The famous EVE Online is difficult to master. Last year, only 10% of 600 thousand new players stayed in it for longer than a week. To solve the problem, CCP Games will introduce an MMO “hotline” for beginners.
Players lose their first ship in EVE Online very quickly — it’s enough to enter the PvP zone. At the same time, they are forever deprived of loot in the cargo hold and all the improvements put on the ship. At the same time, many users do not understand why this happened. The input threshold in the game is very high due to the unintuitive interface and combat mechanics.
Upset by the loss, newcomers often refuse to continue playing. And CCP Games is trying to reverse the situation. She provided EVE Online not only with guides and technical support, but also with a “welcome program” (at the first login to the game, the user can contact the moderator and ask him all the questions of interest).
Now the studio has allocated a budget for a “hotline for affected newcomers.” It will work like this:
- the moderator of EVE Online receives a notification that one of the players has lost his first ship;
- the moderator contacts the player, answers questions, conducts “work on mistakes”;
- in addition, the moderator can reimburse the player for the lost ship.
The first consultations will take place manually. Subsequently, developers automate this process.
CCP Games believes that thanks to the hotline, the player is more likely to stay in the MMO. This means that the retention of the project will grow over time. “This is the first time we have allocated such a serious budget for something like this,” studio CEO Hilmar Petursson told PCGamer. — We haven’t done this before, but now we are doing it, because, according to metrics, this is the biggest problem of the game.”
EVE Online is an MMORPG in a sayfay setting. Her first build was released in 2003. The game is especially famous for its complexity, depth of mechanics and extremely large-scale battles.
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