NidenShareTweetThe unprecedented success of This Is EVE, New Eden has seen an explosion in new players coming to take part of what they have seen. The unified voice from the community has been that this trailer truly represents what EVE is all about and that it gives even people who have never played a good idea what they’re in for. Meanwhile the NPE has seen improvements, there are a plethora of guides for new players and recruiters have been putting in overtime to get newbros active and involved.This was all very different when most of us took our first steps in New Eden. Where do you think you would have ended up if you had started EVE Online today? How would you career be different if you could do it all again? Assume you had just seen the trailer and came into the game as it is today. Similarly, do you see this new generation of players evolving differently and having a significantly different experience than your own?Dunk: When I started in 2008, getting into null sec combat seemed like a far remove from what the average player could engage in. BoB and Goons were dancing around at that time and getting into a group in null required skills and ships I didn’t have. Goons still wanted to see activity on Something Awful, and so I ended up joining a high sec missioning corp, Moose & Squirrel. I learned a lot there until the husband & wife that ran the corp got a divorce. [sad trombone]
Joining the first iteration of Faction Warfare was the first real PvP training I got. Back in the beginning, FW was not the profit machine it is now, and was really about small ship fights. A big event was rolling out a Drake fleet. Learning the different facets of Eve was a solo endeavor, as the FW people didn’t care about anything else by blowing stuff up.
The corps I was in were not as tight and cohesive and left me time to try lots of different professions by myself. Pre-Apocrypha scanning was an amazingly difficult skill to master. Figuring out simple ideas, like contracts (and not getting scammed), mining, and industry was more difficult. New features like Post-Apocrypha scanning didn’t have much info on how to do it and how to interpret the results, let alone what was on the other side of that wormhole.
Today, there is a lot of great information for players, even if they go solo. Youtube videos and Twitch livestreams are amazingly good in showing new pilots the ropes, even is they are shy about joining a corp. If they do join a corp, most have some sort of training program, and the large groups have extensive ones. Even CCP has gotten much more active in promoting Eve information that they do not control, posting on social media about helpful sites and events that are completely player driven.
Tarek: When I started the fall of BoB was a big thing and that fascinated me most, but I soon was made to realize that there is no chance to get into that part of the game as newbie except if you belonged to the Goon community which I didn’t. In the end, I did land in nullsec and indeed the shady business of spying, but it took some time. If I would start today, after seeing this trailer, my first thought would be to become an explorer like in the scene with Wingspan TT but very likely I would also gravitate to Brave Newbies. They have done a lot in the last week to invite new players and give them a perspective.
Niden: If I started EVE after having seen that trailer and given how the game and the community looks today, I’m pretty sure I would have ended up in lowsec and Factional Warfare anyway. The main difference, and it is an important one, is that I would have gotten into it a lot faster. Instead, I spent years trying stuff and failing, going at it alone and quitting several times. To a new player FW must seem like an obvious source of PVP and it is even recommended at the end of the tutorial. I am pretty sure I would have followed that thread because I’ve always looked for PVP.
EVE may be hard, but man was it a lot harder back then. In some ways I envy new players who have all kinds of support that I didn’t, but I’m glad it’s there. Not only has EVE evolved, but the community support for new players has grown substantially. There are a plethora of well written guides and tutorials, and recruiters are a much more common sight.
What I really loved about the trailer is that it shows what EVE is really all about, so it has a lot better hit rate at attracting people who are interested in it. I mean, a lot of us back in the day come into EVE with our own ideas about what EVE was, simply because we didn’t know. We had to find out the hard way, and we lost quite a few along the way.
I see a new generation of players who are more aware than we were then we started, but if they turn out as hardy and committed to the community remains to be seen. EVE had a ruthless way of culling the weak back in the day.
Georgik: Man, when I first started playing there wasn’t even a pvp aspect since no one had ships to pvp in. I vividly remember playing with some guys from bluesnews.com and trying to scrape enough minerals together to make one battleship, I think it was a megathron. There were hundreds of us in the fields, toiling away with our civilian and tech 1 mining lasers, frigates, cruisers.. we ALL had them fit and were all scraping away at the rocks. After Red Moon Rising and the arrival of mining barges, mining got a lot easier, but it was still pretty uneventful. The learning curve was dealt with by just doing what other people in the corp who had been playing for a week longer than you thought would be a good idea. Georgik has so many random skills it’s not even funny, because of this.
