EVE New Citizens Q&A

I'm playing Eve with my kids, so we have 5 players under the same roof.

As we are playing together, I'm wondering if you more experienced players can give me some recommendation on how we can skill to be most useful to each other, both in the short and long term.

For instance, I don't know how much overlap in skills we should do. Should we try to specialize to create a well rounded work force.

I'm sure a lot may depend on what we like, but we are open to suggestions, because we just don't know :)

Maybe there's a logical "do this to get started, then maybe this or this, and that could lead to that" sort of deal? Or "If I had 5 players, this is what I would do..."

Some thoughts on what you guys do with alts may be useful, as they may pretty much be what we have on anyway.



Thanks,
G. Zuo

First off - I mention this as it's come up in family oriented posts before - it is against the EVE EULA for people within a family to share accounts. Which means - that you're looking at $15 a month per person.

Now - EVE is designed to work with multiple clients being run from the same computer - but - if you're going to have 5 people playing - you're going to need 5 computers too if they're all going to play at the same time.

Headphones and practice in using voice communications would also be helpful if the computers are not all in the same room.


As to what you want to do ... that is completely up to you and your family etc.

You could form your own corporation - or join an existing one.

You could all work together as a group - or each explore their individual interests.


You should all run the Career Agent tutorials. Mostly you are not going to need to help each other with these missions - however - some of the Combat missions have some good asteroids in them. IF you wanted to try mining as a group - you could do that and come out of these missions with a tidy sum. Whether your kids are going to want to be miners or not - is another question.

As to running missions - most Level I missions don't need more than one player - but if you all ran individual missions for the same corporation and were fleeted together you could share the rewards. As the missions got tougher - you could operate in teams, calling in help as needed.


Yes - there are ways in which people could specialize - but for it to be fun for your kids - they're going to have to pick their own specialties rather than being assigned jobs by Dad. For example - as above - if you're mining - you might have some flying haulers and others mining - that may not be that much fun for the kids hauling - although if they are few in number compared to the miners they may be busier than the miners.

The other thing is - you may or may not all be playing at the same time. Thus, some may play on their own at some times while you might have family ops at others.


For PVP ... you've got a nice little small gang there.


One thing you need to watch out for though - is having your kids being scammed. EVE is designed to be a harsh environment where lying to other players and cheating them out of their stuff ... or just blowing them up ... is part of the game. If you've got young children ... I don't know if EVE is really the right game for them, especially if they were wanting to go off on their own and play when Dad wasn't around.


What I would suggest - is to just get familiar with the game and see what everyone likes to do, then make your decisions about asking people to take on different roles.


GL

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You mean Gravametric, Mag sites are archaeology/salvaging. The rest of your post is fine though.

And I agree with what other people have suggested, figure out what you enjoy doing individually. Once you've figured that out, you can figure out how those activities interact together for everyone to have the most enjoyment.

If you haven't seen it yet, I'd suggest looking at What to do in Eve. It's a nice picture that shows what all there is to do in Eve. I often suggest that newer players look at it and see what sounds interesting to them and just go for it.

Some random typings:


You have five people are starting at about the same point, what would I do?
Since there are kids playing I would advise doing things that are active. If someone is going to be put in a ‘support’ role for some reason you need to be sure that they won’t get burned out by not doing anything. Also, while you may want to build a team, nobody in that team should be ‘assigned’ a role. They should want to do the role. Better to have five happy people blowing up stuff instead of four happy people and one stuck with ‘butt wiping duty’.

But I am getting ahead of myself here. Some prep work I would recommend:

Get a jump clone for every toon that is going to be a regular player. That means training Infomorph Psychology to at least 1. It is a 1 million isk book but it will only take 8 minutes or so to train. You then have the toon join a jump clone corp like Estel Arador Corp Services. You can read more about it here:

http://community.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=939710

The reason you get a jump clone for each toon in the family is that it allows you to remain in an area together as a cohesive unit, but you can roam if you need because the family is down for a few days. It also allows you to have a PVP/low-sec/null toon and a high-sec learning toon right off the bat.

