EVE New Citizens Q&A

I been playing for a few days now and still not sure how to choose a career path. I read where some players desire to become smugglers, others a mercenary or trader. Are there certain NPCs you need to speak with in order to choose a path? Right now I am doing agent missions and almost finished the opportunity missions.

As a side note: I spent 7+ hours trying to figure out and complete the scanning for data (part 3 of5) mission given by a npc. It was a nightmare but I did complete it) Instructions for this game are a little lacking and the in game missions can be very confusing for new player

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There's no one way to decide to be any sort of profession and no type of "class"-based lock that sets you up for a profession. You basically do what you want.

The Career Agents are a good place to start, but don't ever let yourself feel like you're stuck doing any one thing. It would be better to be a jack-of-the-trades than to try to be a specialist and find out you actually hate it. It isn't uncommon to find yourself deciding to do something completely different from what you first started doing or thought you would do.

http://swiftandbitter.com/eve/wtd/ provides a small run-down of the many things you can do in EVE. It isn't exhaustive.

Your best bet would probably be to get yourself involved with a newbie-friendly corporation (be very, very wary of the ones who spam their ads in local chat and send you mails or personal convos, as more often than not, they tend to be slave-based mining groups trying to make a buck off other peoples' work).

Other's have already given great advice here. I just want to add that many players come to Eve as if it were every other MMO out there and it's not. What sets Eve apart is both it's biggest asset as well as biggest detriment IMHO. Fortunately for us vets its more of an asset when you stay and more of a detriment early on.

So in Eve you are not locked into any career path, it's a sandbox. It could be argued that there are no real career paths in this game. At least not in the traditional sense. The up side is that you can do anything in this game there is nothing to hold you back. The down side to that is that there is no focused path that you can set a new player on. Like "go to such and such quest giver and pick up the intro quest to the questline that shows you how to play the rest of the game".

In Eve you are pretty much on your own to figure out what you want to do, now tomorrow and from day to day from here on out. Luckily that is pretty much the only thing that you have to do alone in this game. Eve is very much focused on group efforts. On that note you need to make friends so that you have people to talk to in game so that you are not spending 7 hours trying to figure out a mission.

So like other's have said: make friends, try everything, stick with what you like, and don't ever feel locked into anything. Skill are not as big of a deal in this game as in others. Don't ever be waiting on skills to train. You are not looking to get "decked out" in this game and there is no level cap.

As said above, this game doesn't have classes or careers that you "choose" and get locked into. The ships that you choose to fly are, in a way, your role - dps, tank, remote repair (healing), scouting, pvp tackle, electronic warfare jamming (crowd control), cov-ops stealth, and so on.

You can train and unlock whatever ships you want (the skills are in the Spaceship Command group), and provided that you also train the appropriate weapon skills (Gunnery, Missiles, Drones) and support skills (Armor, Shields, Navigation, Targeting, Energy/Engineering, etc), you can pretty much build a whole account with all the (tank, dps, healing) capabilities into a single character.

However, training all the ships will take a long time, of course, which is why people recommend specializing in only a few ships or a lineup of ships from one race, to start with. But your first order of business is to figure out what you want to do, so as a newbie try everything. Most tasks don't require a lot of skills to get started, they only require skills to become good at it. So go ahead and try mining, production, exploration, lowsec FW PVP or piracy, go to nullsec see what's what...

Figure out what you like, and then go for that.

EDIT: Player corporations can make this game super-fun, if they're good. This is because it's often hard for a person to keep coming up with new ways to entertain him/herself. A player corp has goals, and you're often participating with others in organized activities (called ops) to achieve these, which provides the fun. Also, a player corp is likely to have drama, wars, and all sorts of interaction that will put to use those ships that you're training for, so things don't get boring.

Try a bunch of different things.

I highly recommend starting a fight with another player sometime. Even if you lose it, it's the most fun you'll have in EVE.

Note that fights are sometimes about starship combat, and other times completely economic in nature.