To be fair mate, they have been revamping the new player experience quite extensively in the last 2-3 patches and I don't think they're done yet.

And yes, there's still ISK sellers around (every MMO has them), there's still macro miners in empire - but it's better than it used to be.

I hate to see what the old system was. I never played an MMO where you had to petition to GM to reset a tutorial mission because you could permanently lose the item to complete it, fail, and be locked out of the future tutorial missions in that line.

They really need to give more guidance to early players tailored to specific roles. They try to do that with the certificate system, but its buried in the character sheet and never really mentioned, or used to help the player to find a career. Especially since you often need a lot of skills and prereqs to do something as simple as pilot a mining barge or cruiser.

The old new player tutorial was pretty much, "picked your char? ok, see that pirate ship over there? shoot it! ok, done? grreat.. bye!"

After that you were left floating in space with a bunch of SP and skills you had no idea you had picked and a rookie ship you couldn't do anything useful with.

Nowadays you at least get to decide what you want to train (though I agree it's still very hard to know what you should actually pick) and get pipelined in to Agent missions (and eventually your Epic mission line) where you can earn your first (useful) ships for free.

I agree, it's not the bestest of systems and they still have lots of work to do there, but I do think they're really trying to work it out, it's been getting incrementally better with every patch.