Eve Online is a hard game and developer CCP Games has been hard at working this summer to shake the game up for veteran players. They have announced an incoming feature aimed at helping new players understand why they lost their first ship. CCP Games has noted that a lot of new players will quit the game after the destruction of their very first ship because they just don’t understand what happened. So the developer wants to help them in hope that they will stick around longer.
While Eve Online does still get lots of new players, most of them won’t stay past seven days and it usually comes down to the fact that they lost their ship. It’s hard to say why this happens but it could come down to players not understanding why they lost their ship, that they can get more if they keep playing or maybe they just get too frustrated by the difficulty of it all.
Either way, CCP will be adding something they’re calling “grief counselling” to help players understand why the ship is gone and to answer other questions they might have. The planned system will alert a moderator that a new player has lost their first ship. The idea is that the moderator will then contact that player to discuss it with them so they can understand what happened, have any questions answered and maybe be refunded another ship so they can continue.
Grief counselling will be completely manual to start with, which means all cases can be covered without any issues and players will be connected to other real people. However, the developer will be looking to move it to an automated system later so that moderators won’t need to interact as much when a new player loses a ship. It’s uncertain how much additional work this will place on moderators once it is implemented and the developer will adjust things as needed
The reason this system is being implemented is due to the sheer number of players who quit the game. It’s hoped that this will help since the development team believes that understand the ‘why’ will make players stronger and will encourage them to stay longer. As far as we know, this system does not cost players any of their hard earned EVE Online PLEX which is a very good thing for new players.
However, this system assumes that new players will want to understand what happened and that they will understand the moderator talking to them as well. There is bound to be some miscommunication and some players won’t be happy for the help if they’re still mad about what happened.
Eve Online is very unfriendly to new players. It’s a hard game to get into so any addition designed to assist them is a good thing. It will help the game to grow and keep it going even longer. However, the name of “grief counselling” might not go down well with some veteran players.
