EVE New Citizens Q&A

Well... I understand how fitting is important.

But you have to have the skills to make the fit work too. Or to use the proper equipment. To me it feels like there is a certain set of skills... particularly fitting skills and skills to get you into the most crucial T2 equipment for the ships you fly with early on.

the list of truly necessary skills is probably smaller than most of us think it is though.

There's organization in the skill system. You can categorize the skills by:

1. Ship skills (Spaceship Command group), these unlock new ships for you.
2. Weapon skills (Gunnery, Missiles, Drones), train only the weapons that your ship uses.
3. Support skills (Engineering, Armor, Shields, Targeting, Electronics, Navigation) these make all your ships fly better.
4. Miscellaneous (Industry, Science, Reprocessing, Trading, Planetary, Corporate, Neural, Social) - train as needed.

If you press the ^ arrow to reconfigure the character sheet to hide your portrait and shrink the skill categories to a single row of icons, the skill categories are ordered as above, from left to right.

Ship skills typically follow the progression lines shown in the Ship Chart in-game.

Weapon skills typically have:
- one main skill that is a prerequisite
- one skill per weapon that you want to unlock
- two skills per weapon to unlock T2 versions of that weapon
- weapon support skills that increase range, accuracy, damage, and performance of all weapons of that type.

Support skills have various degrees of importance. Overall, you only need to train skills to 3 to unlock T2 defense modules (T2 armors, T2 shields), so that's nice (it used to be required to train to 5 a few years ago). In general, the bigger the ship that you're flying, the higher you should train the support skills; 2 is ok for frigates, 3 for cruisers, 4 for battleships, and capital ships are so costly that a lot of people go for 5 to minimize the chances of loss.

Miscellaneous skills are train what you want. Industry, for example, you can train the basic Industry and Mass Production skills to give you more than 1 factory line, just in case you need to make some ammo or the odd ship or whatever, and not worry about the specialized production skills at all. Trading, it's probably sufficient to trade Trade and Retail to get a few more market slots, and then Accounting and Broker Relations to reduce taxes a bit. Planetary requires all the skills at 4 for good results, unfortunately. Social is nice if you want to manage your standings and offset the side-effects of FW or missions.

In any case, once you read a few ship fittings guides and get the gist of it, the skills will make a bit more sense too. Ships are limited by their slot layouts, and by their power grid and CPU, and the skills are designed to give bonuses to fit more or better gear into the ships.

Each ship that you unlock is the equivalent of a character in other MMO's; the ships get abilities from the modules installed, and they're designed to be tanks, DPS, electronic warfare (crowd control), logistics (healers), fleet boosters (buffs/debuffs), scouts, industrial (gatherers), etc.

Each character is the equivalent of a "legacy" of characters in other MMO's; you can basically have all the roles in a single character, it just takes time. WoW or SWTOR may only take 3 months to get to max level with a single character, but it takes a couple years to max out all classes (including end-game gear/purples), reach Legacy level 60 or whatever. So EVE is equivalent: you can do an "everything" character in a few years training one role at a time, or you can feel free to open 6 accounts and do tank on the first, dps on the second, crowd control on the third, and so on, all at once within 3-6 months.

I guess what's confusing is there's no log-off / log-on process to remind you that now you're no longer training the DPS skills and have switched to the healer / repair skills. People seem to want to train all the skills and can't seem to limit themselves to just a useful subset, train the rest later.

Sorry but I cant let this go.

Took a look at the ingame shiptree.

If you want to be good at flying a Leviathan
you need skills worth 1333 days!

4 years to fly a ship? Admit it fanboys, this
cant be right.
Wouldnt this game be more awesome with
more variety in ships?

Edit: thats not even worst case.

You are correct that you can't seem to "let this go" but what "this" is seems to be more relevant.

Titans are intentionally a very long train. When the game was first made the Devs thought that there would be very few Titans in game. They are insanely expensive, difficult, and time consuming to build. Until very recently ( the introduction of citadels a couple months back ) you could not dock Titans and thus they were essentially coffins meaning once you got inside one you were in it until you got blown up.

As such nearly all, if not all, Titan pilots have been alts. Alts that did not get used much. Further most Titan pilots would just sit inside a PoS while they were logged on and provide bridges to cyno beacons for other pilots that were actually doing stuff. This is not deep and engaging game play that any pilot is looking to commit to on his / her main.

Eve is not a linear "progression" MMO. There is no end game in Eve. Years from now you will still be flying the very same cheap T1 small and medium ships into PvP that you are flying now. So please explain to me what aspects of Eve you are missing out on by not being able to fly a Titan in your first year of gameplay? After you answer that then look at how expensive one is and tell me how long you think it would take you to be able to afford one. After you answer that I want you to tell me how long you think you would need to play the game for it to make sense for you to jump a Titan into battle.

