EVE New Citizens Q&A

Everyone is different, but I think that the best goal is to find a corp that you enjoy. Eve is enjoyed the most when the experience is shared.

Thanks! I've been trying to level my navigation, drone and gunnery skills on the side so I'm not useless for combat, just getting those to level 3 in between the mining specific skills. I find the amount of options in EVE almost overwhelming, like walking into a well-stocked book store, and need to keep my focus or I'll just freak out and hide in a corner.

I suggest avoiding specialization. It's possible to know what you want, pursue it, skill for it, and be perfectly happy as a 'young' specialist. But from what I've seen, it's most common to see your rudder shift right and left as each month passes.

Where one day you want to mine, you might discover(accurately) that it's not the best income source, and want to trade or haul or explore instead. Then the next month you wish you were more combat-involved, do some missioning, and you'll see that your combat skills are hardly rounded. Then the next month you get into a corp who's in wars, and you want to be part of it, so you angle with confidence towards logistics cruisers. And then a patch happens, shifting the flavor-of-the-month, and affecting your training drastically. And then suddenly flying tackle in a T2 frigate looks really fun.

Actually, that's the story of my first half-year of Eve.

Here's the take away: Skill toward 'the now.' Plan on your plans falling apart. Don't go all in toward somthing that's farther than a month away. Pluck the low-hanging fruit: skill trains that take less than a day. Don't go higher unless it's a multi-applicable pre-req, or really important.

Bare in mind that specialization yields MILD benefits. With 10 days training, your skills grant you a benefit of '10X,' where continuing to train for 30 days will grant you a benefit of '15X.' Diminishing returns, in other words.

So be prepared to be versatile and responsive toward what engages you. Don't commit too much.

Except for this commitment: Join a corp. This game becomes a real drag when you're playing it alone.

Picking a ship you want to fly and then tailoring your skills, income-generating activities, etc around obtaining (and replacing when it's blown up) that ship is a completely legitimate way to go, and it's how a lot of newer players do it.

Another way is to pick an activity and then train/practice flying in every aspect of it. For instance, you're wanting to mine, so you might try low-sec, try hauling for another miner, try running a guard gang on a mining fleet, and so on. This tends to give you a lot broader set of things to do, which is why characters that are a little older tend to like it... discovering something new to do is more fun once you have all the basics under your belt.

The main thing to remember either way is that there is no such thing as being committed to a path. Even if you're half-way through training a skill when you decide you're done with this and want to train PvP instead, you lose nothing by dropping what you're doing and trying the other thing. Focus is a tool for your own amusement, it's not mandatory and you shouldn't deny yourself something that looks interesting just because you feel committed to your current path.

I'd suggest finding people to play with ASAP. Eve gets boring solo unless you understand the game on a deep level. Decent new player corporations are(Google these to find out more):

Red Vs Blue
Eve University
Brave Newbies Incorporated

Read about these options and see if one is a good fit for you. Keep in mind you can move on to a more serious corporation from any of those three quite easily.

It's funny, because in life I'm a fairly focused person. I can pick a goal, and work toward it with little worry about distraction.

Here, in EvE, it's the opposite. I've played EvE now for...I think about 37 days? Something like that. When I first started I told myself "Find out what interests you and train toward it." The trouble is, there's a hell of a lot of interesting things to do in EvE.

Being new, I don't have a basis for comparison - what will I like? What will be fun for ME? What can I see myself enjoying? Dunno - but all of it requires different skill training focuses. I let go of my sniper-rifle focus and picked up a sawed-off shotgun. Boom! I'm scattering my skills all over the darned place, experimenting, seeing what tasks I actually enjoy rather than locking myself into a role. For now.

I'm doing some mining. Some exploring. Some missions. Some Planetary Interaction. And I'm having fun, jumping from task to task like a monkey on a sugar high. This is okay, for now. Sure, I'm not "minmaxing", sure I could be "gimping" my focus to do things well, but I need to find what I like, and in EvE that is going to take time. And could change, at any time. Oooh! Shiny!

I can do a number of things to a degree that gives me an idea of how they will be, later in the game. I can do nothing well. A Jill-of-all-trades, so to speak. I give myself three months - three months of unfocused "ooh, this looks interesting....ah, let's give this a try...." before I have a better idea of where I see myself settling in. And at that point, I can always change my mind knowing that I have at least a basic level of skill in other areas.

One thing though - no matter what you decide to do, no matter what interests you, some skills I have found are nearly universal. The core skills, the ones that make your array of ships function with any degree of competency. Go to the certificates, hunt down the core skills, and train them up at least a little. They draw attention away from the shiny tasks and fun you can have out there in the universe, but without them you're crippling your usefulness and fun.

It is probably important to try out some things first (tutorials) and then concentrate on one or a very few areas.
With more experience and Character age (=SP) you can branch out and explore different areas.

What do you want to do? - Shoot things (1) or get rich (2)?

If 1, do you want to shoot NPCs or other players?
If 2, do you want to sell things, transport things, or build things?

Answer those questions and then branch further...


Don't try to do everything right now. Later is always time for different things, concentrate on what you want to do in the near future!


Cheers, Ryder