Hospitable capsuleers,
We are always looking for ways to improve the early game experience, because although New Eden is a vast and deep world, full of beauty, freedom, and intrigue, it can also be intimidating for new players.
To help rookies learn the ropes, make friends, and prepare for their full EVE experience, the upcoming expansion will introduce a dedicated starter region named Exordium.
You may remember what it was like to be a wide-eyed newbie seeing the world of New Eden for the first time. Every bit of improvement we can make to support new capsuleers means more players will make it past those initial intimidating steps to eventually experience everything that EVE has to offer.
As most veterans know, getting more new players benefits New Eden as a whole. It means more recruits for your corporations and alliances, more customers for your market orders, more good fights in the warzones, and more new friends to meet at the Fanfest pub crawl.
We have had many discussions and brainstorming sessions over the years about improving the new player experience, both internally and externally, with many of you. An idea that has cropped up regularly is adding a “starter zone” to New Eden, where rookies can begin their journey together in a space designed specifically for them.
This idea will become reality with the introduction of Exordium.
Currently, new players are distributed across multiple systems when first starting out, spread across highsec, determined by their choices at character creation. This has major downsides.
For instance, when two friends decide to try EVE Online together, different choices of empire or school can leave them starting the game dozens of jumps apart, making it much more difficult to find each other and play together.
This current distribution of starter systems also reduces new players' exposure to one another, and we believe they would benefit from being able to more easily encounter and connect with others at a similar stage in their EVE journey.
Starting this summer, all new players will begin the game in Exordium, which contains new starter and career agent systems within a single 53 system region. The region is managed by CONCORD with assistance from AIR, and connected to special empire embassy constellations.
Placing all new players in the same region will give them opportunities to meet other rookies, and create a great environment for corporation recruitment and mentorship by existing players. It will also mean that players can more easily reach their friends.
“But wait,” I hear you exclaim. “If rookies will be spread out over 53 systems, how is that going to bring them closer together?”
Well, the primary hub system of Exordium, known as Manifest, is centrally located and within easy reach of all the other systems in the region. It includes a new AIR Trade Center station, which will serve as an excellent meeting and trade location, as well as the stargate to Yulai that will serve as the primary entry and exit point for Exordium.
The central CONCORD constellations contain the 12 new starter systems, into which new players will be dynamically placed as they finish the AIR NPE. These starter systems are no longer split by empire. Instead, rookies will be placed based on the load of each system, so the new region can dynamically adjust to accommodate periods of high newbie influx.
PvP is a core element of the EVE Online experience and provides a crucial portion of the cycle of creation and destruction that drives New Eden’s economy. However, it can be stressful to know you’re at risk of PvP engagement before you’ve had a chance to learn the ropes, from basic movement controls to the major game systems and how they interact with each other.
Currently, new players in EVE are afforded a measure of protection from PvP while in the starter systems, career agent systems, and SoE epic arc systems, by a rule posted on our support website, and more generally by the fact that new players usually don’t carry valuable items that make them worthwhile targets for “suicide ganking”. (Of course, this doesn’t mean they are never targeted, just that it is quite uncommon.)
However, new players do not know this, and will often have read stories about how ruthless and cutthroat New Eden can be, or even specific stories of new players being destroyed in highsec space. This means that some new players are learning the basics of EVE Online under a cloud of anxiety, knowing that another player could show up and attack them at any time.
Exordium will have a new “starter space” security tier that completely prevents PvP within its borders. While players are in Exordium, their safety will be locked to green, and other normal methods of legal engagement in highsec, such as limited engagements, wars, and factional warfare, will not apply.
This is intended to provide new players with a secure environment to learn the game without needing to worry about PvP risk yet, to prepare them to continue their adventure by journeying into highsec and beyond.
To make the difference between this new security tier and highsec space clearer, Exordium systems will be set to 1.0 security status and all other systems that are currently 1.0 will be changed to 0.9 security.
The new security tiers will be:
1.0 – Starter Space (Exordium)
0.9-0.5 – Highsec
0.4-0.1 – Lowsec
0.0 and below – Nullsec
Exordium will also have several restrictions and limitations to preserve EVE Online’s balance. These include a curated set of PvE content available, higher taxes, decreased opportunities for value creation for most activities, and blocks that prevent use of player-controlled structures and deployables.
With the huge variety of content available in New Eden, new players sometimes struggle to find appropriate challenges for their current level.
Within Exordium, all content presented will be achievable for rookie capsuleers. They can experience a wide variety of different activities, including combat, hacking, and mining sites, low-level missions, homefront operations, and more. Difficulty and rewards will be tuned to suit a starter region.
Exordium will also introduce newcomers to the lore and story of New Eden, deepening their immersion in the world.
The ability to curate the content available in Exordium also helps us balance risk with reward. For example, all the ore found within Exordium will be new “tier 0” variants of veldspar and scordite that can be balanced independently.
All hacking sites are also special variants of existing highsec sites with independently balanced loot tables.
Homefront operations will also have a different reward curve with lower overall payouts.
In addition, special taxes will be applied to most taxable activities in Exordium.
The curated content and taxes are intended to create a space where new players can be confident that the content they are presented with has difficulty and rewards appropriate for their level in New Eden, and that more lucrative rewards will be available to them once they’re ready to move into highsec and beyond.
Exordium is built for new players, but veteran players are also welcome to visit the region to meet and mentor new potential friends and corpmates.
Whether this takes the form of roaming starter systems with a magic school bus full of free ships like Mike Azariah, running public new player fleets for PvP or incursions like Kshal Aideron and the EVE Rookies community, or creating freelance jobs aimed at new players and offering the outstanding performers invitations to your corporations, the much more compact layout of the newbie systems in Exordium should hopefully be a major boon to all of our friendly neighborhood capsuleer mentors.
To assist with corporation recruitment and freelance job broadcasting, the region layout has been designed with a central hub system that will have additional office slots, and that will be within four jumps of every other system in the region.
We’re very interested in hearing from all existing players who participate in mentorship and new-player-focused communities, as well as from recruiters at corporations that welcome new players, about what we can do to help make this new region an even better place for you to meet and support rookies.
The new systems within Exordium already exist but are not yet accessible to players. To help mitigate any risk to New Eden’s stability on expansion day, the starter systems are introduced in phases.
Sometime before Fanfest, the new region will open for visits. At that point, players will be able to enter, explore the new space, and check out the new security tier, but the content will not be in there yet.
With the expansion release, the remaining content will be added to Exordium, and we will begin sending all new players there. Any capsuleers who have entered EVE before the expansion will continue their new player journey using the existing systems spread around highsec.
We look forward to hearing from you on the EVE forum or the EVE Discord and discussing your thoughts on the new region, including what you would like to see added in future expansions. We also look forward to showing you more at Fanfest and discussing this with many of you in person!
Fly safe.