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Right Click is A Demon

Just in case anyone has worried that I've become glued to my machine, I took Sleipnir out on a ride today. The weather was amazing for late November and I had some errands to run. There is supposedly a snow storm on the way so it seems to be pushing a warm front before it. The weather was 75/23c and beautifully clear. Later, my husband came home early from work and we walked across the street to have dinner and enjoy the weather because supposedly it will be a snow hellscape in a few days.

View off my back deck this afternoon.

Then I came home and played Eve. The CTA is going well. The invasion of vets into rookie chat has continued. We're being allowed to stay if we are productive. This has been great. Questions are getting fielded rapid fire. We're dragging people into private conversations and hand walking them through their problems.

I love the right click menus. I use them all of the time. I've tried many times to use hte radial menu and I wind up slow and confused and I screw up a lot. However, answering questions and walking people through problems I learn that we still have a lot of information buried in right click menus. We need to get that information out of the menus.

  • People are still getting lost. The entire concept of jumping through stargates clicks for some and not for others.
  • There is nothing that tells people how to split stacks.
  • Refining doesn't make a lot of sense.
  • That mission where they have to make a shuttle and often wind up in another system to make it gets them confused every single time. I'm about to suggest we just drop the damn size of that shuttle down to fit in their rookie ships cargo hold.
  • The industry window is maybe locking up on people, maybe not. There are a lot of problems with building that second civilian afterburner. I think they are not delivering their job. Its confusing trying to work it out second hand.
  • Double f-ing click in space
  • Really, really, really we need a more intuitive skill tree that they can just unfold and look at
  • Make sure they have accepted the mission when they can't find what to do
  • Bookmarking... they are running off to explore and getting stuck in wormholes
  • Finding the agent mission listing is still confusing people. I don't know if they are closing their station services or just not looking for it.
I have also learned that I use almost no short cut keys to do things in the game. The tool tips make my life easier as I mouse over things to see what the short cut is. The few shortcuts I do use I have used so long I have no idea if I am hitting shift or control half the time. Sometimes I flub answers. It is quite the mental exercise at times.

Lots of people want to help. I commend that and appreciate it. However, some need to remember that people are in their first and second and third days. Helping someone through PvE or Mining questions is helping them get into the game so that they can learn other things. I am sure there are some who are day one, out of the gate, "PvP or GTFO" but a lot of people are just trying to master the basic commands and understand how to process the information that is coming in. I have no wish to discourage people who wish to help but I do council patience. It is hard to remember how early into the game they are.


It can be frustrating. I had someone ask how to turn off a sound. I told him to his escape and use that menu to adjust his audio control. He asked again. Someone else said to use the escape menu and explained that pressing escalate brings up a menu. He goes "BUT WHERE DO I TURN THE SOUND OFF!" and we said the audio tab which has sound selections. I don't think that we can do but so much. Maybe make sure the tabs are a bit more distinct from each other? I don't know.

What will be interesting is following this through the week as they learn a little bit more and start spreading their wings. I wonder what the weekend will look like.

For now, I am going to try to take tomorrow off and work on my second Pod and Planet submission. That ends next week and my second story is only a few hundred unfinished words.

Comments

  1. Could EVE support GIFs? Seems like a better way to teach newbies. Maybe make a 'help glossary' ranging from jumping gates/ refining to setting up POSes. Have it unlock according to what skills have been trained so newbies aren't reading useless info maybe? Also it seems to me that although eve has a great community all the helpful resources are out of game, you shouldn't need to constantly alt tab out to read a guide. The dev blog was pretty much an admission of that. EVE has a bad rep for forcing players to read guides. Focusing on moving information ingame and making it clearly acessible is, in my opinion, the way forward, it's what players expect from games. Official KBs, PI flow charts and a usable map for vet players too :) Thank you Sugar, you are doing an awesome job as CSM, blogger and player.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. EVE very much supports GIFs, which can be opened using the IG browser. I use several for classes I have touch for OUCH uni.

      Delete
  2. All very very good stuff Sugar!

    and if I may, Bookmarking... they are running off to explore and getting stuck in wormholes.

    We, and most Anoikis corps, offer a surprize 'Get Out of This Hole Free' card... and then WE also offer a Bonus Gift of several times the ISK they lost plus a free "What Went Wrong With Your Wormhole Excursion" one on one seminar, that, should they choose to take it, comes with an additional Free "What to do Next Time" group seminar and a bonus all expenses paid fleet invite for the "How to Kill Sleepers for ISK and FUN!" hands on group seminar!... =]

    ReplyDelete
  3. Really, really, really we need a more intuitive skill tree that they can just unfold and look at.

    Wow, this is GOOD. Something like you click on a ships info and get a button that leads to a page with all the skills actually in a tree format... The ship would have a very basic entry skills level 'fit' with each basic module shown as a button that again opens another page with all the skills in a tree for meta1 thru T2 modules.

    THIS would rock and not just for noobs...

    ReplyDelete
  4. Awesome, I tried to help in the new player experience as often as I could - and it's a tough process to get people to understand how eve works.

    Honestly, the easiest way I can get people to understand what I'm talking about sometimes is taking screenshots, posting them on imgur and then sharing the link (drawing a little red circle in my snip tool to highlight the area I'm talking about).

    -Noxisia Arkana

    ReplyDelete
  5. I wish there was a good way for me to get in touch with new players. I don't know everything but being fairly new myself I feel like I can still relate. This is a great game but it takes a little digging to see what is so amazing.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Yeah, that with the stacks was something I learned several months after I started playing. It only clicked for me after I started using my shift-key for splitting stacks in something completely unrelated to EVE. Then I one day just tried this on stacks in EVE and somehow it worked!

    Until then I just kind of had worked around this by doing silly stuff like cramming ammunition for my Raven into a newbie-ship to get smaller, 100m³ increments of Cruise missiles. Silly times.

    ReplyDelete

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