EVE New Citizens Q&A

1. CCP got rid of the Learning skills and refunded everyone the points, and increased everyone's attributes so the training speed was equivalent. That's probably where the skill points came from. You will only get free skill points if they make more changes like that.

However, recently CCP added a method for other players to extract points from skills they've trained into injectors, then sell the skill injectors on the market. They're pretty expensive, obviously, but if you inject skills this way you can get points to assign to skills instantly, rather than through the monthly training.



2. Every station has a Character (appearance) Customization button, click it and you can redo your portrait. If you have a full customization unlocked, then you can change your body shape and facial features (and it gets consumed), otherwise you can just change your outfit, pose, hair color, and makeup (but you can do this as many times as you want). CCP has given a free customization in the past (when they switched to the new portraits) so you may still have it. Otherwise you can also purchase a full customization unlock from the Account Management web page. Costs RL money.



3. "Issues" don't depend on your race, they depend on the standings vs. the various NPC corporations, which you got from missions and from FW (if any). If you're neutral the NPC police won't bother you. Also, what players do doesn't depend on anything related to NPCs; players can attack you or not. Typically if your corporation isn't at war with anyone, any attackers will have to obey the engagement rules in high-sec, meaning that Concord will kill them if they just up and attack you. Suicide-ganking is still possible though; you WILL be attacked if you fly an undefended ship with a cargo full of bling.

The current war is happening out in 0.0 space, not in high-sec, and only affects members of the two sides. If you haven't joined one of the sides (as in, being a member of their alliance or corp), you will operate with the normal rules and the normal protections based on whether you're in high-sec, low-sec, or null space.



4. High-sec is approximately as safe as before. There are a lot more suicide-gankers (a large group of them belong to an alliance named CODE), who love to attack transport ships, freighters, and mining vessels. Concord does come to your aid, but they bring sufficient numbers and are organized well enough that even with Concord they can still get you. So, follow the general "safety" rules:

- don't fly with expensive cargo in your ship

- don't turn on the autopilot and go afk; you can set a route and then manually tell your ship to "jump" to each gate

- don't fly a ship that you can't afford to lose; if the ship costs all your money or even half your total money, don't fly it

- beware the pipelines between the regions (Amarr to Jita for example); they have 0.5 and 0.6 -rated systems in the middle of the pipeline where Concord is slow and a lot of ganking happens.

- scout the route first

- use tanked ships, don't use industrial ships to carry small expensive stuff, use a tanked combat ship instead



5. Personally, I would sell whatever ships I have, at the local market (Amarr, you said?), and then move just with a shuttle or frigate to wherever my new area. This is because you can find ships everywhere; there's nothing unique about them. Keep in mind that you can have Jump Clones now; use them as teleportation points between distant areas, and set up a cache of ships at each area, so you can just jump over, get in a ship, and do business locally, then next day jump back, get in a ship at the destination, and do business locally.

http://updates.eveonline.com/ is a good place to get an overview about what is new. Very highly recommended for returnees. Much better than reading patch notes.