It seems to me that what you are having a hard time letting go of is the MO of other games. Eve is very different from other MMOs and if you are going to enjoy Eve for what it is you need to let go of the preconceived notions that have been taught to you by other games. I have said before that to both enjoy Eve and be good at Eve you first need to either let go of or maybe even unlearn everything that other MMOs have taught you.

I can't say this enough Eve is not a progression MMO. You are not going from Frigs to dessies to cruisers to BC etc.... You can participate in pretty much every aspect of this game on day one. You can contribute in a meaningful way on day one. The only thing holding you back in this game is you.

The only thing that most Eve pilots who have had any experience with Titans like about Titans is either having access to use the jump bridge of one or being on a KM for one. Both of those things you can do with a Titan on day one.

So I suggest you quit focusing on what ships that you can not yet fly and start focusing on the knowledge and experience that you don't yet have.

https://eve-central.com/home/quicklook.html?typeid=3346
Just as a side note maybe you might want to wait until you have 6 Billion disposable isk laying around to spend on the skillbook before you start whinning about the long training time to get into the ship.

ugh, I'm getting beyond the point of wanting to be helpful here and would rather just make fun of you.

Some things are supposed to be hard. It's not that complicated. Your whole "oh I get it, bigger isn't always better" "I want bigger and better!" is... embarrassing. Memory of a goldfish. Rather than get into why titans, and most capitals, suck, I'm just going to say that your brain isn't right on this matter. Find fun where you can get it, and find something that's not imaginary to be angry about.

Im hopeless, I know.

Okay forget the level cap thing and instead have a specific
amount of skillpoints that you can have?
Like fitting a ship, use your points visely.

Also doesnt the skillinjectors open
for that pay 2 win (dominate) direction?

@ergherhdfgh

Watched til 17 mins. Maan, I felt like
a ******. No clue what Im doin.

I know Im a crybaby but thank you everyone for your patience.

I read all the answers but sometimes its like hebrew, especially
those videos of pros makin it look easy, like changing socks.

I could apply for the dev. team and make this game better...

You are far from hopeless just learning.

My first year in this game was a rough ride for me. Mostly because I had a hard time letting go of things that I learned in WoW. I was playing this game as if it were WoW and this game kicked my ass. This is mostly why I forum warrior here in the NC Q&A because I want to help new converts get past it quicker than I did.

As far as pay to win that might be true if:
- This were a free to play game, which it is not and
- Skill points determined the winner in PvP

Eve is a subscription based game with an unlimited duration free trial period. I know CCP tries to sell it as if it were F2P but it's not it is a subscription game.

Combat in this game is about counter's and match ups. Every ship and pretty much every module and even every specific load out has situation where it can dominate and also it's exact counter. Winning at PvP in this game has a lot to do with know when to fight and when to run. Most PvP encounters are won or lost before the first shot is fired. There is an awful lot of meta gaming here. Meaning that you typically have to convince your opponent that he has a chance to win while at the same time making sure that he doesn't. Keeping in mind that he is trying to do the same.

Balance in this game is not about making sure that each ship has an equal chance to win against every other ship. It's about making sure that each ship has enough situations where it is good and enough where it is not.

You also have to keep in mind that there is no queueable PvP with a set number of players against the exact same number of players of the same level with similar gearscores or ratings. You can play the Damsel in distress in this game just to have a bunch of friends jump in and join the fight as soon as you get the other guys to commit to combat. You can pick a solo fight against someone in a ship that you think would be a fairly even match for you but there is nothing stopping him from providing a warp to point for a fleet of 20 of his closest friends.

Yea, it is insane for those living outside a game, thats likely a pretty normal response. I dont plan a week ahead on what I'm going to do on the weekend, never mind planning for a video game. Eve is an old game and it has some old mmo bad habits in it's mechanics. you are getting some fanboy sunshine blown up your rear a bit here. Having said that, also getting lot's of straight information and great advice.
Realistically you have to think about what you want to do, I like to explore and sometimes do a L4 here and there, so my focus has been on flying a Machariel for L4's and cruisers for exploration. You figure what it is you like and aim in that direction, if you want to speed up training I would suggest get a Mach and do L4's or join a corp in more lucrative space to make isk. That brings me to why you could use that isk, if training times freak you out.
2 words, skill injectors, it makes the insane possible. that 30 day training no longer looks so bad when you can take a couple 8 day training chunks out of it during the training duration by buying injectors. But whatever you do to make that isk, do what you enjoy so it doesn't become a repetitive grind.

As far as the game needing more ships, it really has enough with many different roles, there seems to be a big gap in progression where going up to a BS and pirate class is steady but going to T2 and those interesting ships is an eternity(for an average human). But again, skill injectors have you covered there, it was a pretty brilliant addition by the devs to open up the game this way. so dont fret about duration for now just get skills to 4 with a few 5's and you should be pretty functional in around a month.