EVE New Citizens Q&A

This should have been posted friday but I had to leave work early.....

Day 1

So, I spent a week reading Eve-Uni, eve blogs and this very forum and decided to take the plunge into Eve 2 days ago. I wanted to PvP, every site I had read went on about how epic the risk and reward of Eve PVP.

I have been a long time WoW player in which PvP is just rinse and repeat nothing to it, some skill but mainly gear and button bashing and I wanted out. Signed up, logged in and started on the tutorial mission. After an hour got offer of 5 million ISK to joing some fellas Corporation which I accepted, then didnt join....(bad me). Finished tutorials.

Day 2

Having trained Frigate 3 and selling all the frigates that the tutorials I bought an Incursue and used an Eve-Uni setup I had found and put it togeather comming in at about 4.5 million ISK and with the words "you dont need loads of skills to PvP" ringing in my ears I set off jumping through systems;

Steal ore from cans (these were all passworded) No joy.
Trading insults and ramming miners. No joy.
Asking in Chat for a fight. No joy.
Looting wrecks that belong to somone else.....

Having turned my head from the screen to answer a question from the wife, I hear my ship screeching at me as the shields collapse and and my armour begins to take damage. I hit the damage control and Armour repairer and double clicked in space to dring my ship over in a long arc to bring myself into a close 500mtr orbit to the dudes Rifter and fired the afterburner. The ship is now taking damage in structure but the repairer keeps on top of it for the moment, I hit the guns, I get 20 shots off which do bugger all, not even a scratch. Bang as my ship explodes.....warp off in pod to station.

Now loosing the ship isnt the issue, I had gone out for a fight and had expected to get exploded and had I paid attention I may have done better or got away but, I did nothing to his ship. Not a thing. Nadda. Niet. Nowt.

Ive read plenty of posts saying that new players can compete with older characters, I was day 2 and he hd been playing for over 3 years. I hadnt expected to win the fight but I would have liked to give a decent showing if Im honest. Had I even managed to get him into armour I would have been excited!!!

Have I been lied to? Have I been the victim of some great jest? Dunno but its not gonna stop me trying to get into scraps.

I suppose my question is....Why the hell did my light neutron blasters with anti matter ammo do nothing at all? Is it becouse my skills are bad or his were to good? My little incurses had 106 DPS with the drone which has been plenty to kill the NPC ships in missions and belts in just a couple of shots and while I expected a Player ship to be tougher not that tough?

Am I running before I can walk here?

First of all:

Welcome to EVE Online.
And I fully approve your attitude towards PvP. Not many toons do PvP on day 2.

Now about your fight:

http://eve.battleclinic.com/killboard/killmail.php?id=17395644

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What could be the reason for you doing no damage to him:

1.) He was out of range. You were using blasters, which are close range guns (close range as in "welding torch close range", you almost need to touch your enemy to be effective). Each gun in EVE has an optimal range and a falloff range.

From 0 to optimal range you have the potential to do 100% damage. From optimal to 1x falloff the damage potential drops from 100 to about 50%. From 1x falloff to 2x falloff it further drops from about 50% to about 0%.

This is theoretically, even in optimal you can miss (also see point 2).

2.) He was outrunning your guns. Each gun has a tracking speed (in rad/s). This is the speed your turret can turn around it's axle.

If your turret can make 1 circle in say 5 seconds and your enemy can perform an orbit cycle in say 4.5 seconds it will outrun your turret (aka he can circle around you faster then your turret can turn).

This is called transversal (or angular) velocity. It's the speed of your target relative towards your position. (Transversal is measured in m/s, angular is measured in rad/s).

A ship with a speed of 500m/s orbiting you at 2000m will have a higher transversal velocity then a ship orbiting you at 25000m with the same speed. This is cause the distance it takes to make a full circle is bigger with a higher orbit.

So basically when shooting stuff, you can be too far way (outside gun range) or too close (your turrets can't turn fast enough). The skill is learning to know what orbit works best for your ship.

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Also new player CAN be very usefull in PvP. But skills do matter a bit. Just keep in mind: All skills cap at level 5 (so if you have Gallente frigate at V and are up to a 200mil SP character, he too can only have Gallente Frigate V skilled, not more), and also skills at level 4 are usually more then enough to be competitive. Given some exceptions most skills only give 3%/5% bonus for each level, so at level 4 you are near enough as skilled as level 5 without having to train a long time.

So to be competitive, get the skills to 4 (or 5 if they are a prerequirement for another skill) and start firing away.

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And also keep in mind. Bigger =/= better. Each ship has it's strength and weaknesses, the key to be succesfull in PvP / EVE is to know them and pick your fights according to them.

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Also, NPC ships are not Player ships. NPC ships have fixed stats, fixed type of tank etc. where as each single ship you encounter in PvP will be fitted different (not taking into account alliance fleet doctrines and common known fits etc).

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And beside your in game skill points a lot of actual player skills (as in how good do you know what you are doing, do you understand the game mechanics) matter

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http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Turret_damage
Maybe usefull to read through.

This.

A new player can buy a 200mil SP character of the character bazaar. But cause the player doesn't know how the game works (and after 2 years I still learn new stuff) he won't be able to fly the ships that 200mil SP character can fly properly.

Usually this kind of buying high SP characters just end up in loads of tears on the forum cause he lost an expensive ship.

