We did play as a squad but I didn't play on my main...I made a brand new psn account to show her around and I spent my time getting killed lol I'd have her follow me to objectives, tell her to hack them and play an extra shield for her.

I ran around in the recon fit with the nova knives bc im terrible with those and I got killed so many times but it was fun just messing around while she was having fun.

The best way to get new players up to speed is to totally restructure the NPE so that it follows the EVE example of giving you tons of useful free gear whilst teaching you how, why and when to use that gear. By the time you've finished the combat tutorial you have a fully fitted racial frigate. It's about 3mil in ISK's worth of free stuff.

The Academy should be tied to the Daily Missions, which would be become Academy Missions for the duration of a player's NPE period. Each mission is tailored towards the race you chose at character creation, and each day focuses on a particular combat role, giving you missions that allow players to earn competitive (ADV) gear that will help them build competitive fits after the academy. Completing all ten missions gives you a massive SP dump as an additional reward. Completing the Academy, which can now only be done by completing all of the role-focused missions instead of an arbitrary score threshold, rewards you with an even bigger SP reward. Because let's face it, that's what really matters here. Teaching them the skill is one thing, but core skills + proto = unassailable advantage almost every time. If we want new player base growth, we need to boost them up to 10mil sp as quickly as possible and throw some decent guns at them so that they can actually have fun out in the wild with the rest of us.

It's not a perfect solution, but it's not bad either.