Stardew Valley – Farm Upgrades and Stardrops as the Second Winter Approaches

How Big Should an MMORPG Tutorial Be?

One of the apparent constants of the universe is CCP/Fenris reworking their new player experience in an attempt to improve player retention.

June’s Cradle of War expansion brought with it the latest iteration on that, introducing Exordium, an entirely new region made up of 53 star systems, all dedicated to the new player experience and as safe as safe gets because PvP is turned off. No shooting other players allowed.

The Exordium region for New Players

This has been an interesting experiment because there has long been a low level whine of complaints that EVE Online would be more popular if only there was a place with no PvP. Looking at the most recent MER it certainly seems like Exordium is not all that interesting. It is 53 systems with not a lot going on.

Now, that is going to invite the usual sort of “true communism has never been tried” argument about how CCP gimped the economic viability of the place. And, yes, Exordium isn’t an apples to apples situation with the rest of high sec, but so many people have complained about EVE Online having PvP that one might think that having an area without it might entice people with that objection to give it a try.

Fun fact: No.

There is no doubt a long list of reasons why beyond bad faith arguments, but bad faith seems to be the champ as people simply find another reason to say the game is bad.

All of which is mostly a setup for my actual point here because, part of the whole new player experience is a brand new tutorial. Fully voiced and too long for me to bother finishing… I know I am not the target audience, but the whole thing was slow and involved a storyline that I knew from the outset would not matter a whit once I was done… it it yet another run at trying to figure out how to engage new players with the game.

As usual they give you a cool ship… then blow it up

And I understand that is important. Despite the fact that the game is currently in an up cycle in player activity, people still leave the game and some level of replacement with new players is required. The question is how do you achieve that.

This all comes up because of more stuff on Reddit… why must I go there, why must I read things there… where somebody who should know better was speculating on how to get back to November 2016 levels of new player creation. See the chart below.

November 2016 – New Player Creation Peak

You can find that chart, and others like it, over at EVE Offline.

Now, if you’re up on the history of EVE Online you probably know what happened in the game in November 2016. It wasn’t a war or a world record or the banning of casinos that happened on that day. (The casino ban was in October.)

It was the transition to a free to play model.

As happens with every such transition, there was a big influx of new players to check out the game. LOTRO, EverQuest, Rift, ESO… any semi-popular subscription MMORPG that transitions to free to play see such a boost.

Then the novelty is gone and the numbers drop down to a more sustainable, but hopefully higher than before, level. Free to play is the removal of a point of friction, but it won’t make a game magically better.

However, the person in question, in what feels like a classic case of not understanding correlation, waved that away in the comments and insisted that it was really the 10 hour, fully voice, intro tutorial that was what was on display here.

And that seems insane.

First, nobody besides CCP has any idea how many people finished that tutorial. As much as I knock CCP for their seeming inability to think through their changes, I feel like their decision to take that whole tutorial and all the work it represented and toss it in the trash was probably based on player completion and retention data, to which they seem very sensitive.

That they continue to thrash on the idea of a new player experience such that Exordium is the fourth or fifth major change since the Ascension expansion… it is tough to keep track… at least strongly implies that this is something to which they are paying close attention and want to improve.

So, while I am willing to entertain the “CCP has no idea what they’re doing” I think you need to support that statement at least a little bit.

Second, however, is that I am not sure how much positive impact a tutorial can have. I feel like the best tutorial is one that doesn’t get in the way of your playing the actual game. The beginning of Half-Life 2, or even the early WoW starting areas, just put you in the game, gave you some tips, and then gave you a shove down the path to the rest of the game.

Now,that is easy for both titles because they had clear paths forward. Half-Life 2 is a fairly on rails first person RPG and early WoW got you on a quest path that would take you at least to your mid-30s in levels before falling apart for a bit. EVE Online doesn’t have such a neat path forward… or it does, but only if you want to run missions for your entire career.

