EVE New Citizens Q&A

I finally finished the career agents last night and today I went out to Arnon to try the Sisters of EVE, but decided against it. I find missions pretty boring to be honest. Instead I spent most of tonight moving a fitted Catalyst, Navitas miner and Iteron out to a system named Gergish (0.6). It seems to be Amarr, and I am Gallente. It is 11 jumps from Doxidie which seemed close to me. This was actually fun for me, although I had no idea what I was doing. I spent about 15 minutes jet can mining and then decided to try some "ratting". They did not seem to drop anything profitable though.

Basically I had fun tonight, but now I am confused. It seems the game is more fun when you have goals, even short termed ones, but I don't have a great idea of any long term goals. I'm honestly lost in space and have no idea where I am, or where anything else is. Basically I am just really confused. Is there a way to make ratting more profitable? What sorts of things can I make money out of in regard to mining? Am I in a good area, or should I move somewhere else?

There is so much to learn, and I'm sure most of it I will have to figure out myself, but I thought I would come on here and ask for some guidance from people that have gone through this before me. Thanks so much!

Don't stress about it too much.

Tred water for a bit, figure out your surroundings and I'm sure a new long term goal will emerge.


Enjoy the ride for a few months, tinker.

I haven't figured out what I want to be when I grow up yet, and I've played for a while :)

Only rule of thumb? If your bored, do something else :)

The Arnon area is fine but stay out of low sec! Now to your question:

Eve is a sandbox. Most MMOs offer you a path or career or class, and you grind your way along that path until you reach some maximum level. Everything is planned, scripted. That's not Eve. In Eve there is no path. Unlike other MMOs you job is not to level, it is to survive and prosper in the harshest and most complex MMO environment ever created.

It's up to you to decide HOW to do that. You are like an immigrant just arriving off the boat in a new world. You are penniless, no real skills, all you have are your wits and time. The first challenge is to make some money. That's a challenge that for most players never really goes away. But again, how you want to go about doing that is up to you.

Do you want to mine? Buy a mining frigate or cruiser and get mining. Train your mining skills and you will gradually get better. You will fly bigger and bigger ships, ripping ever larger volumes of ore. Go far enough and you might one day find yourself involved in vast industrial mining operations in deep null space or even wormholes, your industrial ship guarded by fleets of killers, and you earning billions of isk for your trouble. I'm sure it's still linked somewhere on the forums, but the BEGINNERS guide to mining is, if I recall, 68 pages long.

That's Eve. It's DEEP. No one really understand all of it.

But perhaps mining isn't your thing. If so, no worries, it wasn't my thing either. The purpose of the tutorial was to give you some small taste of the virtually unlimited possibilities that exist in the Eve world. And hopefully SOMETHING there was interesting.

You mentioned you tried missions, but I am afraid that is not really the case. The tutorial missions are not like the missions in game. Most players get their start really learning how the game is played while running these. They start off easy enough, but as your ranking improves you will have access to new agents who offer you incfreasingly nore difficult missions. The highest level missions in the game are often run with fleets of capital ships, in some cases costing billions of isk each. Even if you don't choose to take it that far (and again, most do not) missions offer a great way to earn money while you train your skills and learn the game.

But perhaps missions don't appeal either. Perhaps you have a head for finance. If so, there are hundreds of billions of isk to be made buyuing low and selling high, and many Eve players are masters of this game. Some, it seems, never even leave their stations. Or perhaps you are interested in transportation, that's a career too. Or maybe industry, constructing modules and ships and everything you see in game. Seriously, I could spend the next hour typing all the different career choices and never cover it all -- if for no other reason than that I don't know them all. Even now, after a bunch of years, I find myself learning something new every day. That's Eve.

And with that said, I will close with this:

Your question is, essentially, what am I supposed to do now. The unsatisfying answer is: anything you want. You have to decide this for yourself, and once you have some idea of something that sounds like it might be fun, I'm sure there will be plenty of people eager to offer you more instructions on how to get started down that path.

The great news is this: you cannot pick wrong. It doesn't matter. Everyone changes their mind all the time, and the skill points you feel like you wasted today more often than not become useful again somewhere down the road.

Everyone likes different things and is motivated in different ways, so what works for one doesn't necessarily work for another. Because of that (and other reasons as well) always question answers given to you. Here's how I see it.

