I think having limited built in instruction is fine as long as that has safeguards and points you to training corps and out of game resources.
    Also, I'm sure whoever anon is, they are more than happy with just a thanks.

    ReplyDelete
  3. In both the "must lose a ship" tutorials, it's clearly stated that you *will lose your ship*. You're explicitly told to either take the ship provided or to use cheap fittings to minimise your loss.

    Whilst making all due allowances for those for whom the tutorial is not in their native language, how far can you take the hand-holding? Will the person who didn't properly read the mission brief really spend the time to read the "You know you'll lose your ship, right?" and "When your ship blows up you'll lose most, if not all, of your cargo" dialog boxes.

    And in both cases you have to warp your pod out -- granted, not as quickly as if there was a PVP villain locking you, but you do have to do it.

    The tutorials are a lot better than they were just a year ago when I started. They don't, they can't, cover everything and they aren't perfect. But anyone who ignores the information they present should look to themselves, not the game...

    ReplyDelete
  4. I thought to post this on the other article, realized it was a few days old, then read this article followup.

    The tutorials do not cover bookmarking, and possibly they should at the same time they handle warping to other systems by setting destinations.

    EVE I think suffers from being an old school kinda game. It hearkens back to the old MUDs and early Meridian, EQ, and Ultima games where PVP was always around, your loot stayed in your corpse and was often stolen by your killer if you did not die to a mob.

    Today we have MMOs that are more themepark, everything easy, harmless and no-loss. You do not have a whole lot of thought at first because you only have a couple abilities to start with, and as Gevlon posted on Evenews, they usually tune the intro area mobs so you pretty much cannot die. The rats in the tutorial areas are quite a bit weaker than normal rats, and you're at much less danger while learning, but you do need to read and find out what is going on. Not just in a "why is the farmer sending me after this bracelet" lore that it seems most MMO players ignore anyway, but military tactical, situational, or other kind of intelligence of what you're going into.

    In some ways I think EVE is not for everyone. It does take more work that many other games. On the other hand, if you know about what will be required of you to have fun in EVE, people might enjoy their experience more.

    ReplyDelete

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