beginner experience - grind or no grind? (Page 2 of 3)

we realise there is still aways to go with the core game atm but i think a lot of people would like to see the early stages of the game by the time release comes around moved towards a better progression curve.

Great MMO's have a fairly rapid curve in the first 1-10 hours of gameplay, introducing players to a lot of new experiences and giving them a much larger sense of accomplishment than is currently awarded in the game as it is.  I've played countless mmo's from release, a few from beta and a few from middle to late games stages.  The mmo's that lost their playerbase a few months after release(more so than the normal continental drift of people who found it wasnt what they were looking for) did so because the early stages of the game became too time consuming to break through to the middle to late game stages.

None of us want an easy ride, i think that also ruins a game and more so attracts a certain type of player that tends to also ruin a games community.  The balance between grindcore and easyride isnt easy obviously.  But neither would any of us who have taken a great liking to the concept of this game want to see it be pushed back into the realms of obscurity come release because players have quit in frustration of feeling all there is to do is grind.

Sandbox is great but honestly when you try to take some things to too realistic a level it becomes too much like real life and quite frankly real life is one big grind and no one wants to leave RL just to do exactly the same RL style grind inside their escape from reality.

I Hope most of us keep pushing for a slight adjustment in the future to whats available to players in the beginning of this game because despite what those with a lot of free time or a propensity for mindless grind say, it does need that curve to be adjusted.  Expanding the range and tiers of mechs prior to release and having their expansion requirements more closely staggered would be a quick and dirty method of giving the early game the visible progression people desire.

Reducing swarming on a few of the early level drone mobs while increasing the spawn size i think is something else that should be considered prior to release.

Maybe a community driven assignment system too, introducing the ability for players and corps to put up their own assignments for the rest of the playerbase to maybe compete to fulfill, like material orders, crafts, pvp objectives, bountys on other players heads with the players/corps putting up the NIC reward for such assignments. obviously this suggestion is merely a fancy but my previous points i think should be taken into consideration since there are quite a few players who feel this way.

All said i love the concept so far i think the possibilties are endless for sandbox games like these i just hope the balance can be struck to make it successful at release and keep players captivated by grabbing them and dragging them into the middle stages of the game before they've even realised that from now there will never be any other game for them, their on full auto and grinning like a berserk maniac raining fiery lead down upon those who would stand between him and his only route to redemption.

Ok I also just started into the game , and coming from Eve myself, was able to figure out quite a few things right off. However the above poster was quite correct in stating that the opening tutorial is entirely to short. Things as simple as opening the Help channel, repairing gear, and figuring out NPC damage types where not at all defined.

The tutorial really should cover the basics of everything a lot better - its your first foray into an entirely new world, and while the learning curve will always be steep (and thats not a bad thing) , the basics should be explained to the lowest common denominator in a simplified fashion.

Yeah somehow I managed to cloes it Figured it out though, wasnt to hard.

Some more simple observations though - Extensions are, by default set to what you can use, and first impression is that that is all there is. Having everything open by default with a hint that you can close it to a minimum may be a better thing to do. I opened everything , and comparing what does what to Eve, started down what I think will be a decent pathway to max cap, hp, etc , but for those who havent played Eve , it may not be that intuitive.

Been moving further afield with my upgrades to hit harder stuff, but havent been able to find a guide to the landmarks yet that explain what the different symbols mean (although its fairly apparent) nor what the colors next to landmark names mean (although I looked, all I could find was that it reflected the map) , so a small section in the Help dedicated to that might be nice.

this was because they reduced your starting SP from ~800k to ~45k, so they gave double training rate up to 1.6mil to make it take the same time to get to 1.6m as it had done before. nothing was really changed except giving players a bit more control over their first skills.

personally I think this is a better way to do things than to give players a bunch of skills during character creation, because at that stage, you don't have their descriptions, you don't know what they do, so it's kind of meaningless. better to start the player with less but allow them to pick and choose what they want, and give them a small training bonus at the start just to get them going. we're not talking about reducing the gap to veterans, we're talking about giving you a chance to get into the game a bit quicker in the first couple weeks, that's all.

well i've been playing for over a week and i still can't even fit out my light bot in all slots because of rp/cpu issues. i can't get into assault bots unless i want to ignore the rp/cpu skills and this means my assault is going to have even worse fitting problems. it shouldn't take 2 weeks to be able to drive the most basic bots with a fairly basic fitting, imo.

