EVE New Citizens Q&A

As this is my first post, I would like to say hello to this rather unique community(more on that later :P)

Then, no matter what I write, it's not a rant, but rather a call for help from a disoriented and lost player :/

So, let's get started:
I began playing EVE a couple of days ago and since then, even though I did play a fair amount of time, the time spent playing was only about 30% of the time invested into EVE, everything else went into reading. FAQs, guides, tutorials, you name it. As most of new players, probably, I noticed that Alphas are severly limited, and as some, I heard about possible ways to make enough ISK to PLEX your account. Now, so far so good, but I ran into a couple of problems:

First of all, is it reasonable to start thinking about it already, when I didn't even get to the limitations of my alpha? I could spend another 2-3 weeks probably learning all alpha skills and the game mechanics and all there is to know.

Next, most of the guides are quite old, some of them are more than 5 years old, and back then, at least from what I know, the ingame price for PLEX was significantly lower, not to mention all the updates that must have come out in the meantime ... so I was wondering, how much of what is written in these guides still holds true?

Basically, from my understanding, you have these possibilities to make money:

1. Mining
2. Exploration
3. Missions
4. Ratting
5. PvP

Seems quite a lot. So, at first I thought, I'd do mining, since I could do sth else while my venture keeps collecting ressources. Now, according to this:
[url]https://levelskip.com/mmorpgs/How-to-make-money-in-Eve-Online[/url]
you could make several millions per hour and if I make the math for my venture (about 900k per load, 10-15mins to fill it up), it seems to work out decently. Now, I have a couple of problems with that: 1. Even in 0.8, you will have pirates attacking you after 2-3 minutes. Well, ok, get some Hobogblins, a medium shield, you're fine. Except I have the luck to always encounter some Despoilers/Saboteurs who jam me non-stop, so as long as they're alive, I can't mine. That's about +1 minute for each mining run.

More importantly however, it's not like you fly into the next asteroid belt, target the asteroid and you can go take a nap. It's more like fly into one belt and find it empty, repeat previous step about 20 times, find one that is crowded AF, repeat that about 10 times, finally find one that you can mine and find that the asteroids deplete instantly (Pyroxeres and Plagioclase) and repeat thi step about 20 times again. Depending on how many systems you have to visit you can easily get up to 20 minutes of travelling only. That turns a 10 min run into a 30-35 min run, but this is something that nt a single guide ever mentions.

So, mining was boring, but not calm enough that I could just do something else in the meantime. So I thought, let's do explorations. In the words of MandaloreGaming "Exploration is good because unlike most other activities you need a brain to do it well". Could be something for me, couldn't it?

This guy:
[url]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVgVbtW9smQ&t=1105s[/url]
Made it seem quite easy. Then I logged in, and went out to find wormholes. Now, first, it takes you about 15 minutes to find a good system without too many people in it(more people = higher chance someone might follow you), then you jump into the wormhole and you find about 2 Data/Relic sites per hole, and all of them are sleeper sites. I found 24 sites in total so far and not a single pirate site. Thugh life, bitches ... Let's sum up: About 2 hours and I made exactly 0 ISK. Well, that was easy.

HiSec sites yield about 100k-1mil ISK and theyre easier to find, but HiSec is so crowded, you will always find at least 2 other people in the site that you just scanned down. So statistically, 1 in 3 times you will get nothing, which results in about 66k-700k per site, so assuming you find 2 sites per hour, you get 120k-1.4mil per hour. That's OK, but nowhere near enough to even dream about PLEXing.

LowSec is almost as crowded as HiSec, but unlike HiSec everyone here seems to want to kill you like there is no tomorrow. The loot is a little bit better, I fould 2-5mil in the sites, so technically you could do about 10 mil per hour. The problem with this calculation is that it assumes a) that you will not lose your ship, and b) that you will be able to complete every site you encounter.

Now, first, you WILL lose ships. Bookmarking locations in empty space is nice, but if you want to explore you will have to visit those sites, and after that you will have to jump through a gate, both locations that are easy to access. And sadly, being cautious or fast is not enough. An alpha-heron fitted for exploration is often times a one-hit for the monstrosities that are hunting newbs like me. And suddenly you're down 1.5mil.

But even if you make it out of a gank alive, there's no guarantee you will make money. If you're about to loot your container and someone jumps you, you GTFO and you live but you gained nothing, you just lost time. Or if you ****** up the minigame, which happens from time to time especially as an alpha, since you dont have all the fancy stuff that Omegas benefit from.

There's probably no numbers on this, but a safe estimate would be abut 1-2mil per hour in LoSec if I had to guess. Together with the stress level it's not worth it at all and same goes for mining there.

500 characters remaining, I wont make it, so I will add another post just below.

Nice write up and welcome to Eve.

