EVE New Citizens Q&A

Hey there,

my general advice is, when not having a better plan, to skill something that's useful or required for all careers. That would be (most of) the navigation, engineering, electronics, rigging and armor/shields skills.

And another general thing: Only train level 5 skills when you know for sure that you want to fly/do something that has the level 5 requirements here. Otherwise you dump tons of skill time here and might find out later you dont even wanna go this route and level 4 is sufficient for your needs.

Every skill in the alpha set is important. I would prioritize engineering, gunnery, drones, navigation for a combat pilot. Since you can't add skills that start beyond 24 hours as an Alpha, save some of the level 5 skills so you only need to login and update your queue once a week.

"Prepare for Omega"

If you have the IRL cash, just get it now. It will double your training speed.

If you'd rather not, get your fitting skills up. I would aim for a ton of SP into the Vexor (or cruiser of your choice). Cruisers are used in PVP and PVE effectively, and I say the Vexor due to you being Gallente Alpha, and it being one of the most versatile cruisers in the game.

This means focussing on
• Drone skills (drone interfacing, light drone, medium drone, buy heavy drone for when you're omega).
• Tanking skills. Get your t2 armor tank asap.
• Fitting skills such as Weapon Upgrades, Capacitor Management, etc...
• I would also recommend social and trading skills, which will help you in the long run with certain quality-of-life things like more trade orders, and easier to recover from bad standings from mission running. (< < I THINK these skills are alpha-friendly)

Buy 3 months of game time direct from the CCP website (cheaper per month than PLEX > use your new larger omega skill que to line up 3 months of (or 50 max, I think) skills > go enjoy your holiday and when you come back you will have trained a lot of useful things.

Keep in mind that discussions about Pay to Win usually devolve to flames, and this is the Newbie Q/A forum; they'll lock the thread if that happens here.

Having to pay a subscription does not make an MMO pay to win. MMO's have two "grinds", you need to grind for XP to level up, and you need to grind for money. In other MMO's you can't log in if you don't have a subscription, and if you don't log in you don't get any XP at all, thus your character can't advance. In this game you can get skill points and level up your skills even if you're offline, so they give you XP and "levels" with no effort. The XP grind is eliminated. The money grind is not, which is why you need to pay a subscription to be able to log in and do whatever activities the game provides for accumulating ISK.

EDIT: It'll be obvious every time you log in, that paying a subscription does not guarantee you'll win any of the PVP, or even PVE, fights in this game. And also, if you throw PLEX at the game, and get yourself some injectors with skillpoints and lots of ISK for ships, you can have a high level character with lots of bling ships, and you'll just be a very desirable loot pinata for the gank squads roaming the game. Bigger ships are not better in this game, everything is balanced so even the newbies can win, if they have enough numbers or good enough tactics, and as Brave Newbies has demonstrated in the past, they very often do win.

You can't pay to WIN. At best, you can pay to reduce the grind for cash, or reduce the wait for skills to train. But that's not winning by any means.

EvE can be pay-for-convenience, certainly, but in my humble opinion it is not pay to win (that topic is, shall we say , "vigorously and intensely debated" by some.
A good thing to look at, but seems to me many let their emotions control them on the subject. Anyway, just be aware that p2w is a charged subject.

There is no gear we can buy that is going to automatically beat "lower-level" gear. EvE doesn't work like that.

For example; There are many people who have been playing EvE for years and almost always fly frigates because they find them fun. Heavier ships such as battleships and above have their place and fulfill their roles very well, but they can be taken out by frigates getting up "under their guns" (orbiting close and fast enough where the guns of the battleship have a hard time hitting them) If that battleship hits them at a bit of distance, however, the frigate may well be vaporized. Point being that in EvE there are roles each ship does well, but no guaranteed win for anybody. I think I read that the most-flown ship is a regular Tech1 cruiser.

We can buy PLEX directly from CCP (the game company running EvE) which can then be sold on the in-game market for game currency. We can then use that ISK to buy fancy and expensive ships and modules ("bling") but often those are blown up and taken by people in vastly cheaper ships or lost in other ways. Don't be one of those flying one of these "loot pinatas".


We can buy skill injectors from the in-game market (if you really want to spend that kind of money, make sure you are buying skill injectors and not skill extractors) which do give us instant skill points. The more skill points you already have, the less effective skill injectors are as you reach particular skillpoint thresholds. Right now a skill injector is selling for around 720-820 million isk. 500 PLEX bought with real money from CCP can be sold in-game to get about 2 skill injectors. If a person wants to spend the real money to buy their way into a fancy ship they don't know how to fly properly, does not guarantee a win, and are likely to lose fairly quickly (in pve also - people love to hunt fancy pve ships bought with real money and you are also more likely to be able to get into situations that are beyond you the pilot even with higher skills trained up by throwing real money into them), then I say fine, good luck. If I were starting out I might consider using a few skill injectors to get my core engineering skills up some, as they are useful for any ship you will ever fly, but beyond that I personally would probably not buy more.

Skill injectors are a very controversial subject and often cited as proof EvE is now p2w. I disagree for the reasons given.

In my response to the OP I was referring to our ability to buy Omega-clone-status time from CCP in monthly and cheaper multi-month subscriptions. Gives us a bigger skill que to put skills to train in and trains them faster than a free Alpha clone would. Not p2w, just much more useful if going away on holiday. You get back and you're character has been training skills while you've been away.


CCP has made new forums, check them out:
https://meta.eveonline.com/c/new-citizens