[DEV BLOG] The New Player Experience

Seasoned Veterans of New Eden – Hello

CCP Rise here for EVE’s Team Pirate Unicorns to give you a heads up about some changes to the new player experience (NPE for short) that are about to sneak their way onto Tranquility.


HISTORY

As many of you remember, the first few days in New Eden can be some of the most difficult, and it’s been a mission at CCP for a very long time to try and improve the experience for new bros. The tutorial has undergone several major reworks over the years and we also constantly strive to make EVE’s core systems more intuitive and usable without sacrificing sophistication. Despite all that, we still feel there’s room for improvement, especially when it comes to the tutorial itself.

Over a year ago, our team took on the mission to overhaul the NPE and since then you’ve seen us establish some systems we felt were needed to make our vision for new players possible. First, we added and tweaked a lot of tooltips covering the major interface elements and features and then we installed a new notification system to improve feedback and give us a better way to deliver information to new players. Most recently we began work overhauling the star map. With all these pieces in place (or at least getting close to where we want them to end up) we’ve finally been able to really dig in to a system that we hope will eventually completely replace the current tutorial:

DEV POST The Bowhead

As promised, here is your brand new ship-moving ship – the Bowhead.

We originally expected this to be a sister ship to the Orca, but after digging into the details realized that it was really more of a freighter and by setting it up that way we could avoid heavier skill requirements that had nothing to do with its role. This means we are going to introduce a new skill: ORE Freighter, which requires ORE Industrial III and Advanced spaceship command V just like other faction freighter skills.
There isn’t much else to say other than that this ship is intended for a specific niche: high-sec transport of fitted/insured ships. It may find applications in other parts of space (especially because of the reduced jump fatigue), but we aren’t really worried about hitting anything outside of the high-sec application. Because we were starting from scratch here, we decided to give a little more fitting flexibility (mid slots and rig slots), meaning the base hp is set a little lower than other freighters since you can actually get the EHP higher using rigs and a DCU.
Let us know what you think.

BOWHEAD

Ore Freighter Bonus:

5% bonus to max velocity per level

5% bonus to ship maintenance array capacity per level
Role Bonus:

90% reduction in jump fatigue generation
Slot layout: 0H, 3M, 3L, 3R; 0 turrets, 0 launchers

Fittings: 1350 PWG, 215 CPU

Defense (shields / armor / hull) : 10000 / 11000 / 36500

Capacitor (amount / recharge) : 3900 / 235000

Mobility (max velocity / agility / mass / warp speed): 65 / .065 / 640000000 / 1.37

Drones (bandwidth / bay): 0 / 0

Targeting (max targeting range / Scan Resolution / Max Locked targets): 51.5km / 45 / 3

Capacity (cargo / ship maintenance array): 4000 / 1300000 (goes up to 1.6 something with ore freighter 5)

Sensor strength: 12

Signature radius: 3200

@ccp_rise