Well in fact you start in the most basic bot with a fairly basic fitting. And the Arkhe is good enough so you can stay in it a bit longer than you'd stay in your noobship on EvE, say, the time to develop your fitting skills some more for example.

That said, I don't know what you've done wrong, but I've had no problem activating and fitting a light bot (weapons, light rep, hardener, add a weapon upgrd if you're a bit more skilled) within less than a week from start.

Many of you asume that arkhe = noob ship of stEVE

You are, ofcorse, wrong.

How many of you have fallen to M2S arkhe?

Quite many, actualy have lost light bots to our arkhe's.

Hell, we have killed lights, assaults, mechs and even a mesmer with arkhes (our gropho aidet the mesmer kill ^^ but yeah)

So dont you dish arkhe just because you blow at everything related to perpetuum and are unwilling to learn.

Last edited by Siddy (2010-06-02 23:06:35)

we should all encourage him he not only entertains M2S but the community in general and some times even has brief moments of lucidness and even insight.

As to the rest of the discussion, I remember a loong while back in my first days before factional drones, sequers and assignments, that even though killing arkhes was quite boring and arduous it actually trained me very well and quite safely in the skills i now use all the time hunting bigger harder npcs, and a good proportion of the skills i use in the occasional pvp.  really don't knock it.

Kill drones, factional and non afford your first light bot and get in that play around with different modules etc. take a few days to just do that with the odd exploration trip thrown in. hang out in help chat to some random people before you know it you will have been there a week and have earned and spent enough EP to be close to an assault bot, have a great understanding of the way things work a good idea of the game territory and a bunch of contacts.

Thats my advice to new players, worked for me and I am still here.

FYI

If I recall correctly. My alt was in the first mech in about 2 weeks of EP. TO me that doesn't seem to be bad at all. Of course it took about 1 more week of EP to extension up some core stuff. This also included very much needed extension for pvp to use demob etc.

If you guys can't fit your bots and mechs you need to look at core skills the reduce the reactor and cpu usage for armor mods and weapons.

END FYI

The learning curve in this game is enormous. The tutorials border on the useless/ditto the info and the grind at the beginning is probably the dullest I have ever encountered. People are coming to this game thinking its a Mech MMO, instead its spider robot shooting grind.

I enjoy the look and feel of the game, but the gameplay is rather lacking.

The mining tutorial is quite poor. Its really doesn't explain anything and its quite frustrating.

I know that hard-core players don't care but I can't see the attraction for noobs.

Its foolish to assume that everyone coming to this game will have played EVE and/or know it well. I, for one, never played the game at all. I have lots of MMO experience, played em' since they were 2D.

Last edited by Lagwolf (2010-06-19 22:47:23)

I honestly think that the newbie experience could be improved in a -big- way by reducing the cost curve of gear a bit in the beginning and offering 1-3 more specialized service bots for a reasonable price.  Even if their look and feel does not change at all from the standard 'bot, having one with an extra turret slot and less CPU, having one with an extra industrial slot and one with an extra head slot, each having maybe 15% more health or so, would be a significant enough upgrade to make people feel as though they were moving forward.  As it is, I'm having a tough time grinding my way up to a new mech, and although I understand that I don't have that much knowledge about this game yet, by the time I'd spent this much time in EVE, I was sitting in a Thrasher and gearing towards long-range artillery spec. 
That's my first time through, with no extra knowledge, and it was in the days before the incredible 10-step tutorial that gave new ships.
I think it's imperative that the devs add a few more low-level items and improve the capacity to get more specialized service mechs early on.  A few more low-level slight-upgrade/sidegrades would allow people to do their farming for a real mech faster, and if it were a reasonable cost (150k NIC or so wouldn't be horrendous) and could carry some better stuff... well, it'd be nicer.
Also, crafting seems prohibitively expensive.  I'm not all that good at recycling and such yet, but I'd need to find fifty or sixty things to break down to get -close- to building this Malleus gun that I researched the build pattern for.