EVE New Citizens Q&A

Before going to the Q & A below, I got to get something off my chest... How comes you don't sound that cheerful to begin with, bud? Understand that despite this game's reputation and maybe what your friends told you, this is a game. It's meant to be enjoyable and to me for the most part it is. Don't treat is as a business transaction cause sometimes it plays more like going to the pub on friday night with your friends, drinking beer but rather that shooting pool you're shooting lasers.

It can be a social club, it can be competitive, it can be boring as hell or it can be a wholly unique and immersive experience. Judging by the way you phrased that question, you already have a serious case of the Bittervet Syndrome LOL

Either way, here goes. AMA.


This is a question in two parts. First off, YES you can make a difference. The smaller your gang, the greater the impact of your personal skill. In the long run, you can kick it to corp CEO or alliance leader... but don't think it'll come easy or automatically. Your ability to influence your surroundings is a personal skill. These are not NPCs -- your men will only follow you insofar you get them results. Solo is also an option, but this too is taking the highroad in a multiplayer environment.

As for the second part,the difference between vets and newbros isn't as big as you might think. Skills only train to level V. You might spend a week maybe two training a ship and its guns to level V and you fly that ship on par with long-term players. The difference will be that the veteran has many more ships to choose from- he has more options.

Between you and me, the time to train new ships is a blessing in disguise: you learn to fly something decently before getting into something bigger. Immediately flying the big rigs is asking for expensive lossmails anyway.



You can fly a decent ship, say, a Rupture class cruiser, in three to four weeks. There'll still be auxiliary skills to train which improve the general performance of all ships, but after one month tops you should be good to go. First few weeks of training are all very short trains (2 hours, 8 hours, 1 day, stuff like that) and this is about the time you'd need to wrap your head around everything you see; setting up an overview; learning new licks; googling googling googling ... there's a bit of a learning curve, both for the player and his character.

That said, if 'grinding' is wasting time ....... then don't. Go do something you like to do- don't waste you time bud! You do not have to grind anything-- I dabble a bit in everything personally, least of all shooting rocks or rats though.



No. You "could", theoretically, skip what you call "the grind" (in reality you're just skipping "the game" though) ..... get a bunch of officer mods, get a big fat faction hull and fly it straight from Amamake to Tama. But you'd have no idea what the actual fkk you're doing.

There are no items only a credit card can buy.

You can skip plexing your account by paying real life dollars for a subscription, or you could sell those plex in-game for in-game currency; but that does not make it pay to win. It is pay to play. Whether you win or not is entirely up to you ;-)

Oh- forgot to answer a question with a realistic number.

Two weeks down the line I move to lowsec. One month in I flew tech I cruisers and attended public roams such as Cruiser's Crew.

Six months in I rode an Armageddon in the first Sukanen wars. (we won by the way ahahaha)

At the age of ten (months LOL) I found myself adrift, had tried factional warfare, wormholes and eventually wound up in nullsec. I found heaven in Utopia and it's been Paradise for a little over a year while I developed sufficient pilot savvy to get behind the wheel of faction/tech II counterparts of the cruisers that had served me well up until then.

At that point, I had sufficient support skills in navigation, engineering and various weaponsystems to make the transition; a heavy interdiction cruiser or strategic cruiser for example was still something to look forward to, but I could field a Guardian logistics cruiser at level IV -- which despite what the nay-sayers (Level V or GTFO!) may say works like a charm. I rode that thing to hell and back- lost only one to date.

Around a year and a half in game, I found I could fly pretty much anything cruiser and below from Tech 1 to tech 3, along with all battlecruisers and several battleships. For all factions. This is when the "long trains" (30 days) started coming around, and I had to pick and choose which ones interested me and which ones didn't.

...did that clarify some?

Do take into consideration that $15 USD gets you 30 days of access to the game. And you do not need to pay for expansions.

And to put $15 USD in perspective:

- a bottle of so-so wine or 6-pack of beer is about $10 and usually won't last 2 or 3 days (maybe not even a day if you're like me).
- a NICE meal at a restaurant is about $10 to $15 and won't last more than 30 minutes to an hour.
- a monthly gym membership is about $10 to $20 a month and, on average, people don't go to it more than 3 days a week for an hour or two at a time.
- a good night at the bar with friends will EASILY cost $50 and MAYBE you remember about 3-4 hours of the experience, followed by hours of pain the morning after.

