EVE New Citizens Q&A

Agreed. In the heyday of datacore farming, it would have been very good advice. Every character I had was trained/had standings for it. Now though, those same characters are generating roughly between 90 and 120 rp per day per agent or between 60 and 90 cores per per agent. With 5 agents thats between 300 and 450 total cores per month per character for about 100k apiece for 30 to 45 mil per month. Or 2 level 4 missions. Or 4 level 3 missions. I could almost PLEX an account with all 3 characters farming in the old days. Those were the days.

It's not really an understanding thing. The actual mechanics of producing items isn't difficult to understand; all the information is in the blueprint. All production activities sort of boil down to the classic MMO crafting model; it's a tiered "distillation" design. At each step you take a lot of something and turn it into a smaller number of higher tiered items. Simple when you get right down to it.

The issue is what your end goal is. If you're dreaming of making lots of ISK in production, you can, it just takes a lot organization. The trading end is actually the harder part, because the only way to learn is to get involved. As a new player, you're ulimately limited by your available ISK and the time necessary to train skills. If your goal is that you like producing things in general, you can do that too, but know that ISK and the economy are more central to the game than other MMOs. If you don't have much ISK or can't get things optimized, you won't get far because you just won't have the necessary capital. One way to look at it is this: noobs breaking into the production market are just like someone trying to break into the cheap plastic crap market in real life. The competition is outrageously fierce, the margins low, and the winners are always the larger, more efficient operations.

Logistics can be good but it also has some similar pitfalls. Until you get into a freighter, courier contracts aren't really a good option for you (it's just too easy to gank you). But getting into a freighter is a sizeable investment. The courier market is also fairly competitive. That said, I loved hauling. I used to be a Red Frog director and I founded Black Frog (on my alt). It's definitely a lucrative field once you get over the hump. The necessary liquid capital and necessary training/assets is quite expensive, well into the 3 billion range. It comes with it's own dangers as well.

If I had to break EVE down to a new player (and I guess that's what I'm doing), spend the first 6 months building your wallet. Do that in active harvesting ways, whether mining, exploring, missioning, or whatever. Build the skill foundation for that activity, but don't get too far ahead of yourself. You may discover you hate the activity long term.

If you're really only interested in the industrial side of things, a good way to get things rolling is a low skill point miner with Planetary Interaction skills. You mine actively, you manage your PI passively. Once you've got him going, get PI on all your alts (it's relatively short training time). Now you have 3 characters churning out a semi passive income. Once you've got that rolling, its back to training the miner for better mining and then into the production skills. If you're not totally opposed to it, missioning really is the fastest way to build your wallet. Check out stoicfaux's thread on L3 mission running.

Here's something to keep in mind: characters are themselves commodities. You can train up a good L4 missioner over time and get your wallet to a good place. Then sell the character and use the ISK for other things. Look into trial offers, buddy accounts, and that sort of thing. EVE is endlessly complex; there are lots of very creative ways to get what you want. BTW, you WILL end up with multiple accounts. It's just a matter of time...

Skill points are never wasted, don't worry about that. You never know what you might decide to do later. I gave PI a try, for example; hated it, but having those skills might be useful someday.