CCP has attempted to mitigate that with career agents and the AIR career path, and the daily AIR goals, and the new achievements that came in with Cradle of War, and the old achievements they had before, and with mastery certificates, and probably a few more ways I don’t even remember, all in service of breaking the player retention cycle they showed us back at FanFest 2014.

New Player Trajectory – FanFest 2014

Even Exordium has, as part of its mission, gathering together new players and pushing them towards faction warfare, the New Eden RvR analog, to help achieve this goal.

In that context, with the goal clearly marked if not easily achievable, I feel pretty strongly that a 10 hour fully voiced solo tutorial doesn’t bring anything to the table for player retention. What does that prepare you for? Missions? Epic arc missions?

Furthermore, it is not representative of the game you’ll be playing. If you spend 10 hours following a story, then get to the end and find that the actual game is nothing like that, was this a good thing? If you enjoyed the story aspect, you’re facing a big rug pull at the end, and if you didn’t like it, if it drove you off… which I am sure happened to some percentage of new players who attempted it… did it cut you off from something you may have enjoyed?

We’ve seen at least the rug pull complaints before. Who remembers Age of Conan?

The opening tutorial was widely praised. Twenty levels of focus on you, the player. And then… the game changed and people were a bit miffed. At least that is how I recall it going, though I never played it myself.

However, I have had a similar experience over in EverQuest of all places.

At one point they put in a tutorial, a story drive starter area where you wake up a captive then have to work with some NPCs to follow a storyline to escape the mines where you are all being held.

It is quite well done. I’ve run in five or six times easily. It shows you how to do everything, gives you a series of progressively more difficult missions, and gets you up to level 10 or so before you finally exit. It is a nice little coherent package of content.

And then you done and you get kicked out of the place and you’re at level 10 in EverQuest where there game isn’t nearly as charming or focused. It is really a bad transition and, as it turns out, the tutorial doesn’t really prepare you for the game as it actually exists.

Or so it feels to me, which is why I am not enthusiastic about CCP/Fenris spending a bunch of time crafting yet another guided tutorial with a storyline that dumps you out into the actual reality of the game. That feels like it could even be counter productive in the end.

But EVE Online is also not a game that lends itself well to an introductory guide as you play either, largely due to the fact that its UI is so unlike other titles that you are unlikely to show up and feel anything is familiar. The Half-Life 2 intro works because you’ve probably played first person titles. Likewise with WoW.

Then there is the fact that EVE Online is 23 years old and has a whole host of old MMORPG problems, which makes me wonder if there is any new player experience that will move the needle. I mentioned five a decade back, and none of them have gotten and less problematic.

Planet Crafter – To The Moon!

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The terraforming was complete. We had done it. The planet, once barren and hostile, now supported the teeming varieties of life.

Certainly A Planet Crafter

Fish and bees and butterflies and trees, fish swimming in the water, amphibians on the shores, and dead eyed mammals wandered the lands that were once cold and dead. Also, the big dashboard display in the base said so.

It’s up there on the big board

The planet was done.

We still had a couple of corners of the world to explore, some wrecks where we needed key cards or had to install a fusion core to open up some final doors, but it was rare to find anything we needed. It was more piling on with terra tokens, the currency you can use to buy things via the trade rocket.

Once you have hit the terraforming goal you do unlock some new technology, including the extraction platform. This allows you to build the extraction rocket which lets you run the final end game scenes.

But there is another rocket that unlocks, the interplanetary rocket. If you build that you can fly to other locations in the solar system. There are two additional planets, plus two more that you can buy as DLC. You also get a screen that lets you see your options, which is below the big board in the image above.

Known planets in the solar system… that green planet is one of the DLC options

Selenea is a barren moon while Aqualis is apparently a watery planet.

Since we were still keen on the game we decided to head to Selenea.

That was going to require some planning because the rocket is a one way trip. So the first item on the list of things to pack were supplies sufficient to build ourselves another extraction platform at the far end of the drip, plus an interplanetary rocket so we could get back to our extremely well supplied base on Prime if we needed to.

