EVE New Citizens Q&A

At first in eve its tempting to want to try everything: You want to mine and build (or craft as some wow transfer students call it initially) your own ships, mission run, live in worm hole space because you read a neat article about it, etc etc. You've got skills training left right and center for refining, for guns, for missiles, for that cool looking interceptor. You've got aspirations to get into lvl4 missions, and at the same time corner some undeveloped section of the market.

My advice is this, focus on one area initally: missions. When you first start out its the easiest way to make isk, and while doing this learn about the other areas of the game. I learnt the hard way that all those hours sunk into skilling for my first hulk were worthless as I could earn more doing missions in a raven.

Sink skill points into boosting a progressive line of combat ships first (eg kestrel, caracal, drake, raven), and their related weapon system, in this case missile skills, as well as some social skills to advance you up the npc corp standings faster. Those skillpoints will never be wasted. Tech 2 strip miners, you might later wish you hadn't bothered with. Don't cross train races at this point, if you play the game long enough you most probably will end up doing so. But save that for when all those core skills to do with cap, extending you shield, battlecruiser, etc are all at lvl 5. It may seem like ages, but its worth it in the long haul.

People will tell you fly this race, or this race is better for pvp. Its a never ending arguement. The fact of the matter is early in the game a well skilled focused player will bring more to a gang, than one trying to get into both a hurricane and an abaddon simultanously.

Get a good bit of experience playing the game before delving into other areas besides missions, you can sink alot of isk, your free time, and skillpoints into something only to realise, oh dear, I was earning more isk per hour running lvl 3's in my drake. One exception being pvp, once you can fly a frigate with some mediocre lvl 4 skills, and understand some basic game mechanics like session timers you'll add to any fleet.

Always have a good mission runner ship and agent in empire to fall back on, loose as many ships as you want, grind and fit out an expensive WH plexer for example, but always have that one ship and an agent to return to so you can grind up more isk if you next big throw of the dice doesn't work.

And above treat Jita local like the spam filter in your email inbox, ignore it completely. Don't even read it, no good can come of clicking on a spam mail, and the same is true of all local contracts.

Get ready to die! A lot!
:D
Ignore these 'don't take from yellow can' messages...what they mean is; 'If you take from a can, be aware of the possible consequences.'
This covers a lot, actually; shoot, buy, steal, fly whatever and go wherever you want, just try to be aware of the possible consequences. Eve has little in the way of morality ( excepting what players choose or can enforce with power ) but it really can have devastating and entertaining consequences.

First,

If CCP announces that normal daily downtime is going to be longer for some sort of update, maintenance, etc...

Set a LONG Training Skill

...things happen and unfortunately the "hamsters" stop spinning the wheels once in a while.

Second,

If you are unsure about what to train (new characters always have lots of short time frame skills), find a skill that takes longer than 24 hours and set it up at the END of your training queue.

You can always add/remove short training time skills above it. This gives you flexibility of ALWAYS having something training while you plan your character

Third,

Have Fun! The Universe is YOURS!!!

I made that mission even better. My first character was a caldari (CCP should REALLY have made the amarr/minnie image-ry more awesome than some monks walking around a temple somewhere/some ferals living on a pile of rust that didn't even have a cockpit in it, should have featured pewpew lasers and loadsaguns images more) and fresh from being a warcrack addict, I thought that I could shoot that brutix parked 5km up from SAK HQ with all the drones out. I found out about CONCORDOKKEN twice, and then failed the villard wheels mission because my stuff got blown up :(

why'd you get rid of it ccp? villard wheels are what made newb corp chat so much fun

at least we still have THE DEVICE!

Just cause you can get that next lvl mission dosent mean you should do it ^^ helps to make a friend and do the mission together join my Corp "the Dex" we will help too

If you jump right into pvp and keep lossing SP's it means you just spent your first year never updating your bloody clone.

Yes I did that for my first year lossing sp's every time I got poded becouse I did not update my clone.

So update your clone and stay on top of it. Hell if I get with in 1mil of the cap of my clone I update it now lol.

1. Train the core competency skills early, I spent a good long time not being able to fit most of what I wanted because I only paid attention to the ship command skills and weapons.

2. Just because you can fly a ship doesn't mean you can do anything with it. Learn to fit your ship for what you want to do. PVE? Fit for the mission. PVP? Change your fit or you'll probably lose fast.

Your drones can be controlled using keyboard shortcuts. There are various other keyboard shortcuts which will make your life so so so much easier.
I only flew Gallente drone boats for two months before I found out

Look for a nice corp as soon as you can. If it turns out they suck, just leave and find a better one.

Best guide to EVE, if it's too good to be true, you're going to get scammed/betrayed/blown up/ransomed/robbed.

Probably repeating most of the above:

1) Avoid Rancer like the plague, and don't be a clever arse thinking you can sneak through it at 4am GMT. Americans are there. Americans are waiting. To shoot you in the face.

2) Join a decent Corp as quickly as you can. Improves your game immeasurably.

3) Avoid mining unless you have a very high boredom threshold.

4) Don't break your arm building a garden wall, as you won't be able to play the game for a while. Although, it does make waiting for Heavy Missiles V to complete much easier.

If you see ISK-making opporturnity which requires initial investment, never go for it unless you can afford to lose that initial investment. There are many kinds of scams around, and it takes time to learn them all. So don't fly what you can't afford to lose and also don't invest what you can't afford to lose.

Also: Don't read Jita-local. It is full of scams and at least in the beginning you most likely won't have enough knowledge to understand them all. I lost 300 mil when I thought I understood it better than scammer ...

There was contract in Jita local selling certain rare item for big sum, maybe 400 mil, and it was advertised as great deal. Of course I knew contracts in Jita-local are usually scams, so I checked market price of that item. Someone was selling the item there for only 300 mil, and I also saw buy order at over 300 mil. So I realized that contract was overpriced and I could make quick profit if I instead buy it from market at 100 mil cheaper price, and then sell.

So I bought it, and tried to sell. But I couldn't. I doublechecked that buy order, and realized that I need 9 of those items before I can sell and of course there weren't so many items in whole region. Checking market history I saw that the item I now had was only worth maybe 20 mil ISK. (Later I learned about Margin Trading scamming, and that even with 9 such items I could not have sold them.)