® EspaceSociety Archive

New Player

Before you go any further: YOU ARE NOT ALONE. EVE HAS A HUGE LEARNING CURVE. Find friends (smiling or not) to help you. The complexity that drives you crazy at first will keep you entranced with the game for years. Worth it? Speaking for myself, I can’t even be bothered to play other games anymore. I played a certain MMO involved with worlds and wars until the day I discovered and downloaded EVE.

I really hope this is useful to you.

Oh, and these are instructions on building characters for the long term.

For those of you specifically looking for info on the Smiling Friends Social Club itself, read the rest of the stickies in the recruitment section. New or old player, we can find you placement in a corp. We don’t care if you use your powers for good or evil, just that you have them and use them.

Speaking of which, I can hear you thinking “Now how do I play this game?”

I’m glad you asked. Well…..

Go to this site and read five articles

Occupations in EVE

First the article about occupations available in EVE. You will have many more than just one.

www.eve-wiki.net/index.php?title=Occupations

Ships of the Four Empires

Then each of the four articles about the ships of the four factions: Amarr, Caldari, Gallante, Minmatar. There really isn’t any difference between these four NPC empires for players, except for roleplaying purpoese, other than their ships. The race of your character only means you start with that empire’s ships. You can add more at any time. You want to know about how the four types of ships suit different playing styles early in your character in case you want to switch before you put lots of skill points into something that might not suit how you play the game. Ideally you’d know before you start your character and choose the race that uses the ship type for you.

You really don’t want to add even one other ship type until way way later in your character’s career. After a certain point its expected for pvp characters but that’s many millions of skill points away.

Fitting your Ship

EVE is meant to have a bewildering variety of equipment with which to modify your ship including ammo types, even rigs to do permanent changes in your ship. Ask the more experienced players in your corp as to what you should do NOW in order to survive today’s merry adventures and take a look at the link below.

wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Ship_fitting

Specialist vs the all around character (Industrial VS PvP)

I am of the opinion that EVE is best played with specialist characters. You do best choosing your sub specialty within the two fields of PvP or Industry quickly. Now others disagree and many point to the successful all around characters they play and I do not deny this. But in EVE you are up against a lot of people who play specialist characters until they get very far in the game, when it could be argued that they are not at such a disadvantage. Also given how EVE characters train skills, it takes a lot of Real Life time to become highly skilled in even one thing. Unless your heart just won’t beat right without a character that does both things from the start, find one thing and learn the skills to do it very well before you start spreading yourself around.

Naming your Ship

Always rename your ship to anything that does not include your character’s name (The default name when you upnackage a ship is “(your name here)’s ship. Make your ship acitive and right click to change the name.

CSPA Service Charge

When you start your character the default setting is to charge anyone 2,800 ISK to send you an EVE mail (to stop spammers) Remove this entirely or be a jerk and make the charge 10 million. Some people will actually not check before they send you the EVE mail. Only recommended if you want to infuriate people and never get EVE mails though. Click on the upper left corner of your evemail (settings) and set the amount people pay to contract you to 0.

wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/CSPA#Communication_Settings

Skills and When to Train Them

EVE Characters train 24 hours a day 7 days a week. You buy skill books and inject the skills. You place skills in your training queue and learn them in that order. All skills have levels you can train them to, one to five. Not many skills are worth getting to 5 but almost every skill, if it is worth having at all, is worth getting to 4.

wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Skill_training

wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Skills_%2528Useful_threads%2529

wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Skills_guide

As a long term player, think in terms of a foundation that allows you highest performance in the skills that you use most often, and later on training up your more specialized skills.

Get all these to 5 as soon as you can no matter where you are headed. Not that you study no skills at all until all these are at 5, but you really just can’t think of all skills as being equal. These skills below were chosen because they effect everything else you do, (Cap, CPU, Speed) and because they give you hit points.

Electronics Engineering Energy Systems Operation Energy Management Shield Management Shield Operation Mechanic Hull Upgrades Navigation Spaceship Command

Skills to get to 4 ASAP no matter where you are headed would be the navigation skills. Everyone needs speed.

EVEmon

Now that you know the basic differences between the ships available and have some idea about the occupation you want to follow you need the add on EVEmon. I know. Something else to learn that isn’t even the game. But using evemon you can plot your training by ship, items, certificate, occupation. A character in EVE is always training and evemon allows you to create multiple plans spanning as many years as you want. I love EVEmon.

evemon.battleclinic.com/

Neural Remap

Strictly speaking Neural remapping isn’t a very first step but you need to know about it from the very start.

Neural Remapping allows you to allocate your attribute points to different attributes. We all get one free when we start our characters, and one per calandar year (yes, every 365 terrestrial days) after that. Long term you will do best with roughly equal attributes because you will be learning many different things, although charisma is generally considered the least useful of the attributes. Do NOT NOT NOT remap before you have installed Evemon, a very powerful add on that allows you to plan your training.

DON’T DO A NEURAL REMAP BEFORE YOU CONSULT EVEMON. You start with two. But after you use those two, you only get one a year. Yep. That’s a real 365 day year. I am so sorry I ever touched this before I used evemon. Using evemon you can test out ideal remaps for all kinds of training programs, in year segments. The right remap can take as much as months off a particular year’s training, allowing you to learn so much more in the same time.

EVE Fitting Tool

Another excellent program that allows you to put together different ship fits.

www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=548883

Market Interface Screen

Where you buy and sell stuff in the area you are in. There’s a button in the Neocom. MAKE SURE YOU DO NOT HAVE YOUR MARKET WINDOW SET TO “SHOW ONLY AVAILABLE.” You want to be able to see and search for all items in your market window. Actually your market window is your great shortcut for info on anything bought and sold in the game including training prerequisites.

wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Market_guide

Multiple Characters

Most of the people who play this game play multiple characters with multiple accounts. The pace of the game allows this. During your 37 jump trip for a pack of chewing gum, you cvan switch over to your other character. The key to doing this successfully is playing in windows mode.

