One of the apparent constants of the universe is CCP/Fenris reworking their new player experience in an attempt to improve player retention.
June’s Cradle of War expansion brought with it the latest iteration on that, introducing Exordium, an entirely new region made up of 53 star systems, all dedicated to the new player experience and as safe as safe gets because PvP is turned off. No shooting other players allowed.
The Exordium region for New Players
This has been an interesting experiment because there has long been a low level whine of complaints that EVE Online would be more popular if only there was a place with no PvP. Looking at the most recent MER it certainly seems like Exordium is not all that interesting. It is 53 systems with not a lot going on.
Now, that is going to invite the usual sort of “true communism has never been tried” argument about how CCP gimped the economic viability of the place. And, yes, Exordium isn’t an apples to apples situation with the rest of high sec, but so many people have complained about EVE Online having PvP that one might think that having an area without it might entice people with that objection to give it a try.
Fun fact: No.
There is no doubt a long list of reasons why beyond bad faith arguments, but bad faith seems to be the champ as people simply find another reason to say the game is bad.
All of which is mostly a setup for my actual point here because, part of the whole new player experience is a brand new tutorial. Fully voiced and too long for me to bother finishing… I know I am not the target audience, but the whole thing was slow and involved a storyline that I knew from the outset would not matter a whit once I was done… it it yet another run at trying to figure out how to engage new players with the game.
As usual they give you a cool ship… then blow it up
And I understand that is important. Despite the fact that the game is currently in an up cycle in player activity, people still leave the game and some level of replacement with new players is required. The question is how do you achieve that.
This all comes up because of more stuff on Reddit… why must I go there, why must I read things there… where somebody who should know better was speculating on how to get back to November 2016 levels of new player creation. See the chart below.
November 2016 – New Player Creation Peak
You can find that chart, and others like it, over at EVE Offline.
Now, if you’re up on the history of EVE Online you probably know what happened in the game in November 2016. It wasn’t a war or a world record or the banning of casinos that happened on that day. (The casino ban was in October.)
It was the transition to a free to play model.
As happens with every such transition, there was a big influx of new players to check out the game. LOTRO, EverQuest, Rift, ESO… any semi-popular subscription MMORPG that transitions to free to play see such a boost.
Then the novelty is gone and the numbers drop down to a more sustainable, but hopefully higher than before, level. Free to play is the removal of a point of friction, but it won’t make a game magically better.
However, the person in question, in what feels like a classic case of not understanding correlation, waved that away in the comments and insisted that it was really the 10 hour, fully voice, intro tutorial that was what was on display here.
And that seems insane.
First, nobody besides CCP has any idea how many people finished that tutorial. As much as I knock CCP for their seeming inability to think through their changes, I feel like their decision to take that whole tutorial and all the work it represented and toss it in the trash was probably based on player completion and retention data, to which they seem very sensitive.
That they continue to thrash on the idea of a new player experience such that Exordium is the fourth or fifth major change since the Ascension expansion… it is tough to keep track… at least strongly implies that this is something to which they are paying close attention and want to improve.
So, while I am willing to entertain the “CCP has no idea what they’re doing” I think you need to support that statement at least a little bit.
Second, however, is that I am not sure how much positive impact a tutorial can have. I feel like the best tutorial is one that doesn’t get in the way of your playing the actual game. The beginning of Half-Life 2, or even the early WoW starting areas, just put you in the game, gave you some tips, and then gave you a shove down the path to the rest of the game.
Now,that is easy for both titles because they had clear paths forward. Half-Life 2 is a fairly on rails first person RPG and early WoW got you on a quest path that would take you at least to your mid-30s in levels before falling apart for a bit. EVE Online doesn’t have such a neat path forward… or it does, but only if you want to run missions for your entire career.
CCP has attempted to mitigate that with career agents and the AIR career path, and the daily AIR goals, and the new achievements that came in with Cradle of War, and the old achievements they had before, and with mastery certificates, and probably a few more ways I don’t even remember, all in service of breaking the player retention cycle they showed us back at FanFest 2014.
New Player Trajectory – FanFest 2014
Even Exordium has, as part of its mission, gathering together new players and pushing them towards faction warfare, the New Eden RvR analog, to help achieve this goal.
In that context, with the goal clearly marked if not easily achievable, I feel pretty strongly that a 10 hour fully voiced solo tutorial doesn’t bring anything to the table for player retention. What does that prepare you for? Missions? Epic arc missions?
Furthermore, it is not representative of the game you’ll be playing. If you spend 10 hours following a story, then get to the end and find that the actual game is nothing like that, was this a good thing? If you enjoyed the story aspect, you’re facing a big rug pull at the end, and if you didn’t like it, if it drove you off… which I am sure happened to some percentage of new players who attempted it… did it cut you off from something you may have enjoyed?
We’ve seen at least the rug pull complaints before. Who remembers Age of Conan?
The opening tutorial was widely praised. Twenty levels of focus on you, the player. And then… the game changed and people were a bit miffed. At least that is how I recall it going, though I never played it myself.
However, I have had a similar experience over in EverQuest of all places.
At one point they put in a tutorial, a story drive starter area where you wake up a captive then have to work with some NPCs to follow a storyline to escape the mines where you are all being held.
It is quite well done. I’ve run in five or six times easily. It shows you how to do everything, gives you a series of progressively more difficult missions, and gets you up to level 10 or so before you finally exit. It is a nice little coherent package of content.
And then you done and you get kicked out of the place and you’re at level 10 in EverQuest where there game isn’t nearly as charming or focused. It is really a bad transition and, as it turns out, the tutorial doesn’t really prepare you for the game as it actually exists.
Or so it feels to me, which is why I am not enthusiastic about CCP/Fenris spending a bunch of time crafting yet another guided tutorial with a storyline that dumps you out into the actual reality of the game. That feels like it could even be counter productive in the end.
But EVE Online is also not a game that lends itself well to an introductory guide as you play either, largely due to the fact that its UI is so unlike other titles that you are unlikely to show up and feel anything is familiar. The Half-Life 2 intro works because you’ve probably played first person titles. Likewise with WoW.
Then there is the fact that EVE Online is 23 years old and has a whole host of old MMORPG problems, which makes me wonder if there is any new player experience that will move the needle. I mentioned five a decade back, and none of them have gotten and less problematic.