EVE New Citizens Q&A

Lots of stuff, you can read up on changes to the game here: https://updates.eveonline.com/

1. No more upgrading your clone after a pod death, so feel free to PVP in big ships or small ships or whatever suits your fancy. You'll only lose the ship, you won't lose any skills (well, except if you fly T3 cruisers).

2. You can extract useless skillpoints, and you can inject skillpoints that other people have extracted. The system is very expensive, but it allows you to "fix" your character if you wish. Character Bazaar prices have adjusted to the value of "extractable" points of a character, rather than the previous formula based on subscription costs to train.

3. Tiericide - a lot of the T1 ships, from frigates to battleships, have been improved a lot, to perform closer to T2 levels. As a result, a lot of the previously "newbie" ships are quite deadly and much more viable now. Ship modules have also been rebalanced and renamed to make a bit more sense.

4. A number of T3 ships and exploration ships have been added to the game, with unique gimmics / tricks that may make them fun to fly. CCP is about to change some of the mining ships and fleet boosting ships in the next expansion, due next week.

5. CCP has introduced ship SKINs (paint jobs), and some are popular. Most, however, are quite expensive, and CCP has chosen to restrict color schemes to "dark and gritty" rather than bright colors.

6. CCP has introduced a whole slew of personal deployable structures, from mobile depots to mobile tractor-beam units to siphon units (steal moon goo). So you have more options for refitting in space and looting now, where you can carry some of these things in your ship cargo, deploy them to take advantage of their abilities, then scoop back to cargo and move on.

7. CCP is in the process of introducing player citadels, to eventually replace the POSes with fully functional stations that we can deploy and people can dock, even capital ships. They're very expensive, but they're popping up everywhere, and will eventually replace POSes and possibly even NPC stations. You should read up on the various blogs regarding citadels.

8. Because of the changes to the various ships, the current meta and player preferences are towards flying smaller ships, typically up to cruiser-size, and to use higher tech ships (T2, T3 ships), to apply high damage while remaining very very mobile. Battleships aren't that popular, nowadays.

9. Brave Newbies demonstrated that we can have fun recruiting a large number of newbies and taking them to 0.0 to take space and get involved in wars, so most major alliances now fund their own "newbie" programs, from Karma Fleet to Pandemic Horde to Newbie Collective, etc., with almost open recruiting and daily organized ops, mostly for fun. "Free for all" pickup fleets, such as Bombers Bar, Spectre Fleet, etc., that operate on NPSI (not purple, shoot it) principles, are also quite popular; you join the fleet and go roaming, everyone is a target, all sins possibly forgiven the next day, in the name of fun.

10. CCP has removed the Evelopedia wiki, so we're relying more on player guides and fan sites such as the EVE University wiki for guides and tutorials. There are some very nice player-created resources out there, and with the changes that CCP has made to the in-game tutorials, getting newbies interested and into the fun parts of the game has become an increased responsibility for the veterans.

I don't always recommend TMC, but when I do, it's this article.