EVE New Citizens Q&A

> 2008
> State War Academy "aww yeah. I gun blap some bitches"
> Undock in Bantam
> Yellow can with T2 Ammo *BLING BLING*
> Take Ammo
> Die
> Convo dude... WTF MAN
> Crazy dutch dude.
> Takes me under his wings
> Become high sec griefer
> Become low sec griefer
> Join FW
> Go null sec
> ???
>???
>???
> Back in high sec griefing.

Started in 2003 just as the game was going live in North America with a great bunch of guys from a website I frequented that were calling for players to join. FrugalsWorld Inc was born.

Kicked around with them, not on this toon until later though, for a long time. We did a lot of mining, ratting and small stuff back then. I remember getting killed in low sec hauling zydrine through low sec in my condor for the corp by m0o corp. I still remember when our CEO discovered industrial mining for the first time and was thrilled on TS and chat to tell us all. We helped each other a lot back then and had a real good sense of comradery which was great.

Friends, good friends is what you need when you first join. Not just corp mates but friends. People thatll go out of their way to help you out and you do the same. If you dont have any coming in MAKE SOME!! Itll be the best investment you made in eve I can guarantee that.

I started playing exactly 1 week before Christmas in 2010. Was active Duty military at the time.

In a week i was having a terrible time, couldnt figure things out, ships dying, couldnt make any ISK, had no clue what i was doing.....and really learned to despise the rookie help chat.
Met another soldier at one of the bases social places....he introduce me to his CEO who took me in. That guy answered my billions of questions, fitted ships for me and told me how they worked so i could learn better.
Not long after we got involed in i guess you could say a mafia group....where the corp i was in soon became a lead corp in the adhoc shadow alliance. What were we doing? Can-flipping, ganking, extorting for the Status Quo of the area!!
The group became a real alliance then we were under wardec for several months.
But in those months we also had moved to nullsec as renters to give our own miners a chance to be safer from the dec'rs
The war ended. We made lots of ISK.
I learned how to Run a corp as a CEO when he retired from the position. Back in that day being in nullsec was fun. We had lots of fights, we made ISK hand over fist.....and occasionally ganking in our former Highsec home was awesome. It was also near the time of the beginning of what nullsec has become today. Due to stupid inhouse political drama our own alliance shattered.
I created a new character....ran a banking operation for a while that was somewaht succesul.
But i had to keep leaving game for longer periods of time. on my final leave of absence....most of the people i knew or had a close comraderie with had been forced seperate ways or left he game entirely. EvE wasnt the same.
I reitred my main.....made this toon and had the goal of seeing if i could hire on and train a group of noobs to be as space rich as me along with other things. (I made my massive amounts of ISK doing industry)
I learned some serious lessons doing this......not all players are quite equipped for this game. And i was far to lenient with some of them. I also learned there is Carebearism and then there is CareSlothism......the latter broke me....and i finally turned into what i consider a bittervet.

But I am stil kicking around....there are still things for me to do yet that i have not fully experienced...Most of the old cadre players that I have played with are gone....some arguably forever. Yet i faith in the new ones that i have trained, and the couple or so other old timers I met along the way. I have other accounts, I have other characters for many different things and reasons......but none of them would be possible nore the different styles of play or fun i can have without the interaction of others both good and bad.

In short.....all I can say is find a group, a corp, your comfortable with....make friends. Learn to adapt. Losing a ship or pod is not the end of the world. Learn from it.....you have learned to ride a bicycle am I right?

I'm no veteran, but i'm chilling at a respectable 7 million SP.

While all these stories of great noobness and overwhelming choice width of eve aren't all to alien for me, I started Eve out due to a friend asking me to. From day 1, i was training to be come a deadly weapon of space warfare, starting out by piloting the much loved Harpy.

