Forums » Suggestions

Give new players pseudo roles

Nov 14, 2014 cellsafemode link
The problem being addressed here is new players often dont stick around in the game long enough to make it "fun", they're stuck wandering around in free or nearly free ships and logoff never to return before doing much. And that's partly because they're mostly mobile and it's not the easiest interface to interact with players or bots in. And it's partly because there is no real direction for them to take and they wander around aimlessly for too long and get bored. Assuming they make it through the tutorial even.

A possible solution to this is for new characters to be given a choice after your faction selection of choosing if you want to register with the Government as a Trader, a Miner, or a Mercenary. The choice puts the new player into the life of a freshly indoctrinated member of that particular job category with certain government privileges.

This choice would probably best be implemented as a mission that the player is required to select from right after the tutorial/training missions. Picking 1 is necessary to unlock the job related ship and picking one excludes the ability to pick the others. After selecting, you have access to a variant of the EC89 bus with certain built in and buffed qualities not available to the other job and possibly special missions.

Trader : increased cargo space, butter thrust (lower turbo energy so you can turbo longer), lower armor...

Miner : less cargo space than trader. Weapon port is hard coded to a mining beam that is significantly better than the regular small port mining beam ... early miners will likely mine in station sectors anyway so no weapons should be fine.

Mercenary : decreased cargo space, little bit better thrust and turbo energy usage. Increase in armor and hard-coded weapon that is an Ion blaster mk1 but with enhanced speed. 160m/s...

these are just shot in the dark suggestions as to what a license level 1 or less person has available and what they'd find most helpful...while making sure it's usefulness doesn't obsolete anything the license levels unlock.

The special ships would probably best be handled by the mission system as well. You'd have a mission dictated by whatever job you registered with to submit a claim against your government insured ship if you lose the first one and you'd be given a new one.

This would give new players a taste at what the game will let them utilize right off the bat without telling them that they'll need to start grinding immediately to be able to do anything. We should push that back a bit until the player has a couple hours of gametime invested so they dont just drop off like flies. Give them a sense of something they should be doing and allow the sandbox and grinding to come naturally off that instead of being lost with having no direction.

While this idea's function ends once the player is up in license 2-3 area it could be extended to give other "job" related missions. Of which would mostly be geared towards helping new players work through the first few license levels. Maybe by offering items related to their field ahead of the normal license level required assuming they are engaging in their job area. It's all a means to keep the open-ness and directionlessness of the game at bay for those first few hours until they're ready both in-game and mentally to just do what they want without losing interest during the dull parts.