EVE New Citizens Q&A

SP determines a threshold that limits your ability to engage in the first place, but once you have crossed that threshold, player skill becomes far more important than exact skill levels.

Player skill > skill points.

I'm a logi 5 pilot but I'm as thick as two short planks nailed together with regards actually using a logistics ship,
I just don't have the experience with it.

Yeah, of the engagements I can see on your KB, you did not choose targets you would have any chance of defeating unless they were equally clueless. (No offense intended, from you posts you are learning relatively quickly)

What you can and can't fight in the ship you have chosen plays a very large part in being successful.

Skills do unlock ships and gear for you, so not having the skills can limit you. But once you get your support skills, and ship and weapon skills up to where the Certificates for the ship that you fly show you're at rank 4, adding more skillpoints will probably not do much for that ship.

Past that point, more skills mean you unlock more ships as choices for you to fly, but basically the skillpoints that apply to all the ships you've left in the hangar are useless for the ship you're flying.

Otherwise, PVP is a lot of experience and skill. At the most newbie level, you print out a ship chart so that you can instantly recognized what an Arazu can do vs. what a Bhaalghorn can do to you. At the more advanced level, you have a feel for not just individual ships, but fleets composed of a set of ships, and you don't need that ship chart anymore. There's a big difference between reading off a chart and having died to those ships and thus having a feel for what they do.

There's more. Awareness of where you are in space, where you can go, and where the enemies can come from, how to scout for them, how to bluff to pull them into your trap or how to escape them, and quite a bit of psychology on how to act in order to control their reactions and your team's morale.

The correct question is how much is blob and how much is sp. The rest is reaction speed and experience gained playing.

It's been answered well already. Here's the wonderful part - if you keep at it, you'll gain experience and SP at the same time. So you'll get better twice as fast!

Having experienced players to show you the ropes is the best way to get that experience because they can easily point out where you went wrong and how to improve, whereas it might take you 20 more engagements to figure that out on your own.

Like chicken.

In my experience, 80% of fights are not close. They are decided before anyone engages. Note that tactics player skill can impact how bad a loss is. As an example, I FC'ed a corp op where three of us attacked a war target's Player Owned Starbase in a quiet highsec island. Upon seeing five hostile players in local (in the system we were in and the adjacent system) I made the call to flee. We lost the fight (the defenders' POS remained intact at 75% shields), but we didn't lose any ships.

The other 20% of fights are decided by a combination of skillpoints, in combat tactical decisions (do I shoot their drones, do we primary their tackle or their damage, etc) and the amount of ISK you field (do you use tech 2 modules, or expensive deadspace ones; do you use tech 1 hulls or expensive tech 2/3 or faction ones).


Also in my experience, the most fun fights are the ones in that 20% that you narrowly lose.

The performance of ships and equipment isn't as important to achieving a favorable outcome as is selecting and making appropriate use of ships, equipment and tactics.

Blowing up spaceships is about being able to make an accurate determination about the capabilities of your opponent, determining if you legitimately have the capability to engage it successfully, and if not re-fitting, re-shipping or calling for backup as required.

I had an alt that had 1.5 mill sp and I scared the crap out of a 400 man alliance.

As noted alot of it is down to knowledge and the alt was being flown by an owner who has played for some years. However. Some users are just damm good at it from the start.

Learn your limits and your capabilities.