When probing first came out, it was also a nightmare. It required a much higher level of manual dexterity, speed and focus to find anything, especially ships. The recent improvements to scanning and the birth of wormholes is where I always should have been though. I’m currently 5 wormholes deep, bouncing between The Spire in the north East, and Aridia in the south west. I run into all manner of pilots and activities and space, and that rush of not knowing what I’m jumping into is always fun. It only took 10 years, but I think I found the perfect profession for me. .
Forlorn: I was playing another online game with a bunch of guys, that I met online (and only one RL friend). When that other game was getting older and older and left unsupported the other guys started looking around and found EVE. I however wasn’t convinced by EVE and its game engine. The graphic looked as outdated as the other game I played. I did a few trials over a few weeks and payment from Germany was not really working. But then right before my first kid was born CCP released the Trinity expansion. And I got hooked by its graphics.
I joined the corps that my friends played in for over a year already and it was an active low sec corps. I basically got taught everything in that corp from many different individuals, some played since beta. Today this is rather unlikely since both the EVE community and information on the internet is much wider than it was common back in the days. But it is much harder to find some untouched and unreported things in EVE which also removed some of the appealing factors in EVE. It got easier to get into but harder to find something new and explore things yourself.
Luckily CCP is going to change that with more randomness in future expansions and I welcome this. By heart I have always been an explorer, I still do side projects where I pick an EVE area and try to find a way to adapt to its mechanics. After a few weeks I check around and try to find how other people excel at this area, just to see if I min/maxed. I probably would have ended up in a WH corp/alliance but started doing high sec probing and very little PvP.
Mangala: I play the “what if” game every so often and no matter what I cannot picture a scenario where had I joined the game today I would eventually end up in the same position I am now: community leader, RvB command member, occasional columnist for CZ, well known FC and two time CSM member.
Back when I joined EVE I only did so as it was spaceships (I am a huge spaceship nerd) and because of coverage of events like this and great war coverage on the now defunct Fires of Heaven forums. I had gathered along the way that players made their own stories in EVE, but never did I think my story would become what it did.
Should I have managed to avoid EVE for the past 8 years, and then seen the This is EVE video, I would have jumped feet first into this game. With all the resources available to eager new players these days, I would be out there trying as much of everything as I could. Really uncertain as to where I would end up, but thats part of the beauty of EVE. No matter your original intent, the game gives you such a canvas to work with you can change what you do nearly every day.
Tags: cz minutes
12 year EVE veteran, Snuffed Out scumbag, writer, graphic artist, producer, Editor-in-Chief of Crossing Zebras and the second most influential player in EVE, according to EVE Onion.
Niden
Georgik: Man, when I first started playing there wasn’t even a pvp aspect since no one had ships to pvp in. I vividly remember playing with some guys from bluesnews.com and trying to scrape enough minerals together to make one battleship, I think it was a megathron. There were hundreds of us in the fields, toiling away with our civilian and tech 1 mining lasers, frigates, cruisers.. we ALL had them fit and were all scraping away at the rocks. After Red Moon Rising and the arrival of mining barges, mining got a lot easier, but it was still pretty uneventful. The learning curve was dealt with by just doing what other people in the corp who had been playing for a week longer than you thought would be a good idea. Georgik has so many random skills it’s not even funny, because of this.
When probing first came out, it was also a nightmare. It required a much higher level of manual dexterity, speed and focus to find anything, especially ships. The recent improvements to scanning and the birth of wormholes is where I always should have been though. I’m currently 5 wormholes deep, bouncing between The Spire in the north East, and Aridia in the south west. I run into all manner of pilots and activities and space, and that rush of not knowing what I’m jumping into is always fun. It only took 10 years, but I think I found the perfect profession for me. .
Forlorn: I was playing another online game with a bunch of guys, that I met online (and only one RL friend). When that other game was getting older and older and left unsupported the other guys started looking around and found EVE. I however wasn’t convinced by EVE and its game engine. The graphic looked as outdated as the other game I played. I did a few trials over a few weeks and payment from Germany was not really working. But then right before my first kid was born CCP released the Trinity expansion. And I got hooked by its graphics.
Niden
