EVE New Citizens Q&A

It might be difficult to find a mentor (however i see some advertise that they look for people to mentor once in a while), so your best bet might be to look into joining a corporation that is new player friendly, but have experienced players you can learn from.
If you are unsure on how to go about finding a corporation you can read over this guide.

Would also recommend that you look into RVB, even tho they are not a "teaching" corporation. Be polite, ask for advice and chances are someone will be able and willing to help you, and you will get plenty of fights while your there

Another teaching corporation that i tend to recommend is EVE Uni, which makes it a point to take in new players and help teach them about EVE (some love them, some hate them). However, the waiting time to get an interview can be quite extensive so prepare to be a bit patient.

Good luck

If your looking for a Mentor or PVP training/advice I would personally ignore the following.

RVB
EVE UNI

RVB does not teach and EVE Uni teaches avoidance rather then conflict.

Having a mentor come in two flavours.

The person that takes you under his wing
The person that offers advice and how to via chat or evemail.

I prefer to be one that offers advice via chat or EVE mail. But only because I like flying on my own.

Depending where your interest lies I am always willing to advice those that need it and appreciate it. So what you need to decide is where does your interest lie within PVP?

Once you figure that out for yourself you are more then welcome to ask me.

Join a nullsec corp. Low sec PvP is silly, it's either jumping on ratters/mission runners or ganking people on the gates while tanking the station/gate guns. If you come across someone in a small-ish ship alone on a gate, it becomes a staring match as each of you waits for the other to take the first shot. Silly. Look at corps in NPC nullsec. Sov warfare sucks, sov holding corps usually run around in huge fleets, and while this can be fun, you won't learn a lot of PvP - you'll just learn how to follow instructions and die very quietly.

NPC nullsec however is full of PvP either on an individual or small gang basis. Make sure your clone is up to date, jump into an interceptor and head out to one of the NPC nullsec regions. You can dock at any NPC station. Look up some of the corps that have offices there and/or talk to the locals and tell them what you are looking for. USE KILLBOARDS TO MAKE SURE THEY'RE NOT BSing YOU! Lots of people claim to be PvPers but actually are just carebears or suck really badly. Look at the corp and look at its pilots - what is their kill/death ratio? Their enemy isk/friendly isk destroyed? Do they just kill cyno ships? Where do they mostly hunt, what is the size of the groups they hunt in, etc. Killboards are not everything but they do give you a surprising amount of information.

Once you are satisfied that a given corp is what they say they are, try to join up. Be patient because anyone will think that someone who wants to join out of the blue is trying to get a spy into their corp. You'll be asked lots of stuff, you'll have to give your full API, etc. Some people won't take you no matter how much you beg. Others will. Then get yourself teamspeak (some people use mumble but teamspeak is more popular by far), and BE ON COMMS! Don't be shy, it's just your voice. Our alliance has a policy that any pilot who makes a mistake on a roam has to sing to us - so talking isn't so bad.

Spend time on comms, talk to people, listen and laugh at their jokes, make some of your own - in other words BUILD A RELATIONSHIP. If someone is in my corp I don't care if they've been there for years, if they're never on comms and I don't know them, I will never light a cyno for them and I'm not likely to drop everything I'm doing to go help them when they're in trouble. On the other hand there are many people who are fairly new but very active. I've got their back, and I know damn well that they have mine. PVP is more about friends than anything else.

There. Some advice.

We take on a lot of players completely new to PvP. No SP requirement, just a matter of whether your personality is a fit.

We're a low sec PvP/pirate corp living in Amarr/Minmi FW space. We fly a lot of small T1 ships, so cost to get out and have some fun is minimal. I can answer any additional questions if you're interested... but my first suggestion would be to join our public channel ( dbastards ) and come fly with us.

We're based in the Auner system, fit out a few frigs and come have some fun

Generally joining some 0.0 corp doesn't help much, partly because nullseccers don't tend to be amazing at understanding mechanics and strategies and mostly because you'll just be thrown into the deep. What you WANT to have is someone who makes stuff happen on his own, who himself is responsible for the outcome of fights because that means to be successful he has to understand EVERYTHING.

As such having Kane as a go-to guy to ask questions and learn from is probably going to work out really well, there's more people like that and if you have questions you can also always convo or mail me.

On the topic of gameplay mechanics, where you might see sillyness I simply see an impossible engagement: neither party can actively agress without the sentry guns going off deciding the outcome. The relative difference between the ship classes both parties are flying, and their willingness to fight against the odds, decides whether or not the engagement can happen then and there. The 'staring match' could just as well butterfly up to a larger engagement, or lead to an exiting GF if one of the parties decides to warp to a celestial. The guy you see belt ratting might just as well be PVP fitted, looking for tags, disregarding any of the higher level anoms, and give you one hell of a fight if you engage. No such things as gate guns around FW complexes either.

Not to diss any of you excellent advice regarding null, it's just a shame if a new player were to disregard lowsec or wspace as potential PVP areas entirely. Lowsec is actually a pretty good learning environment, and wspace has a charm of it's own. I'd say look into the conditions under which you want to live, and head out to other spaces to experience them too. The knowledge you gain will serve you well over the course of your eve carreer.

Definately get on comms with people. No matter what type of space your future corp operates in, voice comms are the first and foremost requirement to a good (non-solo) PVP experience. I share the same sentiment as Ptraci in regards to trust and willingness to invest some time/ISK into other people's benefit.

I think OP has been advised to do everything but join a hisec mining corp in this thread.

But I'd like to recommend the lowsec group Stay Frosty. They have a a lot of good pilots and also just a lot of pilots. As far as I know they have no skillpoint requirements.