4Game

This post is coming off a frustrating session of helping 3 new cmdrs learn the game. My end game is teaching people elite. It's fun and fills the gaps when I'm not doing whatever a violent vagabond ends up doing. Most of the new players I help are streamers. I tend to scroll twitch when I'm playing and find the newbies. I do my best to teach them the game. How things work, how to set up ships ect. ect. ect. Having done it several dozen times I like to think I'm pretty good at it.

But when i was helping out this current streamer, they came with some baggage, which was there being 3 new players in this group. No problem just a bit more work keeping tabs on everyone. Well while I was helping them out another cmdr who meant well dropped in and offered to help while i stepped off for the night. I didn't mind because hey the more the merrier right…..wrong. He started to baby them and spoil them. Now if they have to go more than 150lys they ask for a carrier to take them. They have hundreds of millions of credits, no clue how to spend them. No progress towards any elite rank, and between the 3 of them they have yet to build a capable ship. I'm not just saying to meta, I'm saying to the basics of usability. Huge hardpoints with class 1 weapons, undersized fsd drive because it saves power in a system that has no power constraints. It's a shit show and now they just sit and ask, what do I do now. I stepped out of helping them because the new guy just offered the quickest path to end game and there was no stopping them. I just sit back and listen as the new guy gets frustrated trying to handle this mess he created. So finally let's get down to some pointers to keep this from happening again.

1. Don't just find the fastest way to give them money with little to no effort on their part.

2. Don't be their personal taxi, yeah it may take a bit to jump there normally but this keeps them from building a dependence on you to move them around and makes them less scared to explore on their own.

3. Don't do everything for them, don't be the one looking up everything in inara or whatever 3rd is your poison. Let them learn how to do it. If they make a bad call tell them why. But if you just keep doing it for them, they won't develop the habits to do it themselves.

4. Nail the basics down. It's no good to try to explain to them how a trade route works if they can't kit a ship to do it proper. Or understand how to read and understand missions. Telling them "just grab the mission that says xxxxx" does nothing for them.

5. Let them die. I can not state this enough. If you go to a res site and they start picking fights they have no business picking. Let them learn the consequences of that choice. I'm not saying leave them hanging but if you are always there to save them and kill everything in front of them in seconds they will never truly learn what their weaknesses are or how to go about fixing them. It is very disorienting for new players to go from "everything I look at dies in seconds" to " I can't even get his shields down".

6. Don't tell them what to do, let them pick what they want to do. This one is simple, just because you get your rocks off running cargo doesn't mean they will. Let them pick, help them kit out properly and join them in doing it. I have several smaller ships set up so that way it's not just me, in my big op ship doing 98% of the work while they trail along like a tiny shadow.

7. Fuck meta. It doesn't always have to be sidey, cobra, krait, conda. Or whatever line you think is best. If they want to buy an asp scout because they like it. Let them. Have fun. Experiment with builds, it will do more for them to try to make that ship work than to pick a ship that everyone is flying.

If you have any other tips I would like to see them as well or maybe you don't like some of these. My goal is to help people play the game like they want and give them the tools and knowledge to do so. This way they don't just quit after a week because they already have a conda and they don't understand how or what else there is to do.