New player help

[Lord Orion]

Has a player that has been playing for less than 1 month I do think that there is some room for improvement in terms of reducing the overwhelming information needed for starting playing this game

The tutorials are good, and so are the initial missions, but when that ends we are still left in a panicked state of "what now!".

After a point you cannot do any missions, and the ones you did are not enough to get a grip of the game. I got a grip now after alot of digging in wiki, FAQ and forúm, and mostly some big help from chat, speacially a msg from my guild leader that gave me some objectives to focus on. I also had to do alot of spreadsheets, but that is a different subject.

Enough background, my sugestion:

Draw some tutorials/missions that define some obtainable objectives for new players (you don't need to give prizes for them, they already gain stuff by doing them).
You can organize them by professions (hauler, combat, mining, etc) so that players can try the different aspects of the game to choose (a little like children try different subjects to choose what they want to be when they grow up , this game is a world in itself and new players also get lost in here ).

Some shoukd probably be more general, like getting a full cargo of Ashar, a FOM mission and 3 combat missions all around the same place of Furnace (or another place) and do them (learned alot from that and took me a while to get to that post on the forum).

Or storing a set of stuff in one place and buying a Mall or a Factory in it to use it. And so on.

You can also have it organized by short, medium and long term missions. Like getting saving for a Liberator, or getting everything needed to ask a crafter to make your first implants.

IMHO unless you only want players that are whilling to really commit to learn the game fast, it will be hard to keep the ones less patient.

PS: I'm sorry if this was already proposed, I did try to search for this subject in sugestions but didn't found anything.

[alumoi]

And why would you need a mission to gather stuff and sell them? Buy or craft yourself a mall, gather resources and sell them if that's your style.
Should Coops turn CE into a mission type game? Hell, no!
You can be whatever you want, do whatever you fancy. The intro missions give you a very good idea of what you can expect from CE, the rest is up to the player.
It's not a game you can win, it's not about reaching the final boss and kill it (or whatever passes for modern games these days), it's all about enjoying the freedom it gives you.
Do you want to be a miner, getting all those ores to sell? Fine, grab yourself the tools and start doing it.
You got bored of mining? Add a weapon and start blasting away.
Do you need item XX? Craft it!
Need some quick cash? There are a lot of passengers and goods waiting to be shipped out.
You don't need a mentor to tell you how to play the game, just play it your way!

PS: if you're the type that needs someone to give him/her a mission in life, there are over 100 NPCs all over CE.

[Darakhoranon]

While alumoi might have phrased his reply a little less like a frontal assault, he is essentially right - CE is a sandbox game, so extensive "mandatory" quest chains would make little sense. They'd also be practically impossible to write up since there are so many possible combinations and permutations (fighter - trader - explorer, fighter - miner - scavenger, fighter - explorer - miner, you get the point) that no conceivable "advanced tutorial quest chain" could really cover everything.

Granted, you have to do some digging to learn about some of the things you can do in CE (and HOW to do them), but isn't that the point? There not being "the" right way to play the game also means that there isn't a "wrong" way, either.

Last but not least, completing the tutorial quests doesn't really leave you "stranded" - you should have already learned about gaining rank with different factions, and if you visit an NPC, it WILL tell you "you need more faction rank" (or something to that effect) if you can't take a mission yet. Besides, you have everything you need at that point to start EXPLORING the game...

[Marcus]

Lord Orion,

First, welcome to the game. The Players Guide missions are, as you know, there to get new players into the basics. CE is indeed a complex game, with many of us having played for many years. One of the best things i can advise you to do is join a guild, if you haven't already.
There are some very good guilds, many of which will help you with the variety of questions you are bound to have, hell, Hunbuba is level 187 or something and still learning.
This game is one of a kind and takes time to learn but once you have experienced the game and it's community, you'll be glad to joined. Player chat is also a great place to meet fellow players and get answers, and ofc, meet some new friends.
Feel free to ask me questions if you need too.
Enjoy the game.

[Coops]

It's been a number of years (many in fact) since we revisited ' new players' in CE and so much has been added since then, even entire professions have been added since that point. So I will shoulder some of the blame for a lack of missions beyond the most basic.

But in defence we only really ever set out to give players a grounding in the basics. Hauling, some combat, how to make a little money and to offer insight into the other options, but not necessarily push them down them.

CE is over 2,500 pages of code, with over 10 years of depth, no amount of mission prompting is going to expose you to all the features. From the beginning CE was designed to be a game of 'many choices, all of them yours'. Adding more missions from different areas of the game would inevitably mean getting players to spend IP in places they won't want to or won't use for many months. (in fact I sometimes get complaints about the current ones doing just that lol)

But having said that, perhaps its time to look back, revisit old initial missions and add in a more extensive layer of options. I'm open to 'sensible suggestions' (and criticism) if we can improve our retention of new players.

Coops

[Marcus]

Uh oh, i smell another competition coming!!