In terms of entertainment cost... EVE is probably one of the cheaper options out there.



Depends on...

- your attitude towards...
---- losing
---- personal ethics
---- other people who cause problems with the above two points

- how tenacious you are

- your interpersonal skills (see: you will have to engage other players in some form or another... the better you are at having a conversation with people, the further you will go)

- how quickly you can wrap your head around various mechanics... some of which are unintuitive



Understand that there is no such thing as a "decent ship" as there is no "ship progression" the way other games have character and/or equipment progression.

Every ship is a tool that works well in certain situations and have weaknesses in other situations.

Some examples:
- a frigate is a standard "bread and butter ship." Relative to other ships... it has limited slots, limited CPU and Powergrid, and low HP. This makes it fragile and potentially easy to kill.
HOWEVER... relative to other ships a frigate is fast. Very fast. Which means that it can dictate which battles it wants to be in and which it does not. It can quickly intercept larger ships and pin them down. It can scout ahead and buzz hostiles, allowing to relay information.
And in groups... they can effectively pick apart larger vessels (think, "death by 1000 papercuts").

- Tech 2 ship generally have higher stats in some areas... but lower stats in others. They also "specialize" in some areas that Tech 1 ships are more "generalized" in... but this often comes at the cost of other abilities or even straight, combat prowess.

- A battleship has large amounts of slots, CPU, and Powergrid. It can be fitted in many ways for many purposes. But, it is slow. And has some issues dealing with multiple ships that are smaller than it. Meaning that it is vulnerable to "swarming" attacks without proper support.


TLDR; In a sense, you can begin PvPing from day 1.
Mind you... you will not be winning any "duels" or contributing much in the way of damage... and you will most likely blow up anytime someone more experienced focuses their attention on you.

But you can intercept targets (see: tackling), provide support from the rear (see: Electronic Warfare), scout (see: relay information), and be an extra body that a target has to split his/her attention between.

As you gain experience you will find ways to avoid getting killed right away... you will gain more connections that will help you build your currency reserves... you will find allies that can build you more and better stuff for cheaper... and you will learn of new ways to crush your enemies... see them driven before... and bathe in the lamentations of their carebears!



Tricky question.

While you can buy PLEX (30 day Pilot License Extensions) from CCP with real life money and sell them for in-game currency... this is not quite Pay to Win in a contemporary sense.

What PLEX is effectively doing is this:
You are paying for another person's subscription for an agreed upon amount of in-game currency.

No in-game money is generated from this.
The game itself does not generate PLEX, it must be bought by a player.
It does not work in reverse (see: you cannot sell or redeem PLEX for real life money).
In-game money can buy you many things... but it cannot buy you player experience, fitting knowledge, tactical knowledge, etc. Even a sufficiently "blingy" ship can and will die against players with a sufficiently good plan and/or numbers (even in "trash" ships).

(NOTE: PLEX was originally devised as a way to beat back Real Money Trading)


Beyond that... there are currently no items that can be bought with real life money (see: "gold ammo"). The exceptions to this being "vanity" and "account" level items.

Everything, from the lowest to the best ship/module, can be built, harvested, and/or sold by players.

I typically only play games with a monthly subscription. The reason being I want my game provider to be interested in keeping me around which means making a game that is fun to play. Free to play games typically spend most of their time marketing **** to you. I don't want to play a game that is like a full time commercial. However I have a special distaste for marketing.

As far as your comments about ship "progression" this is not a progression game. You don't move "up" through ships. Bigger is not better in this game and more expensive is not better either. You won't get any solo wins in this game in PvP until you learn the game. This game is far more about what you know and how you play than it is about what you fly.

You can participate in this game from day 1. There is no end game in Eve. You can make a difference from day 1 in Eve. However you'll probably make more of a difference as you make friends.

If you want to enjoy this game you'll have to learn to let go of everything that you have learned in other games. The assumptions that you mentioned here are flat out wrong. This is a video of an experienced PvPer starting an brand new character. He did this back when new character's started out with about 56K skill points which means that by the end of the filming of this video he probably still had less skill points than a brand new character now.

As a new player you can't expect to have the level of success that he does but the point remains that on a new character in a cheaply fit T1 frigate he was scoring wins against players on years old characters and in ships that were exponentially more expensive.

