If I was to make the New Player Experience? Oh God......

1> I would replace the ******** opening Message from that random Admiral Dude with a Serious Tutorial. Things like a Simulation where this Admiral Explains things like...
A] The Different types of Frames and their Specializations. Let new pLAyers have a bit of fun with these letting them Decide which frame they want to Spec Into
B] The Different Weapon Types. Teaches people that there are weapons besides the GAR (Gallente Assault Rifle), and fun little Niche Guns like the Plasma Launcher (R00K3T N00B!) and the Sniper Rifle. Broaden the New Player Horizons.
C] The Usage Of Equipment. Teach People that they can Use Equipment on Almost every Frame, and what each Equipment DOES
D] Vehicle Usage. How Physics Work with the various Types of Vehicles, and the Overall Toughness of the Vehicle types

2>Certificate System. Give a good reason to Learn to Do things beyond Kill things. More Info On what could be included in this System Here

3>Improved Matchmaking. Based a System of Steps for Matching Players in Insta-Battle. Things Like 500,000-750,000 SP and 750,001-1,000,000 SP and 1,000,001- 1,250,000 SP and 1,250,000-1,500,001 and so on and so forth.

I Believe this will Simplify the New Player Experience, however, it can be Supplemented with an Improved Version With the Tutorial we have Now.

Me-Co Out

Part 1: In the lab.

You awaken sitting on a metal bench, camera in first person. The floor beneath you is white, nondescript tiles. You can only see for a couple of meters before a dense black fog obstructs your vision. Your controller is locked, forcing you to look straight ahead at the doctor in front of you. You struggle a little but will soon discover that you have a large metal contraption bolted to your skull and held in place by cables suspended from the ceiling, so the struggling is limited by this.

You have no HUD as you are not yet in a dropsuit.

(These environmental limitations allow a single tutorial to be created for all races. The model used for the doctor can change based on race selection.)

Doctor: "Don't try to move. You've just undergone a major surgery. Do you remember your name?"

The doctor taps out notes on his mad futuristic medical notebook as the PS3 keyboard pops up on screen for the character's name to be selected. Once this has been done, the doctor continues.

Doctor: "Good. Alright. I'm Doctor [racially variable last name]. It takes seventy-two hours, for all cognitive, memory and motor functions to be mapped and routed through the neuro-interface socket implanted in your head. Don't. Move."

The final line delivered tensely as you bring your hands into your field of view and to your head.

Doctor: "A temporary solution until the procedure is complete. Try and relax..."

You sit there for about ten seconds watching him go about his sciencey business until an alert buzzes out of the machinery overhead, then a hiss as the cables and hoses attached to your skull drop to the ground, having been released from the ceiling. You wobble for a minute, threatening to lose balance before looking back at the doctor.

Aiming controls are unlocked. You can now look around freely.

Doctor: "Alright, we're done in here. Do me a favour and watch me walk around the room."

The doctor paces back and forth and the player has to follow with their view. This could be used to automatically decide whether to invert these controls.

Doctor: "Everything seems normal."

A nurse enters and the doctor and nurse lift you down off the bench into a wheelchair, which the nurse pushes out of the room and down a hallway. Eventually the hallway ends and you are carted into a room, placed on a bed and left to fade to black.

An indeterminate amount of time later, you awaken and look at the bed side table. There's a grenade, pin intact.
You lift the grenade and beneath it is a handwritten note which you lift to read. It reads "KILL YOURSELF."

Aiming controls remain unlocked and you are free to look around the room but unable to move. Your little room has no windows, the door is as good as a wall and the wheelchair is gone. It's just you, a bed, a table and a note.

Oh, and the grenade. A prompt comes up onscreen. "Hold L2 to cook a grenade."

Whether you cook it or throw it, the grenade exploding in your room kills you.

--3.THE MILITIA OFFICE--
a. After your character is created you should be ported to a militia office. This would be a governmental recruitment center that your character would first appear in.

(my thinking here is since it is your character's first time doing anything, that before you are allowed to be cloned repetetively and be shipped off anywhere you get educated here at the Terminal.)

b. The point of the office is mostly for role play immersion efforts, but from here there could be learning terminals/videos/ exercises, and a port to the academy. Other applications of the Faction Merc terminal could be implemented as well.

c. After you do what you want to do there you are finally issued your first batch of equipment that you own, given access to your portable merc quarters, and given cloning rights and resources.

(I feel a character, story immersion part is needed between character creation and ending up in the merc quarters, and that's the point of the militia office. Plus it has much unsaid potential for expansion I think. Also, the terminal part could be optional I suppose, but you would be issued better/more stuff if you go through it by your parent faction)

There cannot be a huge difference in suits, from militia all the way to prototype.

