EVE New Citizens Q&A

Two suggestions OP.

Suggestion one is joining Faction Warfare for the Caldari (even if you aren't Caldari) and turning the loyalty points you earn there into Datacore - Quantum Physics*, and selling those on the open market. You will quickly be able to afford a large stockpile of cheap ships this way - a few hours and you'll be able to get a few dozen frigates with tech 2 fittings. It's not PVE or highsec but it is newbie friendly (somewhat).

Suggestion two is echoing the mission baiter approach. What you do here is use Combat Scanner Probes and the probing skills from the tutorial to find people running level 4 missions in fairly expensive ships that are optimized for shooting large targets, then enter their mission deadspaces and steal from their wrecks and generally be a real nuisance. Smacktalk them in local, etc.

Depending how good at provoking them you are, anywhere from 10% to 20% of them will shoot you. This is what you want. You then 'tackle' them (prevent them fleeing) and very slowly whittle down their shield, armor and structure.

You have three choices - offer a ransom and honor it; offer a ransom and dishonor it, or don't offer one at all. Some mission runners have very valuable modules on their ships, you can steal these from the wreck and sell them.

If you want, you can do the newbie tutorials at each of the three starter systems. It's very boring, but that would give you the money for the missions, plus three of each of the starter frigates they give you, plus SIX of the industrial hauler(s). Keep them, sell them, reprocess them for the minerals, do whatever you want with them. Buy platinum insurance and you will get money back for your 'free' ships if they ever get blown up.

Jita is the super trade hub of New Eden. You would need hundreds of billions in ISK and months or years of training to successfully compete with the sharks there. Jita is also rife with market scams, such as price gouging, the .01 ISK game, etc.

If you want to try your hand at Station trading/ market PVP, start at a smaller trade hub. Lonetrek has many good smaller trade (and mission) hubs, and it's the region right next to where Jita is. As a newbie trader, you would make better money. learn more about the markets, and see lots more of New Eden through inter-regional hauling. Buy stuff in one region for cheap, haul it, sell it in another region for more money. Profit.

One market you can get into right away are skillbooks. The same skillbooks which sell for the NPC (non-player corp) price in your starter system will sell for a much higher price in Jita. Skillbooks are also small and light, so you can deliver them in a small frigate or even a shuttle. Sell some of the duplicate skillbooks that you would get from doing the newbie tutorials over again will sell quickly in Jita. The higher priced skillbooks however (50 million and up) are where the bigger profits are made.

Since you have indicated that you have an interest in both:

a) Market PVP and
b) Low sec PVP,

I would highly suggest that you start another alt and train them up to be your Hauler/Trader.

You have to stop training on your main to start training an alt, but a simple hauler alt takes as little as a few hours to skill up. Caldari have some of the smallest tech 1 industrial ships in the game. Amarr have bigger haulers which are also quick to train. Minmatar have some pretty decent haulers, but you have to train to level 4 to fly the biggest. Gallente have the biggest hauler, in the game, the Iteron V, but you need to train to level 5 to fly it.

If you leave your hauler out of corp, you can contract your stuff to your alt, and move your stuff around even if your main character has been war decced. Leave the hauler in the NPC corporation.

If you want to train Trading skills on this alt, you might find it helpful to run some PVE missions for Caldari Navy. That's the corporation that owns Jita 4-4 station. For this, you can run some pretty boring distribution missions if your alt has no combat skills. This will raise your standings with the station, which means lower taxes, which means more profit. You will probably want to quit the NPC corporation before you start running missions though, or they will take 11% of what you make in taxes. If you want, you can start your own corp, set the taxes to zero, run missions, and drop the corp later.

Your third alt can be trained as a scout, or someone to sit in another station so you can compare the prices between two regions quickly. Jita is super-huge as a Trade hub, so things there tend to be cheap and sell quickly. In a place like Amarr system, Emperor station, things take a longer time to move, but sell for a higher price.

Note that if you really, really want to, you can do the newbie tutorials for all three starter systems on all three of your characters. That would give you fifteen frigates of at least three of the races, something like 18 industrial hauler ships, all of the duplicate/ redundant skill books you can sell, as well as the money for completing the missions. That might be a little too dull for some people, but it is an option.

Also, EVE University provides free training, free skill books, free ships, etc. However, many Faction Warfare corporations will also give you free ships and modules, as well as the occasional skillbooks, implants, etc.