EVE New Citizens Q&A

1. Yes, add skills now. Your queue should always have some skill in it, training. There is no penalty to having more skills in your head; when you die you keep them and keep on training. Useful generic skills are training your frigate and mining frigate higher, and then skills in the engineering, armor, shields, navigation, targeting categories. Keep in mind that there are extra skills available, even to Alphas, on the market; buy them from the market and inject them in your head. To see which skills are available, switch your character sheet filters to Show All Skills and then right-click all the ones that have non-yellow (grey) dots, and choose check market prices. Skills are available in all schools, and are sold by NPC vendors, so there shouldn't be any price scamming.

2. You are always open to attack, being a PVP game. In high-sec, the Concord police will kill someone who attacks you, so everyone must follow the combat rules or they get killed by police. Of course, if you're carrying 100 millions of loot in your cargo, in a weak transport ship, it's definitely worth killing you, getting destroyed by police, then looting your stuff for profit. Low-sec space has no police, but may still have some sentry guns guarding the gates and stations. Null sec space has no rules, it's free-for-all PVP, as is wormhole space.

3. Any time you have a question you can ask here. EVE University is a player corporation that's set up like a school, to offer training and guides, and their wiki pages are pretty good. You can also google "eve online guide about x subject" to find other guides, there are plenty out there. The game's been out for more than 10 years and there's all sorts of excellent websites and player-made guides on youtube and on the internet.

4. Do all the career agent missions, pick one career at a time and do all the missions. The career missions are designed to teach you things, and also shower you with free ships and money. Save the ships and you should be able to either use them, or sell them for a total approx 10 million ISK when you're done with all the career agents. You can also fly over to a different school and do them all over again, if you want. Or, you could fly over to Arnon, and do the Sisters of EVE epic story arc, for another 10-15 million ISK in gifts. That one is repeatable every 3 months.

So these should get you started and give you some cash so you can buy a few more skills and put them to training. And then you're free to play with the sand in the sandbox, build castles or go kick other people's castles over, do whatever you want. We recommend that you join a player corporation because you can then participate in their grandiose plans of building super-huge castles or whatever, and have fun without having to invent your own story. But to each his own, and you have to find a good player corp, and there are plenty of crappy ones.

Curious, is there a reason you say do only one career agent at a time? I accepted missions from all 5, went out & did them. Would sometimes have to dock and change ships/weapons, particularly for any mission that involved mining. And of course, it emphasised the importance of reading the mission description and planning ahead.

For me, as a somewhat impatient player, undocking only for one mission at a time feels very slow, makes the tutorial last twice (or more) as long.

If you know what you're doing, yeah you can combine / speed through. Newbies typically need help figuring out what's what, help with fittings, etc., so I usually advise to take it slower and do the missions sequentially, so they can ask questions in-between, figure out the market, etc.

Thank you everyone for taking the time to respond. Some very good advice in there and I appreciate it. Hopefully I'll see some of you in the game and by then know what the heck I'm doing!