The Merlin is a resilient little ship, and that's one of the first counter-intuitive things I learnt as I died of every mistake you could possibly make while we roamed around Black Rise. My skills weren't helping back then; i remember feeling unimaginable joy as i hit the 100 dps milestone in my blaster fit.

As I roamed, I acquired the limited fighting prowess that carries me on today, and boy did that mean a lot of deaths. I used to look at my kill/death log depressingly, tell my friends about how hard this game is. They reassured me that this is how it is when you're new, that the kills will come with time. And they advised me, we talked about fits, tactics, stuff to avoid, how to dodge gatecamps, etc.

Still, I can't help but feel like i had it way easy considering I was flying with a bunch of semi-seasoned guys that could have my back, knew how to D-Scan and which fights to pick in the world of plex pirating. I am thankful for their teachings and hope to keep on fighting for fun and profit.

This is everywhere, but i think it's not said enough. If you're new, talk to people before you even start buying things or training skills. Take the risk. It's worth it. It will spare you months if not years of suffering, trying to figure this game out.

That's Eve's most iconic feature: its huge and slow learning curve. It's what makes it hard to get into, but it's also what makes it hard to get out of.

I wouldn't call myself a vet, still here's my story:

Roughly 2 and half years ago my then roommate started playing eve, and i happily joined him.
I had heard a lot of stories about, how brutal it could be, the trill off a fight and the great null sec alliances.

I wanted to jump straight in guns blazing, so i finished the tutorials ASAP and started training in to something Battleship sized (because you know bigger is better....) I bought a plex to fund it all and trained the minimum required skills for the modules i thought i would need. Along the path to a Battleship came my first try at a pvp ship, a moa which i brought to tama where it promptly blew up.... 3 feroxes followed and my roomate didn't do much better.

We where broke and raging, we would pvp no more. We tried making some isk and doing mining and missions, but it bored us and training took to long. We did not resup.

Roughly 8 months ago i decided i wanted to play a game worthy of my time, this brought me back to eve.
This time i made plan, join a corp to have fun with people and learn the basics. Make some easy isk while mining and gearing up for lvl 4 missions.

I ended up joining a pirate corp near Hek, they did some gate camping and while their add said newb friendly they weren't very helpfull. I did get my first kill with them and it made hungry for more. Still because the lack off interest in helping me out i left and started talking with other corps. I found one with a newb training corp and promptly joined them. It turned out that the newb corp did no pvp whatsoever but, they where very helpfull.

I learned a lot about missions, mining, fits and how to avoid getting ganked in highsec, but mostly the following:
1.) consider everything you undock already lost.
2.) if you can fly something that doesn't mean you should, make sure you can fly it well.
3.) if you don't like something, don't do it (well this i learned from mining)

But the best part about them was when we got wardect. They had a wormhole somewhere and brought us all in to avoid the wardec. At the same time 2 of my friends started playing eve and i made an alt so i could play with them and avoid any of the dangers in Womhole space.

While having fun with my friends and doing some missions i read up about Wormhole space as much as i could. It fascinated me and i wanted to go in there for the full experience. Not just sitting there doing nothing like my ceo had ordered.

While reading i learned a few basics about wormhole space, get a covops cloak, learn to probe fast and press dscan as much as you can. So i started training for the ship i thought would bring me the most fun in WH space, a Stratios. I left the newb corp and started a new one with my 2 friends. We ran missions while training up for the ships we wanted to fly in to w-space. Making the occasional trip in to low sec to try and find some fights.This resulted mostly in us losing ships.

After a month or so we geared up for our first trip into w-space, i still remember trill off the unkown and freaking out at the first sign of danger. We did some sites in c1/c2 and the the isk was amazing, for us anyway. We started looking for c2's on a daily basis and did the first waves from c3's when we would find them. As soon as we would spot something on D-scan we ran to highsec. It was fun, dangerous and exciting. But like all things when you've done them often enough the danger doesn't seem so real and we started slacking....