As far as if the game is worth it or not... If you are having fun playing the game then it is worth it. If you aren't then it isn't. How about if you play the game and decide for yourself if it is fun or not?

I do have to say I find your posting opinions on a game that you've never played a little off putting. It makes me feel like why should I waste my time trying to teach someone that already has their mind made up. Because one of the most impossible things to do is teach someone that thinks that they already know.

So again open your mind and let go of your preconceived notions of this game. Then you might be able to enjoy it. Play this game like it is other MMOs and you might as well not even waste your time.

I will give a few examplea of a small/new player/corp potentially having big impact - sometimes while not realising what you have done.

1. Casually kill a cyno ship in low sec - you may have never imagined it, but that could have been an exit cyno for a massive fleet, or Jump Freighter cyno for very critical/urgent move of goods. You probably won't realise the full implications, but that could be somehing a T1 frigate disrupting multi billion ISK operation, or even more than that - in any case, the least you would have done is to delay someone's op, they may not lose much, but it could be great potential annoyance. ;)

2. There was a forum post somewhere of a guy wardeccing high sec POS which ran out of fuel and forcefield was down and the corp seemed to be inactive. He posted screen shot of muliple T2 BPOs dropping from the labotory he killed with a catalyst lol.

3. You could chance suicide gank a cloaky transport with completely T1 fit gank ship, and you find that the guy was carrying full sets of max researched capital BPO.

4. You can fly 'bait' ship with cyno and join one of those public fleets as hunters, your original goal could have been a nice T3 kill or whatever, but things can escalate in all sorts of unexpected ways in eve and you could be the guy that started a massive capital fleet battle :)

These things don't happen every single day, but the beauty of eve is that even some very tiny action from your part can escalate up to crazy level. Even for high sec mission baiting, if you master the art you could end up killing a pimped to the brim mission ship in your lowly T1 ship. You could smart bomb someone's muli billion ISK implants/pod in relatively cheap set up. You could gank a high sec mining ship in your T1 catalyst and get lucky enough to loot deadspace/faction mods from a miner who made some terribly wrong decisions or went AFK.

There is a lot that can happen with low SP and very cheap gear. Possibilities are endless :D

Eve is hard work...it's not like any other game I've played.

Can you make a difference?...Having reviewed many of the replies I believe that question has been answered in many ways but I'd add another, being a motivator or contributor to the community or your corp/alliance, this is a social game and what it offers is the chance to not just win or lose but to be part of that winning, or losing as part of more than a team, encouraging others and supporting them in their day to day grinds and being the recipient of the same.

Is Eve Pay to win? As explained earlier some people will buy PLEX (game time which can be sold in game for in game money) and use this in turn to buy characters with vastly better skills but they do not understand those capabilities and as such never use them well and often lose fights to lesser skilled but more skillful opponents if you understand the distinction which in Eve is a very important one, Skills limit what you can do, being skillful, is what you can achieve with those skills.

I am in my 30s and have played and even competed at quite a high standard in many games in the past and yet after 8 years eve can still make my hands shake...sneaking past a gate camp in a frigate with far too much expensive loot in it than is sensible, jumping a capital ship in to an engagement not knowing if it will escalate. Flying a cheap interceptor or tackle frigate and chasing away people trying to kill my corp/alliance mates, being a mercenary...a real mercenary not the hollow pretenders who claim the title...stalking a target following them understanding them and then at the opportune moment...blowing them up...all of this and so much more is open to you and many of the greatest experiences and most fun events I've had in Eve came in my first 6 months in game.

Help is out there...and milk those friends for every single piece of advice you can get...most importantly...listen.

Welcome to New Eden :)

You can make a difference from a pretty early point. CCP have been pretty good about maintaining important roles for low-SP, low-ISK characters. But you'll have to be realistic. You're not going to be Sir Awesome Pwn-A-Lot after a few weeks. You can make a difference as Mr Scouty McLooksee, or That Tackle Guy or even if as just new guy in corp that's always willing to burn a few jumps and light a cyno. With zero regard to SP or ISK, you might also be the guy that makes excellent banners or propaganda or even - in my case - that guy that's always terrible at flying his ships but useful at being the PR on the forums. In EVE you can "make a difference" in ways that other games do not consider.

Most games will et you a pre-programmed goal and then tell you that you're awesome for achieving it. EVE does the exact opposite. The pre-programmed goals are essentially meaningless in terms of "making a difference" as far as other players are concerned. What will actually matter is your actual talent, motivation and energy.

