EVE New Citizens Q&A

I am sure someone around here knows more of the in's-and-out's on Skill Injectors and Arum... so I will let them answer rather than contaminate you with bad information.


That said... here is my opinion regarding skills:

You do not need Skill Injectors. They are a luxury item.


In EVE, there is no such thing as "catching up" with veterans.

Here is why:

- All skills cap at level 5. No matter how many years you have played the game, you cannot exceed that limit. And lower tier skills (ex. [Racial] Frigate) are very quick to train relative to more advanced skills (ex. [Racial] Battleship).


- (*this is the important one*) Total skillpoints does not matter. Only a limited number of skills affect any one ship, module, weapon system, and specialty at any given time.

Ex1: You are a newbie facing someone with about 20 million SP... but how much of that overall SP is actually combat related? He/she could be a HUGE industrial player with limited combat skills.
Ex2: A veteran player has just trained up the skill Large Hybrid Turret to level 5. That skill in no way affects the skill Small Hybrid Turret and thus the veteran will be no better or worse than before at the frigate level.


- Getting a skill from level 4 to level 5 only adds on an extra 2% here, 5% there (exceptions apply). If you simply train up all the skills within a given specialty to level 4 (which takes ~20% of the amount of time it takes to get all those skills to level 5), you will find yourself flying at about **80 to 90%** of the effectiveness of a multi-year veteran with those same skills in that specific specialty at level 5.


- Getting a skill to level 5 is supposed to be a painful train. Many players (yes, even veteran ones) opt to avoid doing it and instead train up other skills to level 4 (again, because it's faster).

Example: I personally have the T2 weapon specializations at level 4. That puts me at a 2% disadvantage in damage against someone who has the same skill(s) at level 5 (assuming we are both using the same ship with the same fit)


- Ships and weapons have been balanced against one another.

Example: A battleship can potentially "one-shot" a frigate... but the frigate can fly very fast, making it difficult for the battleship's weapons to hit, especially at very close range... then again, the battleship can deploy drones to deal with the frigate... and the frigate can shoot the drones down... however the battleship might have a Large Energy Neutralizer fitted to nuke the frigate's capacitor power every 24 seconds... in which case the frigate could use a Small Nosferatu that sucks out capacitor from the battleship every 3 seconds... etc. etc.


- High tech equipment (ex. T2, Faction, Officer, etc) will not give a player "I WIN" abilities. It simply gives a player a linear edge at an exponentially higher cost.

Ex1: A basic T1 Armor Adaptive Plating gives ~10% omni-resistance to damage for only 100 thousand ISK... a T2 Armor Adaptive Plating gives ~15% omni resistance to damage for 1 million ISK... a "deadpsace" Armor Adaptive Plating gives ~19% omni resistance to damage for 20 to 50 million ISK.

Ex2: A group of three or four T1-fit frigates that cost about 500 thousand to 1 million isk CAN EASILY overwhelm a faction frigate worth about 50 to 100 million ISK... provided they are using the right mods in the right configuration and know what they are doing.



What does this all mean?

- Having more skillpoints is not the "end all, be all" point of the game and there is more to most activities than "get enough skillpoints, open window, click, press F1- F9."
There are a plethora of factors that can decide success or failure and many of them are purely abstract in nature (see: planning, having friends, making deals, appearing weaker/stronger than you really are, psychological warfare, gathering intel, etc).

- Part of the idea behind the Skillpoint system is to learn how to utilize what you have available to you... which requires you to use your head and be creative.
This helps you later on when you can finally use "better" ships/equipment... because you have hopefully familiarized yourself with the underlying mechanics that most Tech 1 ships/equipment share with Tech 2/3/Faction ships/equipment.

Example: you may not be able to pilot that sexy Interceptor right away... but that doesn't mean you can't slap together a super fast frigate that does something similar.

- Once you have your "universal" core and support skills near or at maximum (which takes about 2 or 3 months of semi-focused training) the gap between you and an older player begins to narrow quite significantly. You can find these skills in the "Engineering" section of your character skillsheet.

- Just because you are limited in what you can do (as a newbie) it does not mean that your contribution to a team is meaningless and/or without weight.
Being a "tackler" or cheapo Ewar-support in PvP might indeed be suicide if you have limited skills and knowledge... but even half-success can mean the difference between catching or losing a target... everyone escaping a bad situation or dying in a fire.

I think ShahFluffers has really hit the nail on the head.

My $0.02: Time spent on your core Engineering and Navigation skills is never time 'wasted'.

err, probing is some of my most used combat skills...... so much so, i have trained a 'perfect Virtue alt'.... once my main remaps back into Intel skills, i'll be spending some months getting those Astrometrics skills well trained up.

Combat probing is an art. one i've found to be highly addictive. It's a great feeling to punt tackle, or call in a friendly BLOPS, on top of enemy links boats or those sitting at a safe.

At 500k SP's under 5mil and 400k SP over 5mil you will need 6 plex's to get over 5mil SP if you trade at the peremiter 0% tax citidal.

That kinda sucks it costs 2 times as much for the injectors as it cost for game play and you are using zero of the developers resources. Seems kinda scummy.. Granted I know there has to be a penalty for instant gratification but still.

As for the others worrying I want to fly a titan with 5 mp skill points relax.. I played this game a short time several years back. I have a basic understanding of how the game mechanics work but still a lot has changed.

I mainly just want to get a bunch of the core skills out of the way, so I don't have to sit around spinning a ship in station while i wait to fly a decent fit frig. I joined FW my 2nd day and I'm running around low sec but I can't fight anyone so it's kinda pointless..