While daytripping into w-space one day we where being watched, they came from a hole we did not know was there and it was out off d-scan range. We just finished the final wave in the site when we got hot dropped. I still remembered the 2 stratios decloack right next to me they pointed us and next we know 3 battle-cruisers land aswell. We all died, the excitement was back and i wanted to do this to other people.

I joined their public channel saying gf and asking what i did wrong, a month later we where part of their alliance, living in a C2 (hs/c3 static) with their training corp. I learned more and more, how to roll holes, Keep security, finding people with d-scan and how fickle Bob can be.

Unfortunately the alliance fell apart after an eviction attempt. I was left alone as my friends stopped playing, it was a very lonely time, i tried to recruit some new people but my experience was lacking, and most left. I couldn't offer a good fight to people coming in to my wormhole and i was at loss on what to do next...

In the mean time someone i knew stopped playing eve, at that point i wasn't even aware he was playing but he was getting rid of his characters and offered a tengu pilot to me at a cheap price. Now i could run c3 combat sites solo and my isk income rose sharply. Besides that i now had a ship i could do some serious dps in. I was still lonely but i managed keep the pos fueled and occasionally fight some people. I kept hanging on by a thread and i was seriously considering leaving eve again.

Then i got in contact with one off my old alliance members, the same that got me in the alliance. She and few other members had joined a relatively new C5 corp and they were apparently all fun guys. So i went on a frig Roam with them and a week later the POS was offline, my stuff moved out and i was shooting stuff at a regular basis in the C5. The corp mates i met there are now my friends and today i'am still having fun in the same corp With the same friends.

So my advice to all new players, pick a corp with people you enjoy spending time with, doing things you like to do in eve.
Don't fly anything your afraid to lose and most of all have fun

It all started on a cold, dark evening somewhere in early Feb, 2005. I was scouring the internets for a sci-fi themed game when I found an EVE free trial ad on mmorpg.com. I took it and abolutely loved the game, the world, the complexity... Unfortunately, I did not have an ability to pay my subscription (I was but a first year undergrad student without any money to spare whatsoever), thus I left after the trial expired, but EVE has left me wanting for more...

Over half a year later a friend found EVE online and invited me to join him on his travels across the universe. I started another trial account and found EVE universe as much interesting and appealing as it was back in the February. Only this time I had means to support a subscription! I dug up information on my first trial character and re-subbed it. Since then I've had over half a dozen accounts and more than twice that characters, had periods of high activity and relative dormancy, but over nearly nine years since then I haven't been too far away from EVE. Funnily enough, the friend didn't last even through the first trial.

I don't remember my first days in EVE with much clarity, but I do remember dabbling with some mining, missions, and lowsec. Eventually I've come up on a corporation of like-minded individuals, all based from the same country I was in and speaking their language, so it felt like home, even though my english skills weren't that bad. We did some high-sec mining then, in early 2006, ventured out into null-sec, where we rented a system from Red Alliance somewhere in Insmother. I still remember the N-RAEL gatecamps with fond memories. We still were an industrial/mining corp back in the day, but that was where we (well, some of us) found a passion for explodifying other players' ships instead of red crosses. Luckily, we were able to participate in RA fleets and they noticed us too, extending an offer of membership, which out corp accepted. My first large-fleet engagements were had at around spring 2006, just after a Red Moon Rising patch hit the servers, introducing new capital ships, Carriers, Motherships (Supercarriers back in the days) and Titans. While we did not see titans for at least a few months after the patch, Carriers became a common sight in alliance ops quite soon.

Afterwards RA decided to move north, to around Deklein region (I still have assets around VFK-IV) we moved alongside with them. Got involved in the BOB's MAXX campaign, on the receiving end, had many good (and not-so-good) fights with them, but eventually they (BOB) drew us out. RA collapsed, many corps left, we also left, joined a new local alliance and participated in local activities. When that and the following alliance collapsed in a matter of few months we lived nearby in Venal region without having allegiance to any of the major alliances until we got forcefully evicted from there. The corp splintered into two, having most of the PVP-oriented people leaving for greener pastures and CEO resigning due to real life issues. I decided to go my own way from there.