Our MOSTLY well supplied base, that is. I wrote last time about having an over-abundance of materials. But something happened to our iridium mine and it stopped producing. This was embarrassing because that is a critical resource for a lot of things and we had been basically burning off the excess by building things to send off in the trade rockets only to have the mine go bust and the cupboard end up being bare of iridium.

Potshot spent some time staging the things we ought to bring with us to Selenea. We both had 45 slot backpacks plus there was a small locker in the planetary capsule, so he laid out everything in lockers at the launch site.

The travel supplies staged for the mission

The locker missing a sign was where the nuclear fusion reactor parts were to go, but we needed iridium for those. However, out base on Prime also had an excess of power generation capacity, so we ended up just deconstructing one from the base, which went into my backpack.

We grabbed things, one locker at a time, remove the sign when it was empty until we were down to rovers and rods. We had five rovers on the list.

In the rover locker

Now, there being only two of us it might seem a bit of an excess to have five vehicles. However, these were five fully upgraded rovers. No expense spared, all accessories added on.

This was due to the fact that a rover, fitting in one locker or backpack slot, is an extremely efficient way to ship raw materials. In Planet Crafter you have perfect recycling efficiency, so if you take the accessories off the rover and put them through the recycler, you can all the parts back… and a fully upgraded rover takes a lot of very valuable parts to construct.

So at least three of the rovers were destined to be parted out at the far end of our journey… and honestly, we had gotten by with just one rover on Prime, so we could go there if we had to.

So we grabbed all the rovers, then as many of the material rods we could fit… those too can be recycled into components or used as is… then climbed up the gantry tower and got into the capsule.

In the capsule awaiting launch

The capsule has two seats, but you don’t get to sit. You have to stand and hold the hand rail for the full flight like some Ryan Air fantasy passenger accommodation. The panel in the capsule lets you choose your destination.

Where will you go?

It also has some reminders and warnings about making sure you pack for a return trip. Once I had grabbed some screen shots, the button for Selenea was pressed, the rocket lifted off, and we were on our way.

On our way to a new planet

Soon we were down on a another barren rock or a moon, just as some meteors were landing. A new task awaited us, armed as we were with only what we could carry.

Landing site on Selenea

Granted, we carried a lot of stuff and, perhaps more importantly, had all the recipes to make more if we could find the supplies. A lot of the initial game is waiting for unlocks to increase your capabilities. The first bit is literally running out of the capsule, collecting some raw materials off the ground, then running back to the capsule before your oxygen ran out.

Now, with our upgrade gear and the rovers, which included the pressurization option, so they provided oxygen when driving, we had a bit more mobility.

Still, we had to get moving. We each brought a few flasks of water, a few meals, and a couple of spare oxygen bottles to tide us over until we could start manufacturing our own supplies.

Also on the rover upgrades list was the jetpack option. We have truly arrived in the future if we finally have a flying car.

Flying rover time

That said, with all the speed upgrades applied, the rover actually drove more quickly on the surface than fly. But the jet packs, which work like our suit jet packs, allow you to hover and lift up over or out of difficult terrain or cruise along otherwise undrivable surfaces. So the utility is high, but it is often better to not have the car fly.

Learning from our last effort, we found a plateau with some open area and started working on the initial base.

The platform for our base laid out

You can see the big 3 x 3 building that is the core of our new base, as well as the two nuclear fusion reactors and the recycler currently sitting out back.

The dome in the background is one of the abandoned sites on Selenea. Unlike prime, which seemed to be littered with a ridiculous number of crashed spaceships… would like to see the lore reason to explain that… Selenea has a lot of buildings left behind for us to explore.

An abandoned base just down the hill from us

Those appear to have all the usual things, with chests and raw materials scattered about, areas that require access cards, and even areas that require explosives to get into. While I was poking my nose into that… because I am more explorer than builder… Potshot kept expanding our base, so I returned to more stuff going on.