To get into window mode hit Esc, then Display & Graphics Tab, the button on the upper left choose windows

Travel Time

The game is designed so that travel time is a major limiting and stabilizing factor. Travel time is key to the whole economy. For example: you can quickly, using web sites and scanners determine exactly where the resources you seek are located. The major limiting factor becomes getting to them and getting them back to where you can use them. Travel time stabilizes because it makes it predictable how long a fleet will take to reach point A from point B. Imagine the chaos if EVE was played using a technology that allowed us all to go from one end of the galaxy to the other in minutes. This can be boring, especially if you are traveling through safe areas only. I use the time for evemails, research, etc as much as I can.

EVE Online is a vast galaxy and a small town

There’s no privacy. Every kill you make, kill you are, the ISK value of your losses or your enemy’s, your employment record, various standings, all these things are online in multiple places for every player in the galaxy to see. Even what system you are in at the moment is available to anyone with access to a locator agent, or certain officers of your player corporation. That’s why what you do and how well is very often of great importance to your corp or alliance. Even the corps and alliances have weekly and monthly stats published about them.

Choosing a player corporation to join

Stay in an NPC corp for one or two weeks but you want to get yourself into a player corporation as soon as you can. A well run player corp gives you the band of brothers (and backstabbers) that makes ALL the difference in your EVE career. Competent pilots are at a premium. You would be surprised at how quickly you can move up in the ranks. Be aware that unlike other MMOs, your employment record is public and many recruiters look with suspicion on corp jumpers–characters who have a lot of short term corp memberships.

EVElopedia Guide to Educational Player Corps

EVElopedia Basic Guide to Selecting a Player Corp

Getting into voice comms

Voice Comms are the heart and soul of any EVE corp. Everything you want to learn and gain will come easier and faster if you get onto voice comms. Only about 5-10%25 of EVE players are willing to talk. ALL the CEOs, Directors, managers, leaders actually talk. One voice has more weight than all that chatroom chatter. Fair or not, that’s the simple human truth of it.

www.teamspeak.com/?page=downloads

Star Map

And, speaking of travel time, you have to understand how to use your Star Map. With the right settings its beautiful. Switching between it and a site like dotlan can yield fascinating patterns.

wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Star_map

Timeline

EVE is geared for the long term. There’s no way around it. Its the way characters train, slowly and incrementally. You can’t decide to play 16 hours a day and work your Elven Warlock up to 80 level in two and a half months. EVE is a gerontocracy–the old characters get most of the respect. The average age of people who play this game is 27. It just doesn’t attract people who don’t have patience or the ability to plan in the long term. The upside to this is that many of the oldsters are happy to help us. We should put off eating them because they are useful.

The Forums and EVElopedia and Google

For the real lowdown on what’s going on, the EVE insider forums are your best friends. The amount of information people are willing to just give away is astounding. Learning, networking, squabbling. All the usual fun stuff is there.

EVElopedia is another amazing resource and the only place you can find a lot of stuff.

I have found that successfully using EVElopedia and the forums is done though google or another search engine. Just start any EVE related search with “eve online.” The search feature for EVElopedia is not one of its (ahem) stronger points, but when you do google (or whatever) searches, EVElopedia is usually one of the very first results and almost always useful. Same thing with the forums.

Link to Forums: http://forums.eveonline.com/

Link to EVElopedia http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Main_Page

Google

just start the search with “eve online….”

Mission Running

You do this for NPC corporations.

Probably the most important thing for a brand new player to keep in mind is this: when you take missions against another Empire (Ex: Caldari VS Gallante)you lose standings with the empire you mission against. Lose enough standings and you will wind up Kill On Sight with that empire’s navy. You have been warned.

You go to agents and they give you missions and you get ISK and Loyalty Points that you can buy in that Corporations loyalty point store for completing the missions. Industrial characters should ideally do their missions for one of the NPC corps that has Research Agents for your tech II production. Military PvP characters should run missions for the navy of the faction of the ship type they fly if they want faction modules that they can use themselves. No matter what player you are you are best off picking one corporation and running missions for them until you get at least an 8 standing (for jump clones.)

There are other things to consider such as how many stations they have that you can do refining at (for industrial players), placement of stations in empire space, placement of fifth level agents in nullsec, and who knows what all else.

The first series of missions you need to run are the Tutorial missions. Lots of goodies from those. Click F12 to find the nearest tuturial agent to you.

The EVElopedia guide to mission running

wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Missions_Guide

This is the mission site to end all mission sites

www.eve-survival.org/wikka.php?wakka=MissionReports

A good guide to the various NPC corps to run missions for

www.eve-wiki.net/index.php?title=NPC_Corporations

These are a series of uniquely profitable missions. Even if you’re not ready for them as a brand new player, know about them for later.

wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/COSMOS

This is another series of unique missions, in this case for the specific purpose of changing your standings.

wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Data_Centers

What Skills and Ships are Recommended for the Starting Spy?

For the industrial character, any skill set will enable you to function as an agent.

For the military pvp player, the obvious recommendation is the covert ops frigate, and the stealth bomber while you are at it. The force recon cruisers are also excellent scouting ships. But as with the industrial player, any skill set will serve you well.

For the player who wants to specialize in corp thievery, the class of skills you will need the most are all in spaceship command. You don’t need to get them to 4 or 5, just enough to grab the ship and fly it to where you can sell it. Tell anyone who asks that this is your first character.