You can buy aurum or PLEX with $$$. They will allow you to skip over the ISK making part of the game should you wish to do so, and by extension you can also hurry along your skill training now as well by buying skill injectors from other players. But you should be very aware that buying fancy ships and mods and even skills will only give you a very limited advantage. Without that talent, motivation and energy, you won't get far. After a while, if you're personable and a good team player, you'll add another precious resource: contacts and reputation.

tl;dr: EVE is in a strictly limited sense pay to win, but the exchange rate for trying to buy "making a difference" is very very steep indeed. Actually investing effort is much more effective.

So, without answering specific questions I'll say something about a common EVE misconception.

"You have to grind SP to get better ships and stuff, so you can't catch up to people that have been playing a while."

This is a common misconception. The way EVE's combat mechanics and ship balance work, bigger does not equal better. In general, each size class of ship or common fitting has a specific role in combat, and a specific ship class or fit that counters it. The universal piloting skills that apply to all ships are a small portion of training and are generally pretty quick.

So, those people you see that have 100 million skill points? They're not actually 95 million points STRONGER than a guy with five million in most cases. They're 95 million points more VERSATILE. Aside from the very largest ships, you can get in to full fighting shape on par with old bittervets in terms of character skills in a relatively short amount of time. Shorter still if you choose to take advantage of the new skill injectors and just buy skill points directly from other players.

The exception to the rule, capital and supercapital ships, are effectively useless without fleet support, and that fleet support consists of, you guessed it, smaller and cheaper ships. There are some edge cases like ratting carriers or pos blapping dreds, but in general, when it comes down to player versus player conflict, skill points are usually far less important than number of pilots involved, what happens to be fitted on the ships, and how well each fleet or individual player uses those ships.

You're not going to take over nullsec in a month, but you're also not going to be stuck at the bottom of the food chain just because of a lack of skill points. In truth the barriers placed before a new player are more often social than mechanical. EVE can very much be an "old boy's club" for many types of content, and successful professionals are often less likely to hire an amateur.

However, for all the crowing of said old boy's clubs, you may be suprised to find that space is very VERY big, and despite rumors to the contrary, people that control space seldom control it completely, people that claim to "own" things often have at best a tenuous grasp on them, and EVE has a long history of stalwart upstarts doing the so-called "impossible" just by applying themselves and working hard at whatever goals they set out to accomplish.

There have been some great answers in this thread, but I just wanted to give a clear answer to two of your questions that's different from what others have said.



The answer to these two questions are "Yes", and "Yes".

The game is obviously P2W in some important way. I can pay real world money to receive an in-game item (PLEX), and I can then perform a little work (a minute or two all up from login to done) to sell that item in return for a sum of in game currency (ISK). That ISK then allows me to purchase other in-game items that grant me an advantage, that I would not have been able to purchase had I not paid real world money.

A PLEX can also be traded for Aurum, which is a non-tradable microtransaction currency that can be exchanged for other items, mostly of a cosmetic nature.

As others have said, none of this creates out of the blue any item that gives some in-game advantage. The ISK I receive for selling a PLEX is ISK that has been generated or earned by another player. The items that CCP generates in exchange for Aurum are (for the most part) cosmetic in nature. There is no equivalent of 'healing potions' or other advantageous items that are produced out of the blue in exchange for real world money. The advantageous items that you can purchase for real world money are only items that other players have earned.

A group of one-day newbros can:

• Prevent targets from moving (webifying)
• Prevent targets from running away (warp disrupting)
• Prevent targets from activating speed-enhancements (scrambling)
• Prevent targets from targeting (ECM jamming, or sensor dampening)
• Drain targets energy (energy neutralizing, or nosferatu = energy draining), shutting-off their defences and often weapons, and most of the above.
• Make targets easier to hit (target painting)
• Kill enemy drones
• Create strategic warp-to points ("pings") for actively fighting fleets

New pilots can be scouts, in their small, fast, and hard to hit ships. Scouts both find targets, and also give early warning. There are commonly both rear and forward scouts, and scouting can be one of the most challenging roles (gathering the most intel quickly and accurately, then putting it in a form that can be quickly relayed and understood by a fleet commander).

My first role in a fleet was a forward scout, because I was in the smallest and fastest ship. Hardest thing I've ever done. I loved it!