Probably your biggest mistake is trying to do all those things in systems that have a lot of people in them. I suggest getting away from major travel routes / mission hubs and go check out dead end cul-de-sac / pipeline systems. You can view them in the Star Map and check their stats for amount of population, amount of jumps, amount of ship kills, etc.


This game takes time to not only learn the basics of what's available, it also takes time to develop your character so yeah, I think you're rushing it.

As for your observations, you're partly right and you just might have had a bad run of luck, probably from rushing it. Definitely don't get discouraged, just decide what career path you actually want to do and then specialize in it before moving onto another career path.

PLEX, in my opinion, isn't a good goal to set for a young character. There's way too many other items needed to develop your character and the ISK spent on PLEX for Omega game time would be better suited in purchasing those items. Eve Online is a game where you're suppose to have fun, not work and worry about making ISK to purchase PLEX for game time.

I suggest paying a subscription so you can then spend your ISK on the other items needed to advance and develop your character. After your character is established and making ISK profit, then you can purchase PLEX with ISK for game time..

Anyway, I hope you stick with Eve and have a long rewarding career.


DMC

1 - To be brutally honest here the basic answer is yes you are rushing things. EvE has a huge learning curve compared to other games and my personal opinion is that it will take you several months to get a basic grasp of what there is to do and which of those activities best suits what you want from the game of EvE. My advice for now is to sit back, forget that plex(at least for now), explore around to see what you like and find a good area to do it in, talk to people in game, and most importantly have fun. Then worry about that plex.

2. A little of both I think.
Luck has a role to play in your adventures in EvE, let's take hacking sites as an example. They spawn at downtime and stay in place until someone clears them. After they are cleared a timer starts at the end they re-spawn. If you are lucky you hit these sites after they re-spawn but before anyone else can find them.
On other hand some of your observations like people in low sec wanting to kill you are spot on.
Again just putting time into the game and experimenting with what there is and in others areas will help.

3. Depends on your interpretation. to me the real question is are you having fun?
If you are having fun while trying to earn sufficient ISK to buy a plex then your goal is realistic.
On the other hand if every time you log into the game to play you are spending all of your time grinding to earn ISK but not having much fun then you have unreasonable expectations.

In the end this is a game and you should play it for fun, not to try and plex an account.
If you cannot afford to pay a monthly sub and still want to play EvE then nul sec is your best / easiest option to make the ISK required to plex every month but that comes with some penalties as well which leads us back to the forget the plex for not, get out and explore all that EvE is and see what you want to do and where you want to do it.

Mining is still one of the easiest ways for new characters to make some ISK. There are systems in high sec that are empty or have very few character in them, I suggest you find one and park your Venture there. No mining especially in high sec will not make you space rich, but mining as a part of what you do in EvE can provide you with a steady income, income you can then use to explore other avenues of making ISK.

If you do not want to specialize in one aspect of EvE and like me want to experiment, explore and do whatever you want to do at the moment it may be hard to make enough ISK to reliably plex your account even as an Omega. I know for me I always find something else I want to do competing with the time needed to grind for a plex, so in the end I simply gave up and gladly pay my subs every month just so I can do what I want, when I want to do it.

Yea, I heard of this way, too. But how did MandaloreGaming put it in his Eve review? "This is for people who like Truck simulator" :D
To be honest, I would not like to spend my free time like that :)

Each to their own.

The trading will make you read a lot and you will eventually dive into NPC corp lore. And you may find yourself stories behind each NPC corp which is interesting by itself.
This game has 14 years of history in it. Most of it is buried but available.

You can also simply roam around and look for readily discovered sites where you can destroy hostile NPCs for bounties.

As for the reviews, nah, I'm only quoting them where they find better words to portray something than I do.

and youre right, main thing is to have fun. And I simply cannot imagine myself having fun with ferrying around goods from one trade-hub to the next.

Well, positive mental attitude pays out it seems.
Found my first pirate site in WH space, got 17 mil out of it and didn't die

You were right about not getting discouraged too fast

Wow, you sure did take your time here :)

Thanks for the link.

Also, that was not really what I meant by Alphas just being plain useless in fights. My point was rather that the smaller your ship and the worse your equipment the worse your chances of survival in general. Sure, you can offset that to some degree with pure skill, but that applies more to a 1v1 situation than a cluttered fight. Also, check this out:
[url]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voDWU5fmVP0[/url]
Now if that would be me in a Heron, I would have died instantly.
Also, since I'm a new player it is very unlikely for me to outskill anyone that will try to kill me.

Which brings up a question: How can you train that? Eve has only a handful flight options like "Approach", "Orbit", etc. and the weapons system is quite simple: Lock target, get in range and you hit him. It's not like I can dodge bullets or sth :/ So the main skill to survive is hit that MWD as fast as humanly possible?

What I find hysterical is people write answers to questions for newbies, expecting newbies to know what they are talking about. I bet you the OP has no clue about some of the answers people have given at all..