I'd just like to be able to fly a decent fit frig or Destroyer and have the basic skills to be semi competent in it. Even at 5 million sp's that.s not really a competent frig pilot. It's just likely not worth $100 bucks though... that seems a bit overkill to me..

If you doubt for a second anything that Big Daddy Shah said in that post go to the eveiseasy youtube channel. Among other things you will see several videos of an experienced vet going out and pwning up against years old pilots in tech 2 ships while the poster is flying a cheaply fit T1 frigate on a days old alt.

He just proves the point that knowledge of this game trumps: expensive fits, Teching up, skill points and everything else. To me your money is far better spent if you went out and purchased PLEX and sold them for isk with the determination of loosing that isk as quickly as possible in cheap frigates. The experience that you gain from loosing all of those ships will help you out infinitely more than the skill points that you could have purchased with the same isk.

I know right now as you are reading this post you have a whole bunch of "ya but ..." thoughts going through your head. What I am going to tell you about that is those are preprogrammed thoughts that come from other MMOs. Eve does not work that way. You can not buy your way to glory in this game. Well at least not through buying skill points or expensive fits anyway. There are people who have bought their way to glory by paying others to fight for them but that is a different story that would be pointless to divert off on now.

Just learn the game and don't worry about the skill points. This section of the forums is littered with the tears of players who thought that they could buy their way to PvP god-dom.

This is pretty much it, in a nut shell. As I mentioned I've played this game before. I think my main was about 60 million SP or somewhere around there but the game has changed a lot, it's been like 3 or 4 years since I last played. Back in he day my 2nd alt actually was a 'Rifter Hero" I started him as a joke to screw around in jita and killed lots of vets on his trial run.

Back then I fit full size rigs to my rifter as a noob financed by my old main and kicked some butt as a noob. However today the game is much different every one is rigged has implants and flies pirate/faction ships or t3 destroyers. There is not much for a noob to do unless you have a lot of skill and knowledge of the game.

Due to not playing in so long I lost so much of the game knowledge with all the changes and I'm not so practiced anymore but knowing I can relearn fairly fast if I could get some actual real practice I opted to go for the 5 mil sp.

After running this toon around a bit with barely 600k sp in FW space I opted to start a fresh char and dumped 5 million SP on him.

I think the 5 million SP is kinda the key point to start re-learning this game. I got all those annoying core grind skills to level 4's & 5's. I also gave him both level V hybrids & auto cannons. To round him off I gave him lvl 4 Cal, Gal & Min frigs. For the most part he's still way out classed by what I'm finding in low sec but at the very least I can start PVPing again with out just throwing ships away with zero chance of success.

I could have fine tuned him a bit better if I choose 1 race or ship to fly, but I felt I was better off getting my self access to a few different frigs & weapons. All in all so far 1 kill 1 death after flying him today for the first time.

Literlally the post directly above your post has the link that you are saying isn't linked anymore. The video was made in 2015 so it is after the frigate rebalancing and fairly current.

Rigs have had their build requirements changed with the introduction of different size rigs and salavge has gotten much much cheaper after things like the Noctis and MTUs have been introduced. T1 rigs used to cost more than a battleship back in the day so yes rigging a t1 frigate was something that just did not happen.

You have a lot of misguiding info in this post. I stick by my last comment that the OP is far better off investing the PLEX in ships to loose and gaining the experience than he is in gaining the XP. This game is more about what you know than how many skill points that your character has and people like Suitonia prove that again and again by making videos of people pwning on days old alts. You can also watch The Rooks and Kings videos to see guys going up against vastly superior numbers and winning as well.

This game is not like other games where you need to be level capped and decked out in purples to be able to compete or contribute, several players have proven that repeatedly. Yet you come in here and say you can't compete without 5 million SP even though it has been proven to be false.

Don't get me wrong I am not saying that skill points do nothing for you. I am just saying that the OP is better off spending the isk on cheap ships and getting tons of practical experience than he is buying SP.

An again I say that this section of the forums is littered with posts from players who thought that they could buy their way to awesome and purchased high skill point characters and spent lots of isk on blinged out ships only to loose them in short order and come here crying. Higher skill point and more blinged out characters get their asses handed to them by better players on less experienced characters flying cheaper ships every day in this game.

Can I try too, but shorter?


Whenever you start the game, you're equal with hundreds of others who start the game ...
... and of course there will be people with higher amount of skillpoints.

After a month there will still be players to whom you are equal ...
... and there will be new players who have less skillpoints.

At some point you will have surpassed those who unsubbed.

You can not catch up in terms of whole amount of skillpoints ...
... but as each skill caps at V it's not necessary anyway.

Yea it's not just the skill gap either but the ship gap. While I don't disagree with the fact that a skilled player of this game in a noob toon can get kills it's not gonna be easy.. I dunno maybe out in null sec where the carebears live, you might find lots of easy kills but around low sec where I always played, it's pirate faction ship after faction ship and now all the t3 destroyers.

Jump through the gate.. ohh look insta locking t3 blab.. Go to a novice plex in your atron or rifter.. look its a daredevil, a hookbill or some other random faction ship.

The only experience you gain in low sec as a noob account that can't fly anything is how to run away.. At least with my now 5 million sp char I can stay and "try" to fight some of these ships. So far my new toon has lost all his actual fights other than a freebie kill.. However I'm re-learning how people are fitting their ships and the tactics they use with them. That's something you can't learn by running away or dying instantly.