EVE New Citizens Q&A

Also, as per recovery of your marbles
Here's a post from my old martini drinking CEO linking to various blog posts he has made over the years that are legitimately useful and informative.
Read them and become a predator yourself (or at the very least better prey)

Yes people are friendly, but... like a chess player can be your buddy and very friendly and still "kill" all your pieces and checkmate you. It's not that he hates you, that's the game. You can totally be in a situation where someone very friendly gives you advice, to help you out: "Don't fly that ship fitted like that, it's too easy to destroy it, here, let me show you *boom* see how easy that was for me?" You learn something = that person doesn't hate you.

Sometimes people kill you on purpose, to see your reaction. GOOD PVP corp, everyone wants to join it, they don't accept applications. They see you, you look like a newbie, they kill your ship. If you run to the forums to whine and complain, you're not going to be of any use to them. If on the other hand you say "well you got me fair and square, how did you do that" or "what should I do to not get killed so fast" you may get an invitation. Because destroying your ship was the recruitment interview.

Applications to join a corp are useless, people can lie on them and you can't tell the good players from the bad in any way from just the application. We're sneaky here, you get put to the test quite a lot; people want to see your true personality, because we don't recruit classes (healers, tanks, etc.), anyone can train any skills, so we recruit based on personality and maybe trust.

But typically there is no trust. Corp members can totally steal a corp's assets, spy for the enemies, possibly even attack and kill corpmates. It's a realistic "gritty" PVP game. If you're good at PVP and get 1000 kills, it means 1000 other people sucked and lost their stuff. We can't all be winners, in fact the majority lose.

The point is, if you lose a fight, it's a game, just get another ship. Do some mining or missions, build up some millions of ISK so when you lose your next frigate, you have 5 more waiting for you in the hangar. And learn to avoid being an easy prey, even if you're an industrialist or PVE player.