EVE New Citizens Q&A

This month I hit the two year mark in this weird and wonderful game.

I am still very much a newbie. I expect in many ways I will still be a newbie no matter how long I play this game. I've lost and won a lot of PVP fights (not necessarily with this character...the joy of alts!), built and lost stations, explored, dabbled in industry and shot a lot of red crosses. I hope a few key lessons I have learned are helpful to my fellow newbies:

1. Make friends and fly with them. That's what this game is all about.

2. This is a game, you are supposed to be playing for fun. If it isn't fun, you are doing it wrong. Seriously! Lighten up.

3. Null is not scary. Far from it; in many ways it is safer than hisec once you learn basic game mechanics and get over the irrational fear of having your space pixels popped! You don't have to join a big sov-holding alliance, become a renter or have a billion SP. There are a lot of public fleets that conduct open-invite roams in null; I highly recommend joining them. You will learn a lot, quickly.

4. When you are trying to learn about a certain aspect of the game (PvP, for instance), seek out an organization that focuses on that then identify individuals within that organization who are *very* good at it. Watch and learn, boys and girls. Watch and learn. If you see a really good player kicking but at their chosen activity and you can't work out how, ask them Most players will be glad to pass on some wisdom. If the organization sucks, move on. Plenty of fish in the sea!

5. Be patient with yourself and others, especially your fellow newbies. The learning curve in this game is staggering! Even two years in I still find myself going "WTH just happened?" quite a lot. As you learn, please be willing to pass that knowledge on to those not so far along the learning curve as yourself.

6. For any action you take in game, there are consequences...in game. With that in mind, maybe the best answer when you think whether or not you should try something should always be "Why not, eh?"

7. Learn PVP. Even if it is not your "profession" in EVE. It will find you and the chances of surviving, winning...maybe even enjoying it...will go up exponentially once you understand it. Heck, maybe you will discover (as I have) that shooting other player's spaceships and being shot at is probably the most exciting aspect of the game.

As for me, I am still living in null, still flying with a bunch of folks I feel very lucky to have met, mostly doing the PvP thing and plotting how to either create a space hippie communist empire or annoy somebody else's.

Fellow newbies, please feel free to contact me in-game, I will always try to be helpful even if all I can offer is morale support and/or advice!

Good Hunting!

This. That's really all there is to it, and it roughly applies to anything else you do in life as well. What gets me sucked into EVE and, eventually, tosses me right back out, is the other players I'm flying with. I still struggle with getting myself into a good organization, but if you luck out and find your way into the good graces of the goons or another well-oiled spaceship club with leadership that's on top of things, then you're golden.

I have always and will continue to chide newbies for attempting to take on colossal tasks like training into a ship that's months away and years from perfection right off the bat. The truth is: once you get there the act of undocking is still boring as hell without some wing-men to help make the content flow.

My, possibly unorthodox, reccomendation to newbies is to completely abandon the notion of independence and skill for low-hanging niche fruit. Basic tackling skills, navigation skills, ability to fly any t1 frigate, and therefor function as a suicide tackling menace with any t1 frigate the corp will throw at you makes even the most young and inexperienced lowbie a big asset. You don't have to worry about things like isk when all your ships and modules are basically on the house. Your skill books will probably also come at a steep discount.

From the lowly tackle role you're only a hop and a skip from a cheap ganking destroyer, a few probing skills away from being an incredibly useful scout, and before you know it you've got half a dozen interesting niches to explore with your gang or fleet. That is the kind of progression that keeps the game fresh, as opposed to just skilling into some random battlecruiser and plinking away at targets when called, grinding rats when off duty, and all the other mistakes I made as a padawan.

Nothing unorthodox about it!

I am never one to say "you can't do that" except maybe in the context of "you can't do that...yet." I use the example you give all the time with newbies thinking of coming out to null for the first time. Our CAS Combat Day public roam events usually result in those very same "lowbies" being key contributors to plenty of kills.

I try to be a pragmatist. I try to pick fights I see a reasonable chance of winning. I lose plenty. I am not above enjoying the occasional "let's just go bum rush these 'leet pvp guys in noobships and see what happens" moment of stupid silly fun.

I like this, but I prefer "it's more fun to have other people do that for you." This is my constant refrain when it comes to newbies eager to skill into a doctrine ship after flying tackle for a short while. Few of them realize that most of the line rabble are bored shitless while the newbros are having a ball.



I'm using luck as a euphemism for having done out of game research and knowing exactly what you're talking about. Reading your post literally would get most newbies scammed.




I'd say every coalition has a zerg corp that will take newbies. Experiences will vary widely there. I would not say that most of the larger alliances have one of these corps. Maybe I'm splitting hairs. Whatever the case may be, my point was simply that choosing the superior rookie corp is largely a function of luck for new players who are ill equipped to make such a decision.

With that being said I'll just pipe in if I may and say that joining goons or any other large alliance with full ship replacement program can be quite a different experience from joining some ratty carebear renter alliance that has problems understanding how Ishtars/Gilas/Bombers can be better at POS bashing then a BS even though the POS shooting aspect is going to change in the future.

good advice really, always good to keep at solo pvp aswell, getting into a good corp who have good fc's is great but you should always work on getting your personal ship flying experience better too, it will only help you in the future, holidays in fw space help great with personal ship skills

i also prefer small/medium gang alliances as you dont just feel like just another member, i think this game shines in small/medium warfare, fc's remember/know you and that brings a certain satisfaction compared to the 600man blob fests where your just another shiptype (just my opinion though ive been playing around 2 years too)

Absolutely.



I didn't mean to imply you were intentionally scamming, just that it would be easy for a fresh faced newbro to fail in connecting the dots you're alluding to. Consider it an indulgence to the newbros without as much "luck," and by that I mean some exposure to the concepts and the social skills required to follow up.