EVE New Citizens Q&A

Sounds like your constellation in having a Sansha Incursions...

Move out of the constellation and the NPC's will turn back into fluffy marshmallows.

Also building and sourcing your own stuff is Eve on "Nightmare" mode... Use the market, use your corp...
Try mission running, try running combat sites... Try everything :)

Eve is only as brutal as you let it be :)

So is there a reason now that every NPC I run into is immune to all damage and completely shuts down any form of escape. I just tried with a vexor and like the others, you are just left there with nothing you can do but watch....completely ********!!

As someone else mentioned, it sounds like your constellation is in the middle of a Sansha incursion. If so, your information display on the upper left of your screen will say "Incursion Profile" when you're in space. They'll move on after severals days or you can simply move a few systems over.

By they way, I can assure you that your exploration skills were not wasted. It's an excellent form of income once you figure out how to do it effectively. It sucks in highsec though. You really have to push out into nullsec to make it worthwhile. But that's something you can do with even T1 exploration ships once you understand how to avoid the gate camps near the security boundaries. There's a ton of information here in the forums on how to do it.

I’m also a new player here, but I can give you some advices which I test already…

Yes, this game is brutal… and it’s not only NPC side, but the players characters activity also. For new players the NPC seems dangerous, because you haven’t good ships and skills to interfere with them and other players aren’t interested in you. For advanced players, the NPC are less dangerous and the other players are more dangerous due to: spies, corporation stealing, suicides (vs your 1b ship), pirates, contract scammers, stealth bombers and many others. There are almost hundreds of schemes invented on how to scam you or to blow up your ship (read the wiki, for example, read about old “Goonswarm tag trading scam” to their station :). The players and their corporations are different: from more democratic to more tyrannical, from friendly to unfriendly, from pirate-oriented to manufacture-oriented, from pve to pvp etc.

First of all, don’t do any ratting in systems where Incursions are happening. That stuff can be accomplished only with the balanced fleets supported by logistic ships. People lost billions on ships before they realized how to do that. You can see if you are in an incursion system by checking your channel messages or go to the Dotline site (systems are marked as yellow-glow).

Secondly, plan your first-year activity: you want to do more combat and PVP games or more crafting and PVE games. If you want more combat activity then remap your attributes to Perception and Willpower and use respective implants (you will learn specific skills much faster). If you want more pve activity then improve your Intelligence and Memory attributes and train respective skills. During the first two years is no sense to train skills to level 5 (level 4 is enough). Only very few skills worth to train to level 5 as soon as possible: Drones, Mechanics, Science, Industry. Use your skill injectors to boost a skill to level 5 only.

For the first 3 months of EVE online I’ll recommend you train/do: Mining (PVE), Exploration (PVE/rare PVP) or Warefare (more PVE/ less PVP). These will give you good money for a new character, good survival skills (how to use your scanners), good understating of locals, good understanding what to do further. Never try to craft all ship fits by yourself – specialize in some production only. Then train more into Science/Industry, Planetary and your ship skills (to level 3 or 4 only) to be able to perform level IV quests, high-sec/low-sec combat sites, RnD missions. This stuff will let you not care about ship lost. The level IV hi/low-sec Planetary will give you from 15 to 30 M ISK/week passive. The stuff from RnD and exploration will let you to invest into Science and Industry. The Exploration can be very profitable with high skills, but L4 missions and ratting grants more ISK/hour (confirmed 60MISK/hour on a Rattlesnake). With exploration, you can roam around for 2 hours and gain nothing and suddenly you can get 60M from a single site in 5mins. Check the JonnyPew’s channel to see what else you can do in high/low-sec systems.

Talking about system’s security and what’s going there the next image explains the best link.

We don't have crafting in this game. We have industry and production. In this game very much similar to the industrial world you build for profit. If you find something worth building then you build many copies of it and sell them for profit. If it is not profitable to build and sell that thing then you just buy it. However even at that you are not going to be collecting all of the materials yourself.

In theory you could collect all of your own materials and build what you need. In practice you would spend all of your time building stuff on a one-off basis and you'd not have any time to do stuff yourself.

Years ago I decided to try and build a Jump Freighter myself from scratch. I spent a year trying to collect all of the materials to invent and build that ship myself. In the end I wound up buying most of the T2 reacted materials from the market as I was loosing isk trying to do the reactions myself. Even at that many of the moon mats were purchased off of the market as I only could get access to low quality moons. That is a year I spent trying to figure out how to build one copy of one specific ship and in the end gave up trying to do it all myself and just purchased much of what I needed. Granted the JF is the most complicated ship to build but the point remains.

