EVE New Citizens Q&A

I usually look in the Eve Uni Wiki. I find it full of very useful information.

The specific problem you're running into is just update lag -- the various wikis are, for the most part, volunteer efforts, so truly massive patches, like the tiericide that changed the basic stats of the ship you're talking about... and also every other sub-BS ship in the game... take a while to work their way through the man-hours needed for full updates.

In the sort term: Grab the Eve Fitting tool or some other fitting application for building ships or market/assets reference app. Applets are usually updated via direct searching of the game's internal databases (I'm a nerd even for an Eve player and use Aura, one of the smartphone general reference tools, when I need to look up basic stuff like how many slots quickly or am just bored at work).

In the long term: Learn what all the numbers mean, memorize the basic costs of commonly-used things, or at least whether the primary module cost lies in power or cpu, and learn to wing it by using the in-game market window as your personal library to supplement your background knowledge of fits you've already tried.

One of the unique things about eve is that the most relevant kind of "experience" to your gaming is not the kind measured by an incrementing integer quantity. As you fly and get blown up, you'll get better at flying. As you craft fits and those fits turn out to suck (and get you blown up) the better, and more importantly the faster, you'll be at fitting. As you try to sell your stuff and spend time cursing at unresolved orders and people undercutting you, you'll get better at selling. As you hang out with people that know what they're doing and ask them a continuous stream of questions, you'll get better at asking the right question to fix your problem the first time.

Fitting is the most noticeable area of improvement and the most urgent one to chuck the training wheels as fast as possible, even if it slows you down at first. This is primarily because, while all the other things practice makes you better at are themselves fun (even pestering guildmates with questions often leads to a few pleasantly burned hours arguing over something like whether to put MWD or AB on a particular frigate), fitting is a chore that delays your attempts to have said fun. I would make the effort and spend an hour slaving over some fits without mechanical assistance for a week or so, because a month later when you can snap together viable fits adapted to what you're doing with five or six favored ships in seconds instead of the 15 minutes to half an hour it takes to go over internet references and guides is going to add up to a lot of time spent flying your awesome goddamned spaceship instead of staring at it in the dock while scotty makes snide comments.

OK, so, with that whole "don't use references outside the game itself if you don't necessarily have to" disclaimer, here is the list of places to look for things in roughly the order of descending reliability, with caveats listed:

Evelopedia: Always basically 100% accurate. caveat: sometimes 100% accurate for the game 8 months ago rather than right now.

Eve Uni Wiki: Very reliably update, though you should always test advice before adopting it permanently. Same caveat as Evelopedia.

New Citizen Forum: Very reliable, as we will harass the everloving crap out of anyone that intentionally lies to or trolls the rookies here. Has the advantage of dated entries, so that you can _see_ if something is from before a major patch.

The rest of the official forums: Useful, but somewhat dubious. Very good for hunting down the formulae and mechanics of how things work (tracking, accelleration, etc) but as a newer player you may sometimes lack the context to tell when we're talking about universally agreed-on principles of the game and when we're speculating randomly or messing around.

Your Corp: Probably has a better idea collectively of what they're doing than you do as an individual. What they lack in dispassionate analysis and in-depth knowledge they make up in instantaneous feedback and actually caring whether you succeed or fail.

Randomly guessing: You'd be surprised how often this works. The more you know about basic mechanics (learn by getting blowed the hell up repeatedly! It's more entertaining than it sounds!) the more effective this is.

Battleclinic: Generally, if you're a person of average intelligence, your first guess as to what seems like it might be all right fit-wise is going to be at least ten times better than the actual fits upvoted on BC. Apart from that, they do usually keep good records on modules, and if you're totally clueless it can give you a starting point.

Other people's Corps: Advice tailored to a random group's playstyle may spark a starting point for further understanding, but otherwise is probably pretty useless. Advice on their websites probably borders on flat-out lies.

Blogs: Eve blogs are for bragging and entertainment only. Even the ones that post fits and guides, you ask? ESPECIALLY the ones that post fits and guides. Most of them are purposefully trying to spread misinformation, and that's a GOOD blog. The bad ones genuinely believe the fact that they're not space-broke and have some kills means they have a set of unique and awesome skills that must be shared, and if you buy it it will poison your mind. Read blog, if it's not a funny story about an awesome kill or messing with someone for grins, skip to the next entry, because you're wasting your time with any blog that's not making you laugh, preferably evilly.