EVE New Citizens Q&A

PvP can't be optional, it's part of the game. It sounds like this game is not for the casual gamer. It's obviously not for everyone and appears to have a huge learning curve. In fact, I'd say it's easier to learn how to fly a F-4a Freedom Fighter.

I'd want revenge, but from what I understand, losing spaceships and getting blown out of the sky is no big deal. So basically, it's a FPS in space. I uninstalled the client within minutes of finishing my character, so don't feel bad.

Like to thank everyone for their advice etc, more especially for their words of encouragement. Had a cool chat with a guy last night
who suplied me with a Drake fit (was or maybe still is my next project /wink)

Fly safe!

I'm curious how much the OP raked-in via this thread and his innocent comments in the in-game help channel. By my count at least 50M isk and a Drake.

Sounds like a good gig.

KB

I forgot to mention that what you read here on the forums is not representative of what you live in game : A lot of players never post here. So the proportion of "badass" wanabees, social darwinists sharks etc seems bigger than it really is. The game has a bigger amount of lovely people than it sounds like here. It's up to you now to make a step toward them.

Thank you for your comments. I have to admit I was surprised at the amount of positive posts I received. I did expect a right flaming. But now it seems the negative element is gaining momentum with suspicions of it being a isk scam and being pathetic.

Oh well I did expect it

In EVE, you consent to pvp the moment you log in.

And any kind of attachment to stuff is toxic in EVE, unless you keep it in a station forever, out of any corp that's not your own alt corp. Consider anything you undock at risk. There is no safety, not even in HS.

That is part of the beauty of the game. The real danger of loss anywhere, by anyone and at any time. If you're not prepared to lose your stuff, then maybe EVE is not going to be your favourite game.

I have been playing games for only about 15 years now, but I started with D2 HC. I found a really decent group of players back then. One of their habits was, to stop all games running when a member lost a character. A team of five players started a new character from scratch and while the team blitzed the levels, the others kept a game open for item exchange, to equip the team. It was only a matter of hours to get back to hell this way.

Then WoW was released and most everyone left D2 for good. When I moved to WoW myself, I had real issues with the fact, that your character wasn't lost for good, when you die. It just felt completely wrong and it took time to get used to it. And while I did get used to it eventually and had a good time with very nice groups, switching to EVE was like a breath of fresh air. The fact, that the danger of loss was back felt like coming home.

Losing stuff in EVE is part of the game.

I've actually found EvE to have the least toxic playerbase of any game I've played, though it's wise to expect everyone you see on-grid will give no quarter and beg none either. If you convo them after the fight, as long as you're not overly salty, you can usually get some tips for the future.

My first pod loss was to someone from Black Rebel Rifter Club who shut me and my friend/corpie down and podded both of us. We were total noobs with barely a month in the game. The fight cost me a 100m pod. He convo'd us and talked us through what we did wrong and told us that my friend nearly had him (brawly rifter scramming his light missile inty).

It's kind of like a judo club. On the mat, we try to tear eachother in half and throw eachother through walls. Off the mat, we talk about technique and then get a pint.

Fly Sauced 7o

Your goal/aim is similar to mine. I have unlocked agent 3 miissions but stuck to 2''s while grinding skills isk etc. Actually think I've unlocked 4's also come to think about it heh! I have 2 days left on my account but if you can do it maybe I can but doubt not as good as you heh :)

My apologies if I mis-read:


Help chat is notorious for people whose actions out-paced their abilities and they cry poor-mouth for handouts. While begging is discouraged in Help chat, people like yourself come in and "innocently" bemoan their newbie losses and threaten to leave the game in discouragement in hopes of getting "unsolicited" handouts.

Happens every day. I spend a lot of time in Help offering advice and helping on missions. We often see types that come in simply to throw a tantrum play on the kindness of strangers to their profit.

I just call 'em like I see 'em. I've seen this type many times. I'm not fooled. Sorry if you're disappointed.

KB

I'm very glad to hear that you'll be staying. As everyone has been insisting, you've misunderstood what this game is about, what to expect, and what we the players are like. But your misunderstanding is perfectly reasonable, because Eve really is an outlier in all of gaming, fundamentally different from anything else you could play. There's no real preparation to be had, no way to 'get it right' without trial and error.

You made a comment earlier about PvP players being motivated by ego inflation, or something to that affect. Well, this will be another misunderstanding, and I hope to change your mind. As you've read earlier, everyone is out to get everyone in Eve, and it's very competitive in a particular way. In-game, we're very paranoid, and very aggressive, but this is a learned behavior, a result from our environment. This isn't born out of an innate personality style, necessarily.

Primarily when people seek out PvP opportunities, we just want action. The adrenaline, and risk of loss or triumph, is innately fun, whether your win or lose a fight. In this regard it's much the same as any other game, even though we are always competing against fellow players(missions offer no challenge, and are therefore disregarded). Trying to assert or display dominance can be a factor, certainly, but it's secondary: The most immediate reward for PvP competition - the thrill and risk - comes without regard to win or loss.

But that's only one version of PvP. The more significant face of PvP in eve is Corporation- and Alliance-based competition. We choose our tribe, we throw in with their collective cause, we stake our claim. And then we build a sandcastle to show ourselves that we can do it, fully expecting that someone will try(and eventually even succeed) to knock it over. And someone inevitably does come, and then we seek to show ourselves, and everyone else, that we can keep what we've created in a hostile environment. Or at least reciprocate their attack. We work as a team, competitively, to go farther, do more, and find out what's possible to achieve. This always comes first before other competition motivators, like revenge or dominance.

And in the process of these large player alliance wars, we get to know our tribe, we work with them on genuinely difficult tasks, and we team up in ways that extend beyond the game - FAR beyond the game. This is, in fact, one of the other major differences between Eve and anything else: When your only competition is another person, and never the computer, it results in the most deeply genuine social gaming available on Earth.

It's notoriously hard to sum up what Eve represents, particularly through the lens of it's innately PvP nature. Usually this difficult task results in us simply telling people to forget what they've learned from any other game, especially MMO's. In the end, that response is a failure to describe what to expect, even though it's correct in rejecting the MMO comparison. But I can at least proscribe one thing: You should try playing from the other side.

You should let go of your preconception of PvP being for 'the PvP crowd,' because for whatever that might mean in other games, it does not apply here. You should loosen the assumption that PvP isn't for you, because it's a completely different animal here, with different motivations, different expressions, different feelings, different purposes, and vastly different results. If you can somehow mute the human urge to confirm your pre-existing biases(which other games tend to confirm, certainly), and try to see the game from the perspective of, for example, the guy that destroyed your ship, you will begin to see Eve in a completely different way, and may greatly value this new perspective. And I'd wager you'll get more out of the game this way.

Finally, I believe you will have a very good time if you join a large, newbie-oriented corporation that's in a larger alliance, who aggressively engages in the big contests in space together. These groups will give you access to all the greatest things in Eve, sooner, and more effectively. I am of course partial to KarmaFleet, and believe it's likely the best at doing precisely this, but there are others out there that can also do the job almost as well, too.

Alright, nuf wordcount. Glad you're sticking around. Feel free to mail me in game if you have questions.