Started my own corp in the end of 2006, primarily as a mission/industrial corp that (continuing the tradition of my old corp) recruited mostly on a nationality basis, for ease of acclimation and communication. After a while we grew up in numbers and become one of the most prominent corporations based on our language group. Moved out to a low-sec missioning hub and joined forces with a small russian-speaking alliance already living there, continuing the missioning/industrial activity but with increasing PvP focus as we needed to defend our home system from occassional pirate incursion, though our own policies around haven't been much different. We operated on NBSI policy, giving only two options to our opponents: join us (or at least become blue) or die.

After a while the core PVP contingent of the corp decided to split off and try their luck in nullsec again, by joining the Against ALL Authorities alliance, basing around Stain. I transferred rule of the corporation to one of the industrial-minded directors and went off to nullsec alongside with other corp members. The split was very amicable and we all continued to hang around in unified chat and even had positive standings set from alliance towards our corp, to recognize their friendly status, even though our paths rarely intersected due to being in different parts of the EVEverse.

Eventually my growing distaste for nullsec warfare which always revolved around CTAs and blobs, and the trend was only increasing, I returned back to my old corporation. After a while (late 2009 -- early 2010) we have met a group of highly skilled low-sec PVP players, known as Rooks and Kings, who were operating in the same region from a constellation nearby. It still beats me how we managed that feat, but after more than a few skirmishes our alliances realized it would be of mutual benefit if we became friendly, and this is how my history as a RnK pilot started...

I eventually handed over reigns of my old corporation to a good friend and became a part of Rooks and Kings alliance and participating in many of the feats they are renowned for. I am immensely grateful to them and my old low-sec Russian alliance for the fun and comaraderie they provided. Those were by far the best days of my EVE life.

Finally, at around early 2012 I found myself tired of all things EVE and went dormant. This character was created at around that time as my blank slate, as all of my other characters went dormant and eventually got sold or unsubscribed. Joined a friendly group of (mostly) indy players that operated in the same area. The old corporation I have created kicked around for a few years until most of the players went on with their lives and the corp slowly faded away. Now I have only one account and mostly station spin and live off the wealth I've accumulated over the years :)

Welp, that's all of my story so far. Thanks for reading!

I am not the eldest in EvE - my first character is 2008, but my story is so borderline absurd... because EvE changed my real life and vice versa. No other game did this.

I love competition and challenge. I left other MMOs (I play MMOs since before 2000) because they'd become too easy or I'd completed them. In example, I have just quit Elder Scrolls Online because I have cleared everything and now it's just a bore.

in 2008 I joined a PvP MMO that sadly failed to live up with expectations. I was eager to PvP and to do something... harder... different. Something I could finally say: "this is HARD". Googling around with these criteria, it was inevitable I'd find EvE.

So I created my first character. To make it harder, I picked the worst and weakest race of the time: Minmatar. Everybody else infact were rolling Caldari, a sort of "sons of the gods" race getting all sorts of advantages on multiple fields.

I spent the first days joined to the Rookie Chat. Oh, the horror stories you read over there!
Ebil pivates, scammers, thieves, scandals. This definitely made me want to know more of this strange game: so awesome yet so half unknown, yet still growing in player base after several years.

As the ISDs (volounteering players who help newbies) suggested, I needed to make money (ISK) and to do that they suggested starting with mining . I read some guides around, they suggested to buy an Osprey (at the time a good mining cruiser) and then up and up to the Real Thing, aptly named: "Hulk". At the time there were no really useful tutorials, we had to buy expensive "training books" that would allow us to... train the other skills. Skills had no queue. People were using all sorts of tricks to plan them so that skills would finish training during the day, but that was not always possible. So the most hard core guys had to set alarm clocks at 3 - 4 - 5am and wake up to inject the next skill or rank of same skill.