Already more stuff is up and running

You can see the big T5 drill going, the rocket gantry out back, a T4 heater, and a water fountain.

I am not sure how to explain how we have open water on the surface with little atmosphere and sub zero temperatures, but at least we were not going to die of thirst. There was also food growing in the new dome on top of the base.

Beans not ready yet

It was all beans in the food growers, so it is going to end up like that scene in Blazing Saddles I am sure. But there it is.

We now have a new moon to explore and terraform. And I am pretty sure that is Prime hanging there in the sky above us.

The view from Selenea

It is a bit of a crowded solar system.

EverQuest Legends – Class Decisions and Blackburrow

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Last time around I reported that I had meandered my way to level ten in the game with my druid/warrior combo and that I was now being called on to make some decisions.

EverQuest Legends

The game does at least pop up something to tell you what you need to do, even if it is in the tiny, eye-straining dialogs of the original game.

Level 10 announcement

That would probably have been perfectly readable by mid-30s me on my 17″ CRT monitor back in 1999 running at 1024×768. Early 60s me on a 3440×1440 34″ LCD monitor has a different opinion. But with my glasses on, face practically touching the monitor, and a bit of squinting, I was able to divine that I needed to do things.

I need to pick a third class, I needed to do something with the loadout tab, and I needed to be ready to commit at level 11.

Levels 1 to 10 are basically the free trial period where all classes level up as you go and you can go back to town and swap them around to try them out. I never actually did that, staying committed to the druid/warrior combo I had picked… and also pretty much never going back to town.

For a third class I initially though that maybe paladin would be good. I like smite and lay hands and all that routine. So I created a new loadout and chose it… and then spent a bit figuring out where all my gear went.

It wasn’t like I was wearing that much, but it all stayed with the default loadout and I had to figure out how to get it back on my person again, which seemed a fairly manual process.

I took that combo and headed out in the world, playing with that a bit. I found some willowwisps in Qeynos Hills and even delved into Blackburrow a bit, gaining maybe half a level.

The Splitpaw Sentry at the top of Blackburrow

Then I slept on the idea and woke up thinking I really needed more offense, that you don’t need lay hands if the other guy is already dead. So I went back to town and edited my loadout to remove paladin and add wizard. That erased my half a level of xp because your constrained by your class with the least xp, and everybody stopped at 10. Still, half a level wasn’t much. I’d have felt worse if I had waited until level 30 to try that and found myself back at level 10.

From there I went back to Blackburrow, where I was going to try to focus on leveling up.

Blackburrow in the Qeynos Hills

Like so many early EverQuest zones, I wrote a whole piece about Blackburrow back at the 25th anniversary in 2024 which included maps, images, and vague reminiscences about the place and where it sits in my memories of the game.

Right there in the Qeynos Hills, it has always been an early destination for those starting on the unfashionable western end of Antonica.

As noted above, I had visited the place already… a couple of times really. But I had found it crowded and a bit chaotic. That was before I had finally found the not-red button in the lower right corner of the screen.

Button

While it has a difficult to read label that says, somewhat ironically, “Difficulty,” the real magic is that you can use it to spawn your own solo (or perhaps group… do people group here?) instance of a dungeon area. You can choose difficulty as well as whether or not you want mobs to respawn. Still sitting at level 10 I figured I would leave myself at the lowest level of difficulty and turn off respawns if only to avoid awkward encounters with mobs I had already burned down.

In I went… and things at the top level were as chill as could be. There are a few mobs scattered about, including a named mob in the form of Tranixx Darkpaw who drops the onyx earring. With respawns I suppose I could put him on repeat and farm that item, continuing to use each drop as a merge to upgrade the original. Maybe something for the future.

However, once you get through the door and down the ramp into the first major area of Blackburrow you end up with a bunch of level 18-19 mobs who will absolutely do you up a treat if you’re just level 10.

