EVE New Citizens Q&A

Yes, you "will" ... but let's be honest here, it's not going to be enough to actually get a chance to play eve as anything other than "grind NPCs and hope I get that 200mm Reinforced Rolled Tungsten Plate so I can finish my build".

As I've already said -- it's an interesting experiment, but will get really old, really fast.

It's certainly ratcheting up the difficulty level, but ultimately virtually everything is obtainable - be it through drops (from pve or pvp, although the latter will be terrifyingly hard under your rules!), mission rewards, manufacture, or lp stores. Hell, as long as only true "purchasing" off other players is off-limit to you (which sounds the case since you broached bartering through contracts), good old-fashioned theft of a corp-hanger or two could fill a gap in your inventory

I imagine the only thing you'll hit a wall on is T2 items, since it would be phenominally difficult to gather the moon goos from different poles of the galaxy to craft anything worth having, so the only way you are getting hold of these is nefariously (the previously mentioned pvp or theft).

If its how you want to play the game, don't let anyone tell you you cant. Sure, its going to be really difficult, likely highly demoralising at times, but as long as you are having fun, and remember that if it gets to a point where its keeping you back from something you want to do, you can toss the whole ethos in the bin and go hog-wild (I'm reminded of my vegetarian housemate who broke down and went on a week-long bacon bender when he decided his philosophy was broken ).

"Playthrough" isn't a great word for this kind of game, but something like "strategy" makes little sense when there's still so much to learn, and for an experiment that limits my options (although it does force me to learn about the options that do exist).



PvE provides that - NPCs giveth, NPCs taketh away, and I'm OK with that, especially when it means getting things that can be useful for a long time like skillbooks (usable forever and everywhere) and blueprints (limited to where you have them, for usable forever in the case of BPOs) - more so than destroyable assets like ships or ammo.



Since I'm still learning the game and how to get by with drops and mission rewards, the importance of T2 equipment is still unclear to me - it may depend a bit on context, I take it.
If they're in the market, like I said, and nothing else will do for a given task, an item exchange contract with a tempting enough offer might do the trick.



I've been reading about the game on and off for a few years now (recent news, namely plans to remove the tutorials, tempted me to finally take the plunge), so I'm decently informed about its reputation and risks - but none of that would still get me accustomed to the basics of actually playing, which is something PvE can help with.
If the PvP side of things will eventually appeal to me, who knows - I don't expect my puny PvE-based fits (and I don't make a point to always use the best I have, far from it) to be the greatest of temptations for suicide gankers, but when I eventually find a reason to head to lower sec I think I know where to look into info for precautions.
At this point I'm not aiming to be space suzerain, killboard king or market mogul, I'm just enjoying the concept of making do what I can get and building stuff I can master the use of - if repairing it myself were an option I'd do that too, but trust issues make that an unmarketable skill in this game, I guess, and the current NPC repair costs must be negligible for most compared to a hypothetical requirement of having the blueprint, materials and an adequate set of skills.




I don't need nor want to train them all - if I stick to something like frigates, which appear to be a stable of both PvE and PvP, full mastery can take about a year, but it's not necessary to go that far to get decent use out of them.
The tutorials already provided enough skill books to be able to build stuff and mine - I wouldn't be competing with the folks that have specialized in it, since I'm not working for profit margins, just to get stuff done.
Think of it like getting chores done around the house - most of us aren't professionals at cooking, cleaning or maintenance, but we still get it done even if it's not perfect - over time we can get better at it, but the quality and efficiency isn't super important as long as everything works at a sustainable and healthy level.
Maybe specialization is in my future (if/when I rank 5 all my skillbooks, I can just get the ones left to work on my frigate masteries), but for now this looks interesting to me, trying the full circle approach.



The forum is complaining I'm quoting too much, I'll continue below.

Then everybody else would just be playing their usual way - if hypothetically somebody else is interest in item-only contracts, but deterred by the 10k fee instead of something more proportional to the value of the items (it doesn't seem viable to set up an exchange of the duplicated skillbooks I got from tutorials for others I may lack, since those are in the market range of 30k), they'll just keep not using the closest available option.
It's a bit of a "be the change you want to see in the world" approach - if enough people used the system more, maybe it'd get some improvements.
I feel a bit too new to propose that in the current Ideas forum (also, it's flooded with sticky Knonos topics), so I'll just act on it when it seems relevant to try and set precedents.




From things read here and there one can get the impression that it's possible to play only with your mouth, through Teamspeak or similar if you're influential enough, which is far from my case.




I have a couple of Ventures from the tutorials - at this point I've not yet researched how much I'd need to mine to make my own frigate, but the scale of mining effort and efficiency I'd require for that is likely less than someone trying to make a profit supplying somebody trying to supply a fleet.

regardless of what ship or mods you have you will die anyway its just inevitable, dont think a single player could take on any average sized gatecamp solo

Not only are you approaching the game from an interesting way, but you are a fellow FFXI vet like me. I'd love to assist you any way I can. Any sort of trade or advice you need if you're in game look me up.

Also, Puppetmaster 4 lyfe. (Played for 6 years, stopped when the cap was still 75 + merit points)

Some modules, such as warp disuptors and energy neutralizers are never used in PVE fits, because they serve no purpose against npcs (ie the mission rats aren't going to try to warp, so there's no reason to try and prevent them from warping).

Other modules are fairly useless for PVP, or are eclipsed by better options and thus are rarely used. For instance, capacitor rechargers are used in PVE to improve capacitor stability for long drawn-out combat, but in PVP fits capacitor boosters are much more common since they provide a large burst of capacitor which is useful for shorter engagements.




Structure can be repaired using a hull repairer, which is similar to the armor repairer modules. They are not commonly used because most ship have very few structure hitpoints, so it is almost always better to invest defensively in shields or armor instead. Modules take damage from heat if you overload them (requiring the thermodynamics skill). They can be repaired in the station service or by using nanite repair paste while in space.

TLDR: All damage can be repaired without ISK. Heat damage will require you to do some extensive planetary interaction to obtain nanite repair paste however.