I've been in the beta for a few weeks now and I'm getting on great with it, but this weekend a friend of mine who has been really looking forward to the game got into the beta. (I got one of the emails with weekend codes in so I sent one his way)

I talked to him after he got to play the game for a bit, and it seems he has just been completely scared away from the game!

I won't quote him exactly, but he pretty much said that everything look so complicated that he just didn't know where to start, and when he was looking through the market and playing online it seemed to him that it was pretty much a pay-to-win game.

Since I have tried explaining to him a little more about how the game works, and keeping in mind that this is a beta and the is still a lot to be added into the game, but it does raise the question of how new people will see the game for the first time, even when completed.

I will admit that my first go in the game I had no idea what I was doing, and I have been tracking Dust for a long time now.
The messages that pop up in game were a bit of an information overload and I ended up learning more just from messing around with the game than I did reading up on how to learn skills or upgrade your equipment.
I'm sure that will be fine for a lot of people, but not everybody really works that way, some people need a bit more guidance.
My friend, for example, only ever had a wii up until last year when he decided to buy a PS3 because he'd heard Call of Duty was a lot better on it.
He's got a long way to go with his gaming.

It would be nice to see CCP implement a really well thought out tutorial stage for new players, maybe introduce things to them a step at a time.

Maybe when you first enter the game and you've created your character, it puts you in a pve match or a match with specifically other new people so you can learn the physical gameplay.
Then upon completion of the match, your screen pops up saying how much SP and ISK you've earned and it goes on to say "now let's show you how to spend what you've just earned!", then shows how the market and skills work.
After that maybe it can go on to showing the various game types, how the social features work and how to build up your vehicles...

Showing people one thing at a time and allowing them to learn in stages will be a lot easier for people who have no idea how the game works than flooding them with walls of text when they first enter the game.

Another thing to be careful of is the kind of matches new people play in.
The vast majority of people in the beta right now have a lot of experience with the game and have pretty descent gear.

Somebody who is brand new and isn't so good with the game is pretty much cannon fodder, and as my friend experienced, they don't have much of a chance.
His assumption was that everyone he was playing with had payed for really good gear and so his bullets didn't do anything to them whilst theres instantly killed him.

This is how the vast majority of people that play the game will be seeing things.
People who play beta's are normally much more likely to do there own research on a game and know what there in for.

Your average person is just going to see the game on psn's front page and think "ooh, new game! lets try it out!" and pretty much act in exactly the same was as my friend did.

I'm sure it would help a hell of a lot if he had me there to guide him a bit, but obviously there isn't a way in the beta for me to do that yet.
But even still, not everybody will have a friend that can help ease them in to the game come release.

I don't know about everyone else, but personally I wasn't as big and robust a community for Dust as we can manage, and that means we have to give some leeway to the new people that really have no idea what there doing here.

It brings to mind MMO's where more experienced players quite often offer to help out new players who don't know whats going on yet.
Maybe CCP could try and implement some kind of a mentoring system into the game?

Just a thought.