Bouncers and Elite Guards pounding me

I took a couple runs at trying to bypass them, then trying to solo just one, and neither worked out. That is possibly due to me not understanding stances, though I do think that not being able to tackle mobs that far above your own level isn’t an unreasonable barrier.

The real problem was that these red con mobs were an effective cordon between me and the rest of the zone. In the modern MMORPG era one might stack a place like Blackburrow with the most difficult mobs at the bottom. But 1999 logic put them up top.

So I did what I used to do back in the day, which was just jump into the pit.

The top level of Blackburrow

Seriously, I did that back in my retrospective post as well.

The pit is the big open hole that new players absolutely used to fall into back in the day, then possibly drown if they hadn’t figured out the whole swimming thing and how to get out of the water, because the fall won’t kill you. There is water at the bottom. Just don’t drown. Doug recommends it.

Read this, remember this

Anyway, dropping into the pit puts you at the bottom of Blackburrow where the mobs are much more reasonable range if you are only level 10. In fact, initially I ran into mostly level 8 or 9 mobs, which I dispatched easily enough even when they came at me in groups of three or four.

I managed to get myself up to the snake ledges, where the giant snakes live, who were always a good time back in the day. Ringing in at level 12 they were handing out decent xp.

A giant snake pull… or something

Also, the keen eyed amongst you might note that I have a different chest piece on in that image. Blackburrow actually drops gear, unlike those cheapskate beetles in North Karana. I was actually starting to fill some of the many empty gear slots I had been wandering around with for ten levels, and even getting some merge upgrades. Not enough to make much of a difference most of the time, though the tunic has a proc that assists casting now and then, but at least I felt better not being completely bereft of gear.

After moving and clearing the lower levels, trying to take care, I hit level 11 and got the dialog to commit.

Lock your class choice now

I thought my primary class was druid in this lineup… I am not sure a half-elf can be a warrior… but I didn’t have a lot of time to sit and think about what that meant because this happened during a fight where I opened up a door and the three yellow con mobs on the other side rushed to attack me. I leveled up when the first one died and felt I had best commit to whatever in the moment. So I did. I am locked in now.

Having committed, my character leveled up and I immediately got bombarded with the now familiar skill up spam as the fight continues.

Signs you have leveled again…

I don’t think it mattered all that much. If I decided to roll another character I would probably level up more quickly. I’d probably not start in Qeynos, for openers, it always being the poor relation on xp allocation.

I kept on going, running into some of the notable rare mobs, which see to always spawn in EQL, so we have that going for us.

The Splitpaw Commander with his dual whips

I eventually worked my way up to the point where I ran into another host of red con mobs… where I was at least now able to defeat one before I died.

Cornered again by elites

That sent me up to the zone entrance, which was fine. I had hit level 12 by then and my bags were full. I keep holding onto “maybe that will be useful for an alt” things, like the commander’s dual whips, though I am not sure we have shared storage or anything that would allow me to pass items off to an alt. Or that I would make an alt.

Mostly an old habits sort of thing.

But there I was at level 12. I picked up the all important spells, Spirit of the Wolf and Bind Affinity. I had at least two good wizard spells, including a nice AOE. I felt pretty good at this point. Not knowledgeable. I’ve still not watched any of the videos about the game. But I have enough clues to work with.

It might be time to travel. I am, above all, a tourist back in Norrath. I have no real goals beyond seeing the world and stoking some memories. I kind of wish I had kept the paladin because I am keen to go visit the Estate of Unrest. But I have a ways to go before I see that.

Blaugust, Motivation, and Just Repeating Myself

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We are now heading down the home stretch of Blaugust. There is about a week left in the whole event. If you’ve been diligent in trying to do that “post every day” thing that we still hand out an award for, you might be feeling the strain of having something worthwhile to say every single day in August.

Blaugust 2026

And there is your problem I would guess. You want to say something worthwhile, to impart meaning, to publish something that matters.

Matters to who?

I am here to suggest that if it matters to you then that is enough.

