My EVE

Ari is short for Arimal the name of my Dust514 character which I've been playing avidly for around six months now. I had no previous experience with eve outside of reading a few pieces of fiction several years ago. I was intrigued but PC gaming was just not convenient for a long time. After finally building a new computer this spring. I decided to grab a 21 day trial from the forums here with a generous isk offer that was paid when I upgraded my account in the third week(thank you for that Tank CEO) and after vigorous devouring of wikis, guides, more guides, tutorials and maybe most importantly rage spewing rants began to get my feet wet this is a hopefully brief summary of my experience.

The tutorial went smoothly enough, though I did learn a valuable lesson about reading the mission text thoroughly when I lost a fitted atron instead of the throw away one they gave me for the mission. When I got farther into career missions It was pretty clear that there are not enough hours in the day in which to gain skill points. In deciding what route to take my training I came to a few conclusions about how I do and do not want to play.

1. Mining is for peasants with no imagination, I will not touch an asteroid if I can manage without it.

2. Missions are repetitive and outside of grinding up standing I don't plan to do many of these either.

3. Probing is a fun in odd treasure hunting kind of way.

So explorer it was, I started training the relevant skills(3-4 all across) and it is almost infuriating that I spent almost an hour on signatures that now take a matter of minutes to scan. I spent about two weeks just plotting large routes(20 or so jumps) hitting every dead end and road less traveled I could find in search of the lucrative radar sites. Eventually the lure of larger more lucrative hacking opportunities got the best of me and lured me and my trusty all in one imicus into low sec. Where it was promptly blasted because I did not know what a safe was or how to get more use out of d-scan than just spamming max range at 360 and trying to warp away if there was anything in the system bigger than me(this would later prove an irrelevant way to measure a threat).

http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=16944827 a month later and I can only facepalm this one.
http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=17059764

I've lost a few also ninjaing the contents of low sec radar sites and failing to get out when the hordes of enemies appear.

So after losing a few loads of engagement plans, test data, and bpcs. I've gotten better and more careful at it slowly building my wallet to over 500mil(it's okay you can snicker in superiority if you want) not counting the 350 mil recruit bonus which I view as my rainy day fund and have not touched a kredit of it.

As you can probably guess doing nothing but explorers work gets a little dull when you find nothing but wormholes and magnetometric sites for 2 days in a row, so I've taken my winnings and joined the gallente militia getting what lp I can and learning how fights play out. in and around plex. I've lost 6 incursus and 2 atron this way and bloody loved it Dust514 is a fun game but rarely gets my heart rate up the way this game of cat and mouse does even more so when I almost win.

http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=17396016
had him to 20% armor but just didn't have the dps I think, that active tank incursus sure soaked up some damage though.

http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=17370304 here I learned what a tracking disruptor is.

I'm on ts3 now and have participated in a few small open militia fleets and learned a lot about how groups operate and fly together in just a single morning. So I'm just living and dieing for the moment waiting on thermodynamics and t2 guns, while I try not to let my wallet shrink to far, venturing out in my newest imicus in search of tasty radar signals only to recoup my losses.

Disclaimer this is only a small selection of my failures and success(but mostly failures).

Edit: This became much longer than it looked while typing.

Nice post. It's good to see a newer player figuring it out an not crying. My advice is to learn DScan - become expert at it to where you can quickly and accurately scan - pinpointing celestials, gates, belts etc to find people. It is essential for PvP, especially if you go out solo hunting. Have the window open at all times.

Also, lose any fear of ship loss now. You will not have fun if your afraid of losing a collection of pixels on a computer screen. Fly what you want where you want and the game will teach you. No better way to learn than to do it.

Keep working on it! I was very similar to you when I started this game (except FW didn't exist). I used to scout for 0.0 coalition fleets, and was one of the main tacklers for Triumvirate / Roadkill / Curse alliance, all sorts of random alliances. Flying something like a tackler really improves your pilot skill for the future.

I would really suggest also listening carefully to the guy in charge too, you seem like the kinda guy that would want to be in charge someday, it definitely helped me 7 years down the line :)
-Buhhd