EVE New Citizens Q&A

Hi,

I am quite new, not just to Eve but also to MMOs. (I have played a few football management online sims before, but that's about it). Eve's always intrigued me because it reminds me a lot of Escape Velocity series, in which I used to have a lot of fun when (much) younger. I have spent these past few days:

1. Going over the reading material I could find on the net, especially Eve University, but some other sites too.
2. Trying to get a hang of the game. I have started as an Amarr. Done 4/5 career missions (I left the exploration midway because I found it quite boring). Done a few lvl 1 missions for the Amarr Navy (and gotten to level 2 missions, even though they don't seem particularly suited to my coercer).

The issue I'm facing is as follows. Most of the newbie guides I've read seem focussed on a newbie who's nonetheless a month or so old in the game. Getting a clearer idea on how to chart out a career path, fit ships, clone, skill up, use implants etc when you don't know the first thing about what you're doing is much harder.

From what I've read so far, I know that mining or running distribution missions aren't my cup of tea. Ideally, I'd like to set up a slow but steady income stream (planetary interaction? Trading?) while using the ISKs earned to feed my combat ships (though probably not just running missions, perhaps faction warfare ? Though I'm open to other career paths for an okay but not so good combat pilot).

If the old hands could link me to some guides that might give a total newbie some idea about how to earn a few ISK (right now, I'm at 9M, training destroyer to level III to start training for a Amarr cruiser) and become better at combat, I would be quite grateful!

As already said, make sure you've done the Career Agents. You can redo these if you need to as each empire faction has three sets of these agents and you can do them all.

It seems as if you have found some of the better guides out there, including Eve University's wiki and such.

Get yourself into an educational player corp that fits your needs and play-style. Make sure you get on their comms. chat channels, and forums. Being involved with other pilots and learning from and with them is much better than going it alone and depending solely on guides (not that you said you were).

1. Play with others.
2. Play against others.
3. Have fun.


Basically, it's a MMO, so be social. Talk to people: Random people in local, random people in your NPC corp chat, join public channels, join community channels...talk to people.

If you want to try to PvP:

* Join a public fleet (NPSI communities fleets).
* Go to low-sec and try your luck (and contact the guy who slaughtered your ship for tips how to improve yourself).

Leilana, yes, I quite agree. I guess that's part of the issue I'm facing in Eve: being confused as to what to do, how best to learn, and quite what to learn! So far, I've managed to identify a few things that I found boring, which include mining and, at least in the tutorials, exploration.

For the moment, I've identified combat related paths as a possible career option, though I haven't really tried much in the way of trading/corporations to know whether or not I would like that career path.

That's the fun part.

It's a sandbox....just skill some basic skills, and try it out.

If you don't like it, move to the next thing.
If you do like it, keep this thing going.

Thank you for taking my bait by assuming that I hold a lazy person in low esteem. I would never judge you from a few lines of text.

If you allow me I would like to suggest that you spend a few minutes to think on how the benefits of laziness (high gain from little effort) can be applied to playing EVE. Trading can be one of them if you take advantage of the laziness of other players who are not willing to do the 15 jumps to Jita to save them a few 100kISK. Finding out what young players (who didn't learn about the hubs yet) actually buy and providing those goods locally, can make you a decent profit -- if you mind the risks of space travel.

You can make loads of cash on a well fit destroyer ratting in null. While a L1-2 Mission will pay you peanuts, a single battleship pirate you kill at a belt can net you 1mil. Of course you'd have to join a player corp to have access to that kind of place, or take the risk, but death happens alot in those places when you're alone. Second thing i'd say, is avoid flying a ship you can't lose, and right now any cruiser would fit that bill.

Your first engagements are likely to be this way. There is tons to learn that older players can take for granted. Just picking targets is hard when you are new because you don't know what all the ships are or what they are capable of. Joining a corp so you can get real-time feedback is a great way to speed up this learning process dramatically. Also flying in a fleet with others takes less of the focus off you so you can have a chance to figure out what you are doing without being instantly killed (though, like me, your name starts with C so you are likely to be near the top of the primary list when the fleet commander chooses alphabetically ).

I highly suggest this site for getting up to speed on the ships used in faction warfare and their capabilities. Focus on the t1 frigates at first. Choose one to fly and learn what it's strengths are. Also read the sections on the other t1 frigs and see if you can determine their strengths/weaknesses. Try to pick fights against targets you know something about (ie other t1 frigs) as these are likely to be the best-matched fights for you. This will involve learning to use dscan (read that whole thread and practice in high-sec by looking for mining barges in belts, etc.)

As others have said, you'll have a much easier time if you join a corp. I don't think anyone mentioned yet that faction warfare can be lucrative in addition to providing PVP opportunities. Capturing plexes (complexes) for your militia yields loyalty points which can be exchanged but items in the loyalty point store, which you can sell for ISK. This can be done easily in a t1 frigate so it is very accessible for new players. To take part you either need to sign up for the militia or join a faction warfare corporation. It's worth noting that participating in faction warfare will harm your faction standings toward the enemy faction. But as everything else in EVE, it's one of the tradeoffs you can accept to make some money and get some pew were it is easily available. Another option is to join a pirate corporation that operates in FW space for similar access to frigate combat, but you will not be able to capture plexes and will have to come up with a different means of moneymaking.



Just want to point out that players control the markets in EVE, so moving to a different faction space doesn't really affect what you can buy/train/skill. In fact, the largest market hub in EVE (Jita) is located in Caldari space and you can pretty much buy any item in the game there.

Edit:

Another thing I want to point out. In Eve, "bigger is not better". A well fit/flown frigate can kill a cruiser or battleship, depending on the situation. Ship classes have different niches they fill. Don't fall into the "need to train for something bigger to be effective" trap. Many veterans fly t1 frigates daily because they are fun and cheap to fly. Frig fights tend to be quite action packed because your low HP means piloting mistakes are punished harshly. They are actually quite tricky to fly because of this, but once you get good at flying them you will find it much easier to transition to larger ships. Flying frigs for a while also allows you to build up good core skills which apply to all the ships you fly (gunnery, tanking skills, engineering, navigation, etc), while keeping things cheap.

Thanks ShahFluffers, reading that thread now.

@Cara Forelli, that's very helpful advice. Thanks again! I'll go through the site and focus on frigates for now as well as learning to use d-scan.

There are so many guides out there for specific things in eve if you search you will find them. As far as general guides go the game being a sandbox is so broad that is kind of difficult to effectively do. IMHO your best bet is to get into a new player friendly corp so that you have people to ask questions on the fly.

I have seen some very new player video guides on youtube and even some blogs of the years but none of them that stuck out to me as being particularly good. Having access to vets to ask questions as you are playing is probably the best way.