I've been playing the new update on PC mostly, but I thought I'd reset save on the PS4 version (which I've not played much) to have a go at the new beginner zone. Now, this isn't one of those "I hate the noobzone because I think it's pointless" posts, but I tried to play the game from the point of view of a beginner and found it not to be all that helpful.
I started in the Dromi system and got my first message that told me that I had my beginner zone permit. So far so good... So, now what? I was kind of expecting to get another message with a mission, but nothing showed up. I decided at first to take off, but then thought that maybe it'd be good to take a mission instead, in case I still didn't get a new newbie hint on what to do next and would have to land immediately. I took a delivery mission for 2t of something that I can't actually remember now and set of.
I kind of enjoyed the auto-undock with the Blue Danube, and that view when leaving the first station is amazing! I pointed my ship to where it needed to go, hit hyperspace and was shortly at the destination station. I handed in the cargo and got my first trade rank... Okay, I thought, that's not good. I've now just graduated from the noobzone. No matter, I decided to grab some goods to trade, used the new trade menu to select a suitable place to sell it, and set off.
Forgetting to make note of what station I'm supposed to be delivering this stuff to, I chose the closest one once I arrived in the system. But the sale price there wasn't so good and I was making a loss. Nipping back into the trade interface I find that the station I need is further off in the system, so I look for it in the nav panel, but it's a planetary station and they're all marked "undiscovered". Now, I knew how to get myself out of this by using the system map and selecting it from the stations list there, but I think a new player could have probably gotten a bit confused at that. Maybe they'd be concerned that the station not being there is some kind of bug, got frustrated and given up... Maybe I'm wrong, but at the very least it might be a bit confusing. What I'm saying is for a beginner zone it didn't seem to be very logically laid out from a games development perspective and didn't prepare my "inner newbie" for the unexpected situation of needing to find a station that I've not yet discovered. Alright, I probably jumped ahead by taking a mission too soon and missed a load of stuff in the process, maybe I was supposed to take off first and then it'd point me in the right direction, I dunno. It just seemed that before I knew it the beginner zone was over before it really began and my "inner newbie" was left alone on the wrong station in the middle of nowhere.
I think it would have been more logical if it had a series of natural steps.. 1) get hello message, 2) follow this with a message to fly to X place, 3) another message to tell you to select X mission, 4) now you're told to go to X place, and so on... Maybe it does, maybe I somehow managed to skip all that by trying to be clever. But there might be a new player who does the same thing and thinks, "Well, I dunno what to do, so I'll take a mission" and then ends up missing a ton of other stuff that's in the beginner zone.
Anyway, I think the beginner zone is a noble effort, and I know it's not really aimed at me because I've been on the Elite forums since 2008 before ED was even a thing and have played far more hours of all the games than I can count. Besides, who knows, I may have broken something by doing something the game didn't expect me to do.
I started in the Dromi system and got my first message that told me that I had my beginner zone permit. So far so good... So, now what? I was kind of expecting to get another message with a mission, but nothing showed up. I decided at first to take off, but then thought that maybe it'd be good to take a mission instead, in case I still didn't get a new newbie hint on what to do next and would have to land immediately. I took a delivery mission for 2t of something that I can't actually remember now and set of.
I kind of enjoyed the auto-undock with the Blue Danube, and that view when leaving the first station is amazing! I pointed my ship to where it needed to go, hit hyperspace and was shortly at the destination station. I handed in the cargo and got my first trade rank... Okay, I thought, that's not good. I've now just graduated from the noobzone. No matter, I decided to grab some goods to trade, used the new trade menu to select a suitable place to sell it, and set off.
Forgetting to make note of what station I'm supposed to be delivering this stuff to, I chose the closest one once I arrived in the system. But the sale price there wasn't so good and I was making a loss. Nipping back into the trade interface I find that the station I need is further off in the system, so I look for it in the nav panel, but it's a planetary station and they're all marked "undiscovered". Now, I knew how to get myself out of this by using the system map and selecting it from the stations list there, but I think a new player could have probably gotten a bit confused at that. Maybe they'd be concerned that the station not being there is some kind of bug, got frustrated and given up... Maybe I'm wrong, but at the very least it might be a bit confusing. What I'm saying is for a beginner zone it didn't seem to be very logically laid out from a games development perspective and didn't prepare my "inner newbie" for the unexpected situation of needing to find a station that I've not yet discovered. Alright, I probably jumped ahead by taking a mission too soon and missed a load of stuff in the process, maybe I was supposed to take off first and then it'd point me in the right direction, I dunno. It just seemed that before I knew it the beginner zone was over before it really began and my "inner newbie" was left alone on the wrong station in the middle of nowhere.
I think it would have been more logical if it had a series of natural steps.. 1) get hello message, 2) follow this with a message to fly to X place, 3) another message to tell you to select X mission, 4) now you're told to go to X place, and so on... Maybe it does, maybe I somehow managed to skip all that by trying to be clever. But there might be a new player who does the same thing and thinks, "Well, I dunno what to do, so I'll take a mission" and then ends up missing a ton of other stuff that's in the beginner zone.
Anyway, I think the beginner zone is a noble effort, and I know it's not really aimed at me because I've been on the Elite forums since 2008 before ED was even a thing and have played far more hours of all the games than I can count. Besides, who knows, I may have broken something by doing something the game didn't expect me to do.