[Rexx Shredd]

Awhile back, i suggested New Player Explore Missions, utilizing Civilian Grade Spacesuits, Civilian O2 (the 30s work here), etc. to give players a demo for Exploration (planetary and Derelict) early on.....Id like to put that back on the Table

Bonus to make Farpoint 2 an area that has to be Surveyed first, with a small number of Civilian grade Survey drones to give new players a hands-on for that aspect to the game as well

Id also like to add a new Space Station in Feris that looks like me to give new players a training area for proper hero worship of myself

[blueblue]

i found the game similar and my early game experience similar to the original post, the game is so massive at level 42 i still feel lost! ...you can do some stuff, and there is good guides out there but it is also a lot of info to take in at once.....

So i started to write a newb guide for the guild forum, which morphed into creating in guild missions that are easy to do and give you essential things like salvage kit (my first salvage was level 25!) i feel this is essential, i almost quit a few times, as you do feel a bit lost after the first npc missions, you may be hesitant about coming and asking for help and the stuff you do at that level is fuel heavy....it is important to explain to new players after the npc missions what it is they should try and do, what to buy, how to maximise fuel and money, plus the importance of the first new ship....if the game gets lots of drop outs at a certain level then there is issues there...It is fun finding stuff out for yourself, and it shouldn't be made easy but some more advice is required.....


we tried to cover the basics like logging into the guild forum, community forums, creating extra passenger bonus systems if you pick up from guild members sets, we dot guild salvage around for folk and we ask them to run extraction missions which covers the costs of iem like guild salvage scanners, jump drives and other kit that is handy to know about. We opened a guild shop so low level crafters can sell stuff through it as an intro to crafting....our aim is to not have heaps of stuff leaving the guild, retain new players and cover some more of the basics......

we tested it a few times and it works quite well, we don't make folk do this, it's only and option....

but yep, more info level 5-20 would be good, even just a what next on the forum here or something the guilds can do....

[Lord Orion]

It is not my intention to even sugest what should be the direction of the game. Most players have been playing longer them me and would know better than me what can be make for that. My contribution here is mostly a feedback on my experience as a new player. I can't even say that I have solutions for any bump I might have had, only sugestions.

It is great to see the ideas been described, even some that are already been used by other players in their alliances and might benefit all players.

I was talking mostly about introdutory missions, because I think its what may solve a gap for players that may be having an hard time understanding the game. I don't see the problem with missions as a general idea also. Actually there are good examples of those on the FOM, trade, and combat missions. Don't think that having more type of missions would affect players that don't like missions, its their decision to make or not.
But that is a different subject, and an harder one since developers time is precious, so I would suggest to leave that for another suggetion post .

I don't think I'm the best person to say how to do stuff since I'm still green myself and still going at it by try and error, but I can post here the examples when I can run into them. Truth is it is very easy to forget about the difficulties, I'm just doing 1 month and although I remember I had at least two times I was really demoralized, I can't seem to recall the details of why it was now. I will have to go back to that and try to remember, because the first cases are usually the hardest.

FOr now I'll just describe what is still fresh. A simple example, that actually wasn't too hard for me to solve it now that I'm more informed, but it was a puzzle to me for a while and it can be harder to other players :

I found out about Pets (on chat, specially the fact they give IP), checked the FAQ and then the Pet status (like said in FAQ) and ended up at the SNARG NPC that said I didn't had enough Explorer standing. I already know about most of the base jobs, standings, and my way around FAQ, Wiki, forum, schembrowser and NPC tracker, so I was able to understand I needed the landing gear to do exploration and eventually get enough level to do the missions for the SNARG.
Now the landing gear is described in the CE Data Repository as a "Player Made". I did not find any being sold in player market, so I tried to find a schematic for it to see if I could ask someone to craft it, but I couldn't find one...
So I decided to go with to the solution to many problems and ask on chat, was pointed to the right NPC and all became clear, I got the landing gear today (this "quest" was going for maybe a week or so, but I have spent alot of time in the game lattelly :$, though not only on this of course).

Don't know if there was an easier way to do it, but considering that this a more a less common approach I'll go to the conclusions:
1 - Most of these steps are doable by researching the diferent information resources that surround the game. Some players however might not have the time or patient to do all that search, so is just a question of deciding if those are players to keep or not.
2 - The step of understanding how to get the Landing Gear I wasn't able to get by searching information, just by asking.
a) It was already refered that some players, specially in the beggining, might not feel confortable to ask directly for that information, and it is again a question of deciding if it should be a requirement for this task. Actually, asking directly can even make the first point much easier (I just don't like to ask for things that are already on forums, FAQ or wiki, so I research until I can't find it).
b) Even if a player would normally be ok by asking, if he is not confortable on writting in english (even if he is OK at reading it) he will have the same problem, and that is something that it is commonly disregarded by those that don't have a problem writing in english. Again, it can be considered a requirement for the game to be confortable to write, the initial tutorials are very clear on the importance of asking in chat.

[pikolinianita]

Lord Orion,
It is perfectly ok that you suggest things . And your impressions are very valuable, as we, more experienced players, are, well, more experienced and don't remember our early problems. or we were here before some stuff were added. Or changed. So please don't be discouraged, I'd like to see which areas of the game were hard to understand, info hard to find, or just outdated