Took me a day, was I the only one who realized everything was self-explanatory? See enemy kill enemy, see neutral/ red objective take said objective. Repeat steps 1 and 2 until you are bored. The only thing that took me about a month to figure out was how the ******* mic system worked.

Same and having started many alts, I can see where we might be losing some. For something that is supposed to be all about community, this game makes it very hard to get in touch with anyone. I think we're actually seeing very little of the population coming to the forums. I'd bet most of them don't even know its here. They downloaded the free game, tried it out, were lost and posted in local which may or may not have active vets looking in and said, well feck it and leave.

The menus are not intuitive. We can claim they are as much as we want but when you play something for 6+ months, anything "seems" intuitive. Part of my job actually entails designing intuitive interfaces for users. This interface misses the mark in every way.

I also remember way back when I started the game, there was an in game mail that described everything and in the load screens it actually explained visually the lifecycle: 'you purchase items, you use items and lose them in game, you use earned sp and isk to purchase more skills and items' That is no longer in the load screens. Now its basically 'skirmish: this is what a skirmish is...', etc.

The new "improved" academy literally says: open battle finder and join battle. You get thrown in battle and press buttons to see what happens which may or may not be easy depending if you're used to fps. You get out of battle and it says congrats, now go level up any skill. A new player is either going to spend hours reading on skills not knowing which is better for any reason other than to just try it, or skill into the first thing he sees. Congrats, you leveled a skill. Now go play the game.

It doesn't tell you how to do these things, you just press buttons until menus fly out. it doesn't tell you how to use chat. It doesn't tell you about your default corp or even squad finder, which is why so many of us have to repeat over and over: don't go solo, find a squad. There is a level of basic general introduction that needs to happen if you are not going to create an intuitive interface and we don't have one or the other right now.

TL;DR: Lack of connection with community and a very non intuitive interface create a big enough disconnect to dissuade more people away from this game than we probably realize.

So your actual answer is that it took you about a month.

I understand that this game is a bit different from your average FPS, and that can be a bit confusing at first, but I still have some trouble seeing why people are having so much trouble with the basic mechanics other than laziness. I make my case with a tale of an inexperienced, yet inquisitive merc, long long ago, by the name of Shutter Fly.

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I was logging into the closed Beta for the first time, after receiving my acceptance email and beta key. What was the first thing I did? LOOK THROUGH THE MENUS. Saw an item for Skills, opened it and was greeted by the skill list (no tree back then). There were dropsuits, weapons, equipment, etc. At the bottom of the screen it said to press triangle for info, here I was greeted by a tabbed menu that showed the skill benefits, costs, and PREREQUISITES, meaning I needed some skills before I could get other ones. I already knew I wanted to use the shotgun no matter what, so I put a level in it..

Next, the Marketplace, that sounded important. Well this is an FPS, so I took a look at the weapons first, shotguns to be specific. First thing I noticed was the first shotgun on the list had a nice green checkmark by it, while the others had scary red Xs. Using my nifty info button, I investigated, in addition to stats I saw the PREREQUISITES tab. Upon farther investigation I saw that each gun had particular incremental prerequisites that matched up with the skills I had just looked at. I figured it would be good to take a thorough look through the marketplace, so I knew what there was to do in this game. During that time I came across the various MILITIA items which, surprise, had no prerequisites, I bought some that looked useful.

Where could I make use of these new items I came accross? Dropsuit Fitting seemed like a safe bet. I saw that I had a few suits already made up for me, which was nice. I wanted to make some of my own, though. I started putting my suit together, shield extenders sounded like a good idea, and I threw on that shotgun that I bought. This fitting had a number next to it, one, as did all the items I put on it. Maybe that's why it asked me how many I wanted. I bought some more of everything.

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It doesn't take a genius to figure out this game, it just takes some patience and willingness to learn. There are a few things that are a bit obscure like orbitals, vehicle fitting, and some more specific item mechanics, but the basics are easy. If someone comes in and isn't willing to go through a similar process, then I don't think this is really the game for them in the first place.

However, there is some need for a few things. Some more clear and descriptive UI would really help clear up some confusion and IMO would add some much needed polish. Most things have descriptions, but they are often very unclear, uninformative, and a bit misleading. At times I think some of the more "colorful" descriptions (See: Gallente Scout/Flaylock Pistol) could actually hinder someone's process of learning about the game.

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Although, all this stuff is lost when every new player goes directly from 2-4 games with other newbies, to a complete roflstomp against seasoned players. I doubt many people even care to continue with anything interesting they noticed after those first few post-academy battles.

I don't think I got a Kill for my first month of playing.
I thought map knowledge would eventually be the most valuable tool. And it is, sometimes. But I got a little OCD with it and these maps are so unnecessarily huge.
I was big on CoD up thru the first MW, then got burned out and didn't game again til Skyrim. I had forgot about playing the numbers and had a 0.16 KDR with over 2000 deaths the first time I looked. That was a massive hole to try to climb out of when it seemed like everybody else knew what was up and had 10,000,000 more SP than I did back in early open beta.
I didn't understand anything about anything until I got to the forums. Specializing? ****, I invested in everything. Poorly. I was awful well into Uprising, then it all started to come back to me and started to figure this thing out.

How long does it take the average player to figure everything out?

What's wrong with charging enemies?
My hyper aggressive playstyle relies on making players feel pressured, charging is the best way to do it