Also, it is staying motivated week for Blaugust, so this is me trying to be motivational or something.

Blaugust 2026 Schedule

I am unlikely to get you to want to write… you either feel that urge or you do not… but maybe I can help you with a roadblock or two that might be hindering you.

In addition to things that matter I will occasionally I will see someone suggest that they don’t want to repeat themselves or that somebody else wrote about a topic and now it doesn’t feel “fresh” or some such.

Look, after nearly 20 years at this there is rarely a topic I write about where I am not, in some way, repeating myself. And that is fine.

Have you ever read a book from somebody who is not, by profession, an author, who put together their thoughts or philosophy on a topic… this is a non-fiction thing… and then heard them speak or write later only to find them almost constantly repeating points made in their book?

I am going to use Guy Kawasaki as an example, and his book The Macintosh Way. I have a copy somewhere around here, signed by the author up at the ComputerWare store in Palo Alto back in the day.

It is a good book. A fun read, and not too long, with reflections on early Apple, the development of the Macintosh, and how to make great products.

I enjoyed it enough that I used to go out of my way to read anything about him in the press; guest columns he did, interviews, and whatever. And then I stopped.

I stopped because it became clear that he was most often dressing up what he wrote in The Macintosh Way in a variety of ways and sending it out into the world once more. The primary value after the first book, for me at least, was seeing the content of that applied in different situations.

Basically, he repeated himself. A lot.

But is that a bad thing? If an idea loses its value through repetition, that probably says more about the idea than anything. And there are always people who show up and are new to the idea, and the idea being presented as applicable in a different context. And sometimes you just change your mind about an idea, or find that there are new aspects to the whole thing.

So it goes. I too have repeated myself here on the blog. Quite often. Just around Blaugust, and mostly around motivation week, I have the following past posts:

Aug 1, 2018 – It Is Blaugust and What Should I Even Write About?
Aug 8, 2019 – Blaugust and What the Hell to Write About
Aug 29, 2019 – Blaugust and Keeping the Words Flowing to the Site
Apr 10, 2020 – Blapril and Figuring Out What to Write
Aug 24, 2021 – On Blogging, Motivation, and Passion
Aug 22, 2022 – Staying Motivated Going into Blaugust Week Four
Aug 23, 2024 – Blaugust and Motivation – How The Sausage is Made at TAGN
Aug 29, 2024 – Blaugust – Who Even Reads This Stuff?
Aug 27, 2025 – Blaugust Motivation – Where Do All These Words Come From?

That is just Blaugust versions of this post. I have also brought this sort of thing up in annual review posts and in occasional reflections about blogging in general.

I’ll save you the bother of clicking on any of that, though I think there are a couple of choice ones on that list and sum up.

I adhere to the philosophy that it is better to have written and clicked publish than to have not written at all.

But I am also not a real writer. I do not practice it as a craft. I have not cleaved to the core tenet of the guild, which is that writing is re-writing. For this blog everything is effectively a first draft when I schedule a post to go out and I consider having high standards… or even somewhat modest standards, obviously enough if you’ve read much here… to be a mere obstruction, a vice to be avoided.

I write conversationally, the way I speak in real life, which should give you a sense of how annoying it is to be around me in person. I don’t tend to the correct alignment of my verbs and nouns very diligently. I will, if left unchecked, start every paragraph with a conjunction… often the same one. The one bit of self-editing I do tend towards is removing the leading word “and” from every paragraph when it gets out of hand. I also use too many pretentious words because my parents beat me with a thesaurus when I was a child.

Anyway, that is all I’ve got. But, as noted above, I’ve have variations on this post in the archives, in case repetition will help you in your need.

Meanwhile, here we are in that final week and the count of blogs signed up has hit 171. Here they are, listed out in alphabetical order:

Few things motivate a writer so much as being read, so perhaps you could take a minute or three and visit some of the sites on the list.

The Ancient Gaming Noob

Veni, Vidi, Scripsi