EVE New Citizens Q&A

Wait...what..

There are only a very very limited amount of things you can't do without massive SP

And even with those massive SP, you will still suck at it as you lack the knowledge to do it properly.

Another for the NO category.

There is little to no value for a new player to buy a character with "skills."

If you take a moment and look at what skills give you then you will realize that most often the limiting factor in EVE is the player and not the skill points. The exception to this are skill requirements for specific and advanced ships.

For example, if you want to fly a titan, then... yes, you need lots of skill points. If you want to fly any capital ship then having a lot of skill points is pretty much necessary.

You will be a better pilot if you learn to fly your ships with lower skills since there is slightly more challenge to doing so. Most often though you can fly a ship reasonably well at skill level 3 and you are good in a ship at skill level 4. I know a lot of high skill point characters who have very few skills at 5. They have their skills all over the place and it's fine.

Skill points do provide more options in terms of ships you can fly at any given moment but once you are in a ship type then the rest of the skill points are useless while in that ship. For example, if you are flying an assault frigate all skills for medium weapons mean nothing.

In EVE you can catch up to a 5 year veteran in a relatively short period of time in a specific ship type if you focus. All the 5 year veteran has on you are more options.

As for exploring: you can begin an exploration career immediately after finishing the tutorials if it interests you. You can use the exploration frigate of your race (magnate for amarr, heron for caldari, imicus for gallente, and probe for minmatar) and start exploring with astrometrics II (takes 2 hours to train up then another 11 for astrometrics III which is plenty for most highsec sites combined with astrometric rangefinding III which takes a total of one and a half days to train but you can still find stuff with rangefinding at I).

Also, let this be a lesson to you to not fly expensive shinies without the RL exp to keep it alive:

http://www.twitch.tv/leeroy678/b/397282739?t=88m

Nyx Super carrier :25 Billion (?) isk.
Look on the dudes face : Priceless!

I will join in with the no crowd here and add in another reason why (in my opinion) you should not buy a character.
I just skimmed over the other replies so not sure if its been mentioned yet, if it has im sorry.

One of the things I remember the most from when i was a "young" player is the excitement i felt when i looked over my skills and could think "Sweet! Only X days until i can use (whatever)!" and the joy when i finished that skill and could jump over and get whatever it was and play with it.
Of course ISK is also needed for many of the things you "want" in EVE, but the ISK grind feels more trivial and..inpersonal? then knowing you were sitting there for days/weeks waiting like a kid waiting for Christmas eve it just felt that much better when you finally could get that new shiny toy.

I can understand that some skills are very boring to train because they don't actually allow you to fly/use anything extra and its just support skills, but at the same time...it gives a sense of accomplishment... something you did, not some other random person.

But enjoy this while you can. Eventually you will find your self at a point where you dont know what to train anymore because you dont need/want anything else, and the excitement you can feel now will be gone. It does not matter if your training the last racial BS to level 5 or titan level 5...its just numbers, and in the long run those numbers are pretty meaningless and dont add to (or provide) enjoyment in the game.

As i said, this is how i feel and i know a lot of people disagree with me and feel that SP means quite a bit (and dont take me wrong they do, up to a certain point). But when you have those skills at level 5 your just the same as everyone else with those skills, and what makes the difference between you and someone else is how you play, and some luck