Armor/shielding needs to be much lower.

Weapons need more recoil.

Fully auto weapons should have fewer total rounds, including in the magazine.

Weapons should have similar attributes and drawbacks as in other FPS games.

These above ideas would help new players accustom to other games an easier time while not allowing players with a lot higher SP the ability to completely dominate much lesser SP having new players.


The following are just tossed in ideas others have surely mentioned.

There should be an actual attacker and defender position such as in skirmish 1.0 along with the current game mode of skirmish. That makes two game modes.

There should be more involvement between EVE and Dust. There should be a PVP free roam location for this. This would give opportunity for dust mercs to perform other tasks such as mining or running missions such as espionage while possibly competing with another corp, local wildlife, or humanoids. Red Dead Redemption had a free roam mode for such type of missions but with the addition of allowing corps see who is in which free roam for sabotaging their goals.

Education of new players is lacking right now. I have seen people confuse starter fits for static FPS classes, and not know that they could even edit them or create new ones. I have seen players generally clueless about how the market everything works. New players need to informed so that they can have a good experience in Dust, and hopefully stay and contribute to the game's growth and success.

If you are a new player, I recommend going to the help tab on the Neocom, go to tutorials, and do them all. You were asked to do the Neocom tutorial when you started Dust, but not the others. They're really short, and you might learn something valuable.


[Out of battle education]: Neocom, skills, market, fittings, & more

The "Way of the merc" video that shows up after character creation explaining various aspects of Dust 514 should not be skippable (Ten-Sidhe's idea). It contains important information that players will need to know.

ALL tutorials must be mandatory. If you already done it with one of your characters on your account, you should not have to do it with other characters on your account.

Text tutorials are terrible boring walls of texts, get rid of them. Only keep the voice guided ones.

Do not make players have to first go access different menus for the respective tutorials to activate, because players may never check those menus themselves without being first introduced to them by the tutorial.

If the tutorials are not mandatory, then an audio message must tell the new player that they will get an item or ISK reward to complete the tutorials (Ten-Sidhe's idea). This would motivate players to learn.

Since you guys still refuse to have voice chat set ON by default, then at least have a tutorial on tweaking settings that cover voice chat settings, push-to-talk settings, screen scale settings, brightness settings, and controls settings.

The uses, strengths, and weaknesses of various dropsuit, vehicles, and equipment types.

Explain the different tiers of items, and the higher skill point requirement as well as financial risk that comes with higher tier items.

[In battle education]: pew pew pew & other important things
There needs to be a gameplay tutorial simulation with some AI enemies, and AI teammates. The AI doesn't have to be smart, just move, follow squad orders (attack/defend/capture/rally), and shoot. The simulation must do the following things.

Basic movement and shooting.

Switching to secondary by tapping R2 instead of holding R2 to bring up the item wheel (like many seem to do, tapping is faster).

Switching to, and using equipment like nanite injectors and nanohives.

Checking the enemy's dropsuit tier by aiming down sights on the enemy to see the tags (MLT, STD, ADV, PRO).

Checking the efficiency percentage of their guns at different ranges, and on different targets.

Calling down vehicles.

Setting squad objectives from the map.

Setting squad objectives with the command wheel (R2+R3, select, aim, R1).

Hacking objectives.

Climbing ladders.

Calling down precision strikes.

Whatever else I'm forgetting.

Thank you for reading.

I think you're off-topic. The OP wants to hear ideas for easing new players into the game.


PS: I will be adding my suggestion to this post soon.

It's worth making the point that the biggest hurdle new players face seems to be that they just don't get that playing in a squad is pretty much mandatory right from the start if you don't want to get stomped.

Learning what buttons to press and how to build up a suit are certainly necessary. But when the new player blasts around a corner chasing a squirrel and gets triple teamed by an organized squad he has to feel disheartened.

It would be a huge challenge to introduce squad values and mechanics in a PVE training environment but if it could be brought off it would be a huge win.

Think of a cross between the weapons range and a series of basic manoeuvres -- attack and take a null cannon, defend a CRU, each "mission" would allow the player to try out different fits and different roles. The NPCs on the player's squad would fill in the other roles. The opposing NPCs would have different challenge levels the player's could choose.

This is getting pretty close to a single player game -- but if it didn't allow the player to gain SP or ISK and was limited to basic versions of all the weapons I don't think it would keep players from moving on to the full game. Especially if it constantly reinforced linking up with player corporations.