Captain's Quarters, new tutorials and crash-course missions on Duality

Howdy folks,

[Update: We've decided to release Captains Quarters early! CQ and new tutorials will now be available to players at 12:30 UTC on Wednesday, April 20]

Walking, in MY stations?!

As mentioned in CCP Chiliad's latest blog, we are in the process of putting together the Captain's Quarters and a whole slew of new tutorials, and a new crash-course as part of the first iteration of Incarna.  We want to give you fine folks all a chance to get a first-hand glimpse of the new Captain's Quarters as the new station environment and especially to get critical feedback about the new crash-course mission strings and tutorials that we've created to go along with it. For the first time ever you'll be able to walk around inside a station within the EVE Online client!

Is everything polished? No. We're still at the chisel-in-hand-in-front-of-a-marble-form stage. So if you would prefer, wait till the exhibition opens and patch day is here and save your judgments on our designs-in-progress till then. But, if you'd like to visit the workshop or perhaps lend a hammer blow or two, we would love it if you'd join us.

For the TL;DR among us, here's the bullet points:

• Minmatar Captains Quarters, new tutorials, and new crash-course on Duality beginning on**Thursday, April 21**,in the **Emrayur **system
• This build is not fully stable or complete, you have been warned!
• Captain's Quarters are "work-in-progress", but contains interfaces for:
  • Planetary Interaction
  • Corporation management/recruitment
  • Character re-customization
  • Ship fitting

We are looking for feedback on:

• The look, feel, and general impressions on the Captain's Quarters as a replacement for the current hangar-view
• The usability, accuracy, flow, and completeness of the new Crash-Course
• The usability and completeness of the new in-station tutorials

New things, coming soon to a test-server near you

So when, and where can you check this out for yourself? We will be putting all the new goodness, in all of its "work in progress" glory up onto Duality from** Wednesday, April 20 through Monday, April 25**. The new Captain's Quarters currently replaces the old hangar/station environment, so you will find yourself there instead, upon docking. Currently you will only see the Minmatar version of the basic Captain's Quarters, but we will eventually have a spankin' new basic Captain's Quarters for each race before we're done. In addition to the new digs, you will also encounter our new crash-course designed to help teach new players the basics of EVE Online in a more intuitive and user-friendly way than what you would currently find on Tranquility.

CCP devs from the teams working on these new features will be present on Duality (in the Emrayur system) between 17:00 and 19:00 UTC on Thursday, April 21 to help field questions, guide players through the new stuff, and get your impressions first hand. We will be collecting feedback on the forums (thread still to be posted), in a similar fashion to mass-testing feedback.

With these new tutorials and the new crash course, it is important to us that we hear from you fine folks how well we did at improving it. We currently only have one version of the crash-course "ready" (Amarr) so it's only available from one station at the moment.  More on that later. We're interested in finding out things like: is it too short/long, does it flow well, how do you feel about starting in a capsule, did we miss explaining something important, etc. In short, we hope to noticeably reduce the "learning cliff" (pictured below).

We also want your feedback and impressions on the new Captain's Quarters. Does the camera and movement work well for you? How about the transition from space to station, or just the overall "feel" of the space? Bear in mind that this is all still very much "in progress", it's using temporary textures and unfinished shaders, and only has basic lighting. We've still got a lot of work to do, but we wanted to get this into your hands early to ensure we do this right.

For more details on the Captain's Quarters, you should check out this video, from Fanfest: Linky

That sounds great, but how exactly can I participate?

A. Connect to Duality (EVE test server)

First, you'll need to get a client to connect to Duality. To connect; simply follow these 5 easy steps:

1. Download the Duality Installer
2. Run it, ensure you do NOT install over top of your Tranquility client!
3. Create a shortcut for eve.exe
4. Edit the properties of the shortcut; in the target field, add " /server:87.237.38.60" [Note the space]
5. Click "OK" then use the shortcut to launch the Duality client.

!*! Currently you MUST disable AA (anti-aliasing) and use high quality shaders, other settings are not supported in this test build and likely will not work !*!

B. Create a new character

In order to try out the new crash course and tutorials you will need to create a new character. The only tutorial arc that is currently "ready for testing" is the Amarr - Royal Amarr Institute tutorial string, based out of Emrayur.

The easiest way to make sure you're in the right place is to make sure you create a character that is both of the Amarr race (first page of character creation) and a member of the Royal Amarr Institute school (last page of char creation, when you pick your name).

C. Join chat, ask questions!

Once in-game, join the chat channels, "CQ Info****" and "CQ Testing".

• "CQ Info" will be moderated and for instructions and information from CCP only.
• "CQ Testing" will be for discussion, questions, comments, etc. 

D. Find/start the new tutorials

Now that you've got your new Amarr character, you'll want to login and ensure you're located in the station in Emrayur. You should immediately be greeted with some of the new tutorials, beginning with how to navigate inside your new Captain's Quarters. These tutorials will guide you through the process of accepting the new crash course missions and lead you through the all the new awesome.

E. Someone call the exterminator?

As always, please don't be shy about submitting Bug Reports. If you're having issues, we definitely want to know about them! Bug reports can be filed by following this link. For information on how to write a good bug report/what to include, you can always read more in this EVElopedia article on Bug Reporting.