Welcome to EVE, Papa. Like you, I only started out recently as I was fascinated with the pirating stories in the Crimes & Punishment forums. The suggestions and advice given by the above posters is certainly true. I've been around for about three weeks now, and according to some more veteran pirates I have come across, I seem to cause an impressive amount of trouble.

As a fellow low-skilled player, I would like to point out to you I have seen two playstyles if you take the above posters advice into account:

1. The f*ck-all-approach: just go lowsec / nullsec and try taking a shot at anything that shows up on Overview. Surely you have a far larger chance you get blown to bits, as well as being an expensive way to learn the game (us newbies are always ISK-starved). Nonetheless, it teaches you quickly the can-do's and cannot-do's of your ship or ships.

2. Picky-approach: pick your targets carefully. I roam lowsec a lot cause I like the whole theme around it. I would be quite sure to warp in when I see a lost frigate somewhere, cause you would have a decent chance against it. Sure, you may not always win, but it makes for good fights. When a T3 ship comes along however, I can assure you I'm nowhere to be found. ;-)

To illustrate, and hopefully motivate you: http://eve-kill.net/?a=pilot_detail&plt_id=1444940

Fly dangerously! o/

hummm, looked at the killboard you're fit seems fine, but you must understand, he's flying a tech 2 ship he has better everything over you, plus skills, plus experience, I get the sense you still felt that it should be somewhat similar to pve, but totally not, PVP is a different animal here, everytime I've pvp I've lost, so I will go to RvB soon to learn those skills.

Something that has not been brought up yet, is that a jaguar is very often ASB fit. This means he has a very strong burst shield tank until his ASB runs out of charges. You were likely doing more to him that it seemed from your perspective (as in you were not doing zero damage, he was just repping the damage that you were doing.) Considering that you were not seeing any damage at all on him, he was likely just running the ASB flat out, which is actually very bad.

The way to beat a set up like the one he was flying, is to avoid his damage, while at the same time forcing him burn through ASB charges. A kitting ship would likely have been very effective against him as he did not have T2 guns and therefore would not have been able to use barrage (long range AC ammo.)

That type of set up is basically purpose built to kill things like the Incursus you were flying as it has a good burst tank that will last about 40 seconds when run flat out, along with very good close range damage.

TLDR: He was flying a ship about 50 times as expensive as yours, purpose built to kill the type of ship you were flying. People have not lied to you, it is possible to do well in PVP as a couple day old newbie. However, the limiting factor in how well you do is going to be your own ability to asses a situation and come up with a better plan than the other guy.

A lot of people say what makes eve PvP fun is intensity that comes with the possibility of loosing your ship that you worked so hard for. That being said if you spend your first several months in game earning enough isk to buy a ship and then loosing it fast to a player that can afford to throw away a jaguar the way you would the single unit of trit that comes with each noob ship then you might get frustrated like it sounds like you are.

One option might be to install a copy of the test server singularity. Then go on SiSi ( singularity ) where there are stations where everything costs 100 isk and have a friend duel you several times until you learn the basics of ship piloting and gunnery. I believe there are even systems on SiSi that are FFA and also where people do 1 v 1s so you might not even need a friend.

Now SiSi only mirrors with TQ every once in a while. I think they just did one a little over a week ago since they put Dust on SiSi. That means you may not be on there but there is a way for new players to get their toons on SiSi. But Keep in mind if you are on there your skills will be the skills that you had when the 2 servers were mirrored.

There are other places where you can read and find out more about SiSi but it might be helpful to learn the basics where your lessons are not as hard. I understand that takes away much of the intensity that people seem to like but it will get you to a point where you are not pulling your hair out and also where you can actually learn something from engagements with more experienced pilots. As you can see with this incident where the only thing that you learned is that you don't even understand the basics.

So learn the basics the cheap way and keep in mind we all started out where you are now so don't get frustrated and stick with it and I bet in a month you will feel a lot more confident with your abilities and find loses more satisfying since you can actually learn something.

Even for pVp i'd still go with the incursus' natural boost to active tank. Higher frig skill makes the incursus' armor repper rep more, at high skills it can tank like a mo-fo.

Yes

As an armor tanking ship, more shield HP will always help. It delays the time a bit till you get into armor
Same other way around. Shield tankers do also benefit from having some extra armor as it means they have more time to GTFO when their tank fails.

And eventually it opens up more possible fits, specially when you cross train into other races. Having both tank skills is never bad.

I lol every time I hear someone say player skills.are what matters and character skills don't. Just an fyi, that 3 year old toon, even if fit the same way as you probibly has 20-25% more shields, armor, hull, cap, speed, range, tracking, damage, cap regen, shield regen, repair rate, repair amounts, rate of fire....the list goes on. Yes I am assuming that nearly 1/3 of his skill points are in something relevent to the fight...but chances are that is the case. If he is 100% miner, he would still have more cap/regen/speed/agi/hull hp just from the skills he needs as a miner.

In addition to the direct % boosts his skills give him to everything relevent, he can also fit his ship out with items that are annother 10-50% better than what a two day old character can fit. The only way player skills will overcome that gap is if the other guy is asleep, or a complete moron.

You will find morons, and sleeping pilots, but most of the time you will find someone who enjoys blowing up noobs and to them you will lose almost every time.


I'm not saying don't try, as player skills matter and you only get those by trying, but take whatever some says about skill points not nattering with a grain of salt...and a shot of whisky.