Next up, implants. Train cybernetics to 1 (more if you have cash, otherwise 1 is good enough for now). You will need your Science skill to 3 first (you might already have it), but you’ll be doing that anyway as you will see in a minute. The cybernetic book is about 75,000 isk and level 1 will take about 25 minutes or so. Even if you do not buy implants outright off the market, you will be getting them as drops or mission rewards, you might as well use them if you can.

Personally I would recommend starting out as a group of frigate pilots and work together on missions. Train Frigate to 4 eventually (it will open the door to destroyers, cruisers, and industrial ships). While you will be interspersing support skills all along, being able to do at least level 2 security missions will give you all a starting income.

With income, I would advise everybody learn how to use a salvager (Mechanic to 3, Survey to 3, and Salvaging to at least 1 (but 3 should be a minimum)) and a tractor beam (science to 3). Basic salvaging should be known to all, it comes in handy more often than not.

While it might be easier to all be of the same race for logistics, the truth is that you can all learn anything you want (you will just need to meet up somewhere). Where diversity could bite you down the road however could be with logistical support if someone goes on to fly a support cruiser. That is a long road though so I wouldn’t worry about it too much.

Corp: You will probably want to make your own corp or set of corps. I would recommend that they be run by one of the two alt characters in an account rather than a ‘main’ character. It costs about 1.5 million isk to make a corp, and your corp leader will need to train Corporation Management to at least 1 if you are all the same race. If you are of mixed race (Cadlari and Minmatar for example) then you will need to also train Ethical Relations (which at level 1 will permit you 4 ‘other race’ people out of the 20 total in the corp (from Corporation Management 2).

The reason for having an alt run corp can vary but some reasons include the ability to join faction warfare without disbanding the corp (handy down the road if you want to run a POS), dodging war decs, trying out RvB, or just for the hell of it. There is also the fact that there is an 11% tax on NPC corp players for rewards about 25,000 isk (it might be 40,000). Watching 110,000 isk go poof after dropping your first powerful mission BS is annoying. Having you own corp will allow you an easy central communication link as well as a corp bookmark/location window for sharing bookmarks on operations (salvage, safe spots, mining points, etc).

Mining: I bring it up because as a group, even early on, four people in mining ships and a single industrial ship can rake in some isk fairly fast together. This is a good way to get start up cash, especially with how the mineral market is right now, but I would not recommend it as a group career path because it can be boring as a traffic jam in the long run.

Missioning: Security missions offer some of the fastest isk to you, and with five of you you can blitz missions very fast even in smaller ships as you can steamroller the mobs. Looting missions when solo is a good idea at first for startup cash, but a five person team can tear up a mission so fast that the time spent on salvaging is probably not worth the isk.

However, if someone in your group enjoys the salvaging, bookmark each room for them so and put them in the corp bookmarks (locations) window. I would recommend dating each one as you go so that they collect them in order. (I usually choose ‘Save Location’ then hit HOME on the keyboard. I then type in the server time and game day “0212 Sunday”. I then drag the boomark(location) to the corp list for the salvager)

PVP: Once you have a revenue stream, you may want to consider it since you are already a mini-blob. You can even practice with each other if you are in the same corp without CONCORD popping you (although I temper that with a warning to watch the rules regard Crimewatch comingup). Otherwise a group like RvB could help teach you once you have enough for a dozen throw away frigates to go learn with.

Long term goal? Do what you enjoy, if the five of you can play well together you are already months ahead of a lot of people. If you don’t enjoy the same things, then allow people their own path. What goes around comes around. In Eve some of the people I’ve worked for have shot at me before, but it an understood thing once you get the hang of it.

TLDR : It is a game, not a job. Never make it a job.

Medium repair drones are an excellent early training choice for group centric players and most ships above dessy or cruiser can fly a full 5. By have a few of your team able to operate repair drones well you can shift your tank to whoever is taking the most damage. While this will leave you lacking in drone dps, my experience tells me it's worthwhile in the early game to have everyone able to repair a little. It will help you bond as a flight crew as well as covering nicely for a few early fitting mistakes.

I thoroughly agree with the above post that mentions the FUN aspect. Make sure everyone has something to do at all times and make sure they feel they have an important role.

If you wanna bring your family to Gallente space for a fleet up some day feel free, gimme a yell first and we can arrange a lvl4 fleet or something.

Fly safe.

Thanks Yawl!