For all the chaff, teasing, and outright hatred that new players have to suffer through, initiates are just as essential an ingredient of any online game's lifeblood as veterans, and their experience as a new player is integral to the continuation of an online game's good health - especially subscription based MMOs. EVE Online's New Player Experience (NPE), the entrance to a world wholly controlled by the elite of well-established alliances, has long been criticized - primarily by new players - for being an inadequate introduction to a harsh world, eve isk to which older players respond with invective slandering the new generation and the "sissification" of the game.

Warranted or not, CCP has put great effort into the NPE in the years since I've joined the game, and I have no doubt that a new player's experience now would be entirely alien in comparison to mine. This effort's aim has been to bring neophytes into the fold of EVE's living, breathing world; no easy task, considering that the galaxy's heart races along to the beat of a hummingbird's. Action on the behalf of new players is more likely to open up debate rather than settle it, and now factions wonder ceaselessly whether EVE is being softened, its values compromised in a deal with the bumbling, Ibis-bound devil.

For all the hemming, hawing, and hullabaloo over tutorial and character creation renovations that give new players an edge that veteran players didn't have, it is a disproportionate amount of attention paid to a relatively small fraction of the greater NPE. As there is no cordoned newbie zone in EVE, the NPE gradually fades into learned game-citizenry with the passing of time. The abrupt physical injection into the full game world takes place at the finalization of character creation instead of at the border of a protected environment, eve isk meaning that new players - after learning a few basics - acclimate to the reality of the game according to their own pace and capability, instead of being forced to conform to a developer's opinion that players cannot experience the entirety of the game world until a certain point, say, Level 10. This assumption can fail on two fronts; first, that the player isn't ready at Level 9 but is at Level 10, and second that the player is ready at Level 10, instead of Level 11. Such are the problems inherent in drawing a line that everyone must cross at the same time.