I slowly gathered up enough ISK to purchase an hauler. For days I'd slowly mine and fill it with Tritanium - at the time it was worth 2 ISK per unit... and then I'd pilot it to the highest selling station. Usually in Minmatar space (the one with the fewest "high sec" routes) that meant going low sec and sell there.
At the time there was no "You are to enter low sec" warnings, so I happily went 17 jumps in hi sec then 2 in low sec and then sell my Tritanium in there
One day, however, I met a guy at the hi sec to low sec gate and he blew my hauler
In NO OTHER GAME EVER I felt so strong agitation like in EvE, I was shaking when I died!
That make me realize EvE is different. And things matter, oh they do.

To add insult to injury, I decided to spend the afternoon doing something different: my first PvE mission!
I loaded up a Rifter (skill being so low I could not fit half of it!), went to the NPC "Agent". He gave me a simple mission: "go fetch me a pack of cigarettes". I did not even know it was odd the mission objective was a station 23 (twentythree) jumps away. Nor I vaguely smelled risk: the pick up station was like 7 jumps in low sec. Finally, I had no idea that one of the systems on the route called: "Rancer" would be any way different than others.
Guess what happened the instant I entered one of the most dangerous systems in EvE: I got insta-melted by an army of pirates.
Now poor like a dog and scorned, I got back to my mining ship. Slowly made up ISK to buy another hauler.
Back at the time, mining ships had very tiny cargo hold, you had to dig a bit, eject the cargo in space, take it up with your hauler. Back at the time, one of the preferrect griefers hobbies was to "can flip". They'd steal your mineral hoping you'd attack them (you'd get "flagged") or they quickly stolen minerals, ejected them in another can replacing yours. At this point you'd take up the stuff without knowing it changed ownership and you became PvP flagged.
Of course I had to learn the above concept and... guess what, I learned it exactly in that day. I picked up my usual "can" with my hauler and... 10 seconds later a guy in a frigate appeared and killed my hauler. Another loss!
But hey, I was not easy to put down. I docked up and prepped my shiny new PvP combat Rifter! I'd bring swift justice on that felon!
So off I went, I got back to the mining belt to punish the guy and... TA-DA! More ships popped up and they were cruisers and... one of them (the same guy) slaughtered me. Since in my previous PvP games, opponents always acted "honorably" and this guy instead insisted on bringing in massive forces against a total rookie, I got really, really annoyed and started unloading some abuse on him on the local chat. Of course he was all happy and taunting and mocking me.

I received my first incoming "tell". A 2005 or so guy told me to not despair and to return mining once the PvP timer reset and... just to mine and watch.

So I did. 30 minutes later the griefer was still killing newbies. He can flipped another hauler guy. He went to shoot at him on his frigate... and this time... the hauler did not die. He went off, switched to his compliment of cruiser and other stuff. He landed... and found waiting for him an ARMY who butchered him and then wardecced his corp (no, I don't recall if they suicided gank his other buddies or whatever, it was just a lot of explosions!).
It was the 2005 guy who brought swift justice along with his corp mates! 5 minutes later he invited me to his corp.

He teached me soooo much. Gave me fitted ships up to including T2 fitted Hurricanes and other stuff I could not even use.
I spent such and AWESOME time with them, we'd do operations together every days. He properly introduced me to low and null sec where he had a Rorqual and other things. We became friends, so much that when, one day, he had to take some months off EvE he made me CEO of his 35-ish people corp.

(to be continued)

I started studying trading and finance for "real": in real trading websites and so on. Besides a short experience with futures, I started learning about Forex. I got expecially "piqued" by concepts explained by a certain "price action" theory.
One day I stumbled upon a thread where a guy teached exactly those concepts, in a way even a goat could understand.
I expecially loved his way of working, because he preferred a "relaxed", almost "lazy" approach to trading. In EvE I had to endure all that 0.01 ISKing by doing station trading. Maybe I could adapt my EvE trading to what that guy teached?