The worst thing you can do is plan out a long term "career", you obviously lack the experience, understanding and knowledge on EVE to make an informed decision in that regard, and even if you did then planning ahead long term generally means being bored to fck because you will tend to favour long term goals over short term fun. Your experience and play style will probably change a few times while playing EVE, just because you discovered something new or gained a new view on things (most notably are the non-pvp minded people who dislike it and after a while get persuaded to the "dark side" and suddenly enjoy the game more) and because of this no plan you make now will actually "survive".

You're better off accepting that this is a sandbox and the only way to find the fun you're looking for is by trying to sample it "all" and realising that your ideas will indeed change over time. Doing so "frees" you from the "must have goals, must get to lvl 85 and get x tier gear" way of thinking, moving forward in a "general direction" while enjoying what you can do now or in a few days/weeks is much more fun than being annoyed by something you won't be able to do for months.

Instead of long term goals I'd probably define play styles instead, like whether you prefer solo play style or teamwork, "dps" or "support", easy low brain activity grinding or being challenged, following or leading, PVE or PVP. Overarching ideas like that. Lets say that you like teamwork, support and PVE then you can look for things to do that fall into that category like being an active part of a mining/production corp flying orcas and whatnot. Would you like teamwork, support and PVP you might look into Logistics ("healers"), or ECM or whatever. Mixing and matching different likes and dislikes in playstyles works in EVE, it's diverse enough for you to find your niche, just accept that your ideas will probably change a bit over time due to gained knowledge so don't plan ahead too far.

Most other MMOs (and RL in fact) tell you that you must endure before you're allowed to enjoy, EVE is different and it would be a shame if you'd stick to the "must have long term goals that force me to be bored now" way of thinking, sample different things, move out of your comfort zone and don't look ahead too far.


More practical advice: read a ton of guides on EVE and give this a thorough look, it gives you most "career options" with an explanation but don't plan ahead too much, instead enjoy the diversity.

For high sec ratting is pretty lame generally. Almost all of the rats you will find in high sec belts will be frigates. The bounties will be low and the loot is mostly t1 or named meta modules. Occasionally these are worth something but not for the most part. On rare occasions you can find a faction frigate to kill which may drop something semi valuable. I once got a low grade slave implant off of a rat in high sec so it is possible.

Mining. Well mining is far more boring than mission running could ever be. The ores in high sec will probably not make you rich but the risks are far lower as well.

In the end you will make far more money ratting/mining in null sec. Skip on low sec. The low sec rats are bigger and the bounties are higher but there are far too many people traveling low sec to rat there safely and make much money. It is possible, however. Assume anyone in local there who is not in a corp with you is trying to kill you. Because they probably are.

If you decide upon null sec join a corp in a decent alliance. An alliance that holds space somewhere can give you relative safety to rat or mine and make money. There are still risks. There are still people who roam the area looking to kill folks. The rats are far bigger. The loot is far better. Faction and officer spawns can drop things worth a whole lot of money.

You should give pvp a try.

Dont know where to start?

If you want there are schools that can teach you how. For starters you could join Red vs Blue, which is all about low cost low entry pvp, where you will never get podded and still have safe systems for pve.

If you want to learn more advanced pvp, how to pvp in null sec for instance, you could try agony unleashed or our school Noir. Academy

PVP is one the most exciting things to do in eve!

Oh and dont worry about PVE. PVE is a way to generate isk. It isnt meant to be rewarding like Questing crap in other games. Eventually when you work your way up to lvl 4's it turns into a dps game where you try to max out your ships dps at the cost of tank so you can run the mission as fast as possible and your less worried about tanking the damage etc.

For now use the market tab to sell your rocks you mine, find the best price or set your own price with sell orders. As a new player you have **** refine so refining minerals would end with a profit loss for you. If you decide to continue down the mining path try to get into the dedicated mining boats as they will be removing racial mining frigates and cruisers from the game. Also joining a mining corp is a good idea. It may open you to the potential of war decs, but then you get mining link bonus's and orca boosting/support which = more isk per hour, and mates to keep mining interesting.

No reason to move back to Gal space, you just need to keep watch on your standings. There are several corps in Amarr space that are Gallantee corps, ie Quafe. You just need to watch how many you do for Amarr or Caldari. We take new pilots in our corp, send an app in.

I dont like mining either or PvE in general but its a necessity. Doesn't matter what you chose for your isk making profession be it combat/ratting, mining, exploration, etc.. You will need an income.

You may not have the isk yet, but when you do check out the classes at the Institute for Aberrant Technology. We can definitely help you. http://502031762871053462.weebly.com/

wat? a new password for EVEgate? goto https://secure.eveonline.com/ its the same password to login to game