EVE New Citizens Q&A

I've got several friends who've played Eve for years and tell me fantastic stories of their exploits. Nullsec wars, exploration, Lowsec cowboys. I've been meaning to try the game for years. So I decide to finally pull the trigger and join about 20 days ago. The game is beautiful, the tutorial is engaging, I love the theme, the industrial system looks fun, etc. After about 3 weeks, all I do is mine and I'm finding it fatiguing. My friends say I should post for advice here because they're "confused" that this is my story and they "do not remember this at all."

My initial experience was to try running missions. But weirdly I can only find a few L1 missions and after doing them, they just seem to repeat? Like I can keep running them, but in the two regions I've checked they just seem to ask me to do about 9 things and then repeat. It was fun the first time through (although weirdly too easy in my Catalyst, most enemies never ever could shoot back). Similarly the distribution missions seem to be either repeats or gone. I got bored, especially since there was basically nothing to learn in these; 5 railguns on a catalyst with Iridium ammo render every mission I could find almost humorously trivial.

Exploration seemed cool. So i fitted an Imicus and fired it up. Day one I find a wormhole. I poke my head through (no real idea what I was doing), shot down by another player in one salvo before I could really react. Noobdeath. I am prepared for this. I do manage to find some highsec sites, but after 10 of them I've made less than 2m ISK, so it hardly seems worth my time until I can handle lowsec.

My experiences in lowsec were... well I escaped from folks 1/5 and considered that pretty good. They work in teams and were genuinely tough to avoid. I tried to join some corps hoping for training an opportunities to do all this fun stuff I hear about, but most won't accept me (one accepted me just to lure me in to try and kill me as I moved my stuff, fortunately I didn't fall for it and just lost one ship). They want me to have millions of SP before they'll even consider me. I found one corp that takes real rookies, but they don't really have a highsec presence and warn me that if I come out to join them I won't have access to the skillbooks I need, so I'm easily weeks from joining them.

Soon I'll have Industry V, Production Efficiency V, and Mining Barge I so I can start to do some industry, but even then I'm not so sure. I've managed to save up a bit of ISK by running things from Dodoxie out to some sub regions and turning profit on volume, but this experiment left me realizing that more training is requited to actually do anything real in commerce.

So I am shooting a laser at a rock, wondering what I should be doing. I cannot really fight without skills. I cannot really do commerce without skills. Industry is cooking, but even then it's not happening. Making money really isn't a problem, but I don't have much to do with it right now other than use it replacing losses getting shot down in lowsec. I've read a bunch of guides on exploration which make it sound cool but the actual returns after doing over two dozen sites mean that it is a fun way to not make any isk at all. How should I be passing the time before I can actually play the game?

It's weird because I go to the missions that the finder says are available and actually AT the station they refuse to talk to me.


They're actually a nullsec corp. I'd get out there by suiciding out.



The big issue I ran into was the number of open orders I can do at once. I can easily see things I can port out and still make a profit. People seem to love abusing a few regions and I can usually tell why just by looking (e.g., a quest wants veldspar, wanna clear that quest instantly? Just give me all your quest money for the veldspar, seems reasonable right?")



I kind of don't, actually. Lowsec seems to be to be a dystopian libertarian nightmare... At least not until I have some skills to defend myself. I lost that fully loaded catalyst trying to fight back. I still am not really sure why...



Clearly! Sadly most of the people are doing things I cannot participate in. Thanks for the advice though.

This is a very common bug.
When you right click on the agent and show info go to Agent info, then look at the bottom and it should say "This agent provides missions to any pilot that meets standing requirements".
If it says that and the agent still wont talk to you try to relog, if the agent still does not want to talk to you petition it.

Try one of the larger newbie friendly corps, like Eve University, Brave Newbies, or RvB. Any of these corps are running newbie friendly fleets all the time. Or you could try factional warfare if you want to go a different route. The missions are usually a bit more terrifying as rival faction players will be trying to kill you while you're running them. FW is also a good way for a newbie to earn some bread without the tedium of mining.

Why aren't your friends telling you to come along and join whatever they're doing?

This.

Ask your friends If you can join up with them. Every corp needs a Leroy Jenkins for suicide tackle. It is a job that every EVE newb has done. It's a fun role to play and it will teach you an amazing amount about how to pilot a ship.

They said no. They're not the sort of friends where I can force them to say yes. So that's that.

I get the strong impression that I will be a burden wherever I go. So I can understand why they'd be reluctant to take me on.

There is pretty much nothing that they could be doing that a newbie could not meaningfully contribute to. It's one of the beautiful parts of EVE's design.

Your friends are bad.

I agree with the sentiment that your friends are doing you a disservice by refusing to let you join in with them.

In the mean time, have you considered ninja salvaging?

Ninja salvaging is where you use combat scan probes to scan down players running level 4 missions in highsec, and go salvage all their wrecks for profit. If you feel daring, you can loot the wrecks as well, but this will give you a suspect flag, so be wary.

It makes ok money, it's pretty non-commital and more interesting then mining. Usually more profitable as well.

If you want to give it a try, grab a frigate and head to Dodixie (good place to start, there's always mission runners in Dodixie).

The kind of fit you want is going to be based on your racial scanning frigate, and something like:

1x expanded probe launcher
Fill the spare high slots with salvagers

1x microwarp drive
Balance the rest between shield extenders and cap rechargers

Fill the low slots with nanofibers, unless needed for cpu co-processors

Add gravity capacitors in the rigs if you can, consider using cpu overclocking rigs if you are still short on CPU

Fill the drone bay with salvage drones

The nanofibers improve your speed but also allow you to slow down effectivly with the MWD on, useful to avoid overshooting the wreck you are burning at.

The cap mods keep the MWD going, the shield extenders help if the mission runner warps out or if you accidentally warp into a hot room.

You'll have to assign the salvage drones manually, but that's fine. Send them off in a dozen directions, one to a wreck, to clean room fast. Your salvage drones should be doing most of the work, so if you are running short on CPU, remove salvagers from the highslots until it fits.

Look your friends just are not that smart. They say when u never want to go back to high sec.....tell them eve is not like that anymore and its easy to fix sec if you have half a brain. They have enuf tackle pfff you never have enuf tackle.......Brave Noobs and E-UNI are both good for learning lots of fleet stuff prefect training for 0.0 combat. If that is the end game you want i would join them. If u want to just have the laid back fun eve experience that is the current state of low sec You are always welcome in Stay Frosty. We are extremely noob friendly even tho we are dirty space pirates. Get out there and lose some ships thats where the fun is. Hell man join faction wars if you really need to make isk. You would be surprised at the amount of actual new players in eve FW right now. The game is the best it has ever been and only getting better. get out of high sec.