Once learned his stuff, I actually found out an old EvE trading tutorial that catered exactly to the likes of me! It's called: The Slow Sell System for Lazy Marketeers

Having learned so much both from EvE Market Discussion's forum posters and that guy, I wanted to share my new found knowledge with everybody. So I created a thread about this odd experiment (copying EvE trading into real life and vice versa).

In the beginning I didn't get exactly a warm reaction. After all this is impossible, isn't it?
But I did not give up. I found a way to import the EvE Online market data into a real life trading platform. EvE market charts now looked as good and professional as real markets! That helped me immensely, because I could apply the concepts I learned in RL inside EvE and also use EvE "fake money" (ISK) to test my theories I did not dare to risk real money on.
My research went posted into another, sequel thread.

Not only the experiment was going well. I actually made ISK and real life cash with it!
I could finally start playing with "major league" players. I could start what I consider my best contribution to EvE Online: a charity. A charity in YOUR cold, harsh EvE. Take that! . Knowing I have been actually useful to real people in need of help fills me of joy. All of this while playing and having fun in my favourite game!

Beside that, my trading allowed me to fill my blog with charts about my favourite markets: the gigantic minerals and ices markets. After a while I wanted to put my theories into practice.
I created a 100 billion mutual fund.
Players of the cold, harsh, scammy EvE would have had to trust me not to rob their money AND to make them money by using a trading method nobody else used (nor truly appreciated).
The incredible happened: the "you are so new, you have to be a scammer alt" guy actually got given 100 billions AND made them a big profit in few days.

At the same time, real life was not going very well: my country fell to the crysis and many lost their job, me included.
My country has no social means to help the jobless, after a couple of months they are out of luck, usually lose all and end up living under a bridge or something.

I took courage and... traded. Stuff learned thanks to EvE ended up feeding me in real life. You can't know how much this struck me.

Years passed and one day, on a real life finance forum I got contacted by a guy who looked for people with a software development background to go help him on an island (Canary islands).
So here I went: to live on a tropical island, getting money both from him and from trading I learned in EvE Online.

Not long after, I sort of got showcased on Fanfest for the second time: the first because of the charity, the second time the CCP Chief Economist would show EvE markets charts with a peculiarity: they were different than any charts he ever shown. They were basically a copy of my "real life looking" EvE markets charts, calculated with the same algorythm I used.

That day I realized I was happy. Happy with EvE, happy in real life. I felt I "won" both of the hardest games of my life.

My first few minutes in eve in '06....

I create a character that looks like garbage and has a high default charisma, fter navigating the crappy interface and talking to some old tutorial agent, I need to mine some regular ass veldspar for him.

I undock and then warp to a belt. I come out of warp near a megathron that is mining. I'm googly eyed looking at this huge ship. I put my velator's mining laser on an asteroid and after a minute I see how little I got from the cycle....man this is gonna take forever.

But what's this? The megathron has a jetcan out....I approach it and have a look. HOLY ****, it's exactly what I need, veldspar. This kind soul obviously doesn't want this, he must have jettisoned it for noobs. So, I drag the contents to my cargohold and ignore any warning I may have got. WELL ****, I don't have enough room for all of it. I open up my cargohold/market/etc and am looking to see if maybe there's a way to make room.

Suddenly being shot at, move move move move move move, CONCORD all over overview, megathron explodes.

I warp out of that belt swearing I'll never go back, those damn npcs just killed that poor guy in the battleship helping out noobs...

From my first month in Eve, the one thing that stands out in my mind was buying a small hauler, then spending days/weeks trading. I was so excited when I made my first one million isk I nearly fell of my chair.

Once you had made your first million isk, you became a somebody in Eve. Up until that point you were a rookie. That's how it was back then.