So much good advice.

1) yeah, sounds like you found an Incursion. These pop up randomly and replace regular rats with super rats. Avoid them when possible.
As an aside- Incursions are high end PvE events that players make ridiculous amounts of money farming. If you enjoy combat PvE, Incursions are one of the 'end game' bits of content you might want to work towards (long term goal). These folks fly ships that run into the billions, and consequently they make billions running these sites.

2) No skill is wasted. You may not use them often, but having them lets you jump into any content on a whim. You might not be the best at it, but you can dabble in almost anything in Eve without committing to an 'all V' skill regimen. For example a million years ago I trained up gas mining because a friend was making boosters. The other day while I was scanning down sigs I found a WH and decided to go huff gas for giggles. Unprofitable and I just sold the stuff at the first market I passed, but it was content and I didn't have to be maxed out in skills just to kill an hour doing it.
Most importantly- CCP uses the probe mechanic as a key for a ton of content. So scanning skills are ALWAYS a good investment. Even if all you do is tip toe thru W-Space as a shortcut.

3) A little focus is a good thing. By all means dabble in tons of content, see what interests you. But, specializing does open up a lot of variation and depth. If you like combat PvE, or hope to get into PvP then content like ratting, mission running, etc are good places to start since you will train skills for combat ships/weapons/tank/EWAR. Combined with probing you can do anything from running sigs in high sec to farming capital escalations in a WH. There is an amazing breadth of content to check out.

4) Once you find something you like doing, find a corp that does the same thing. Doesn't have to be the the KB leader or giant industrial behemoth..just a few active players can transform your Eve experience. Seriously, the only thing that kept me in this game for years now is the people I play with.

5) Patience, grasshopper. Eve is not a game of instant gratification. It was created in a time when the slow burn of character development was the key reward for playing. The goal was always to keep training to see what the game allowed you to do next. Now it's a bit too skewed towards farming max rewards, IMO. Developing a character is now seen as merely a speedbump to throw money and skill injectors at to avoid. The wrong direction in my opinion, but that's for another thread.
Take your time with Eve. Don't try to rush into bigger or shinier things too fast. You are almost always better off flying something small well than something large poorly. The game might allow you to run L4s or fly battleships, but almost universally this ends badly while the player is frustrated and content seems to ramp up to impossible levels quickly- it's not impossible, it's just that your skills usually don't keep up with the rate of progression in PvE. Slow down, smell the roses.

Eve is a game where player knowledge, skill and experience matters a lot more than character skill and character XP doesn't matter at all.

The mere fact that you have been using skill injectors tells me you are placing far too much emphasis on character skill. Player corporations exist, in part, to train new players. Some, like Eve University have that as their primary mandate but any corporation that recruits new players should accept responsibility for helping them scale the "learning cliff" of this player driven sandbox. In that regard, I find it interesting that the CEO of your corporation has only been playing a couple of weeks longer than you - could be a new character for an old player but would be a red flag for me.

If you want to learn exploration, join an organization that specialized in that like https://www.eve-scout.com/signal-cartel/ There are people there who can teach you the what, where, when, why and how of scanning like a pro.

Industry is a bit trickier - I don't know any corporations that specialize in research,manufacturing and markets although they probably exist. A lot of industrialists are solo with an army of ALTS. Industry in Eve is incredibly profitable once you know how - largely because most activities are background - jobs don't care if you are logged in or not - so they scale well across multiple characters.

Thank you everyone for the great advice and sorry about the rage. I just didn't expect to take such a beating from an NPC, I will be more aware next time.

I've lost count of how many PvPrs I've ripped the **** out of when they lost a ship to NPCs because they got the tank resistances the wrong way round for the local rats :)

You are going to **** up so many times in Eve you won't believe it. If you progress enough/stay long enough something you do WILL get a fleet welped. It'll happen and you're going to have to put your hand up & say "my fault guys, sorry about that". You might not even be the FC, a bubble popped 5 seconds early can result in a lot of wrecks in your fleet

/me has been there on a lot of this as you might be able to tell

Doing an after-action report if its PvP is useful on corp forums as your recollection as FC is absolutely certain to wildly diverge from others, but its all a learning process.

Either theres a sansha incursion in your system (i dont actualy know what that is but everyones mentioning it) OR you attacked some Sleepers without realising, those fellas will hunt you down until you're dead if you attack them, you can identify them by their names (just search eve sleepers in google, read there) or just when you jump into where enemies are, click the target and select *Look at target" if it has a blue shining ball anywhere on it, its a sleeper