Blog Banter 16 - Set Your Destination

Welcome to the sixteenth installment of the EVE Blog Banter, the monthly EVE Online blogging extravaganza created by CrazyKinux. The EVE Blog Banter involves an enthusiastic group of gaming bloggers, a common topic within the realm of EVE Online, and a week to post articles pertaining to the said topic. The resulting articles can either be short or quite extensive, either funny or dead serious, but are always a great fun to read! Any questions about the EVE Blog Banter should be directed to crazykinux@gmail.com. Check out other EVE Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!

The third Blog Banter of 2010 comes to us from ChainTrap of the Into the unknown with gun and camera EVE Blog. He asks us: “Eve University turns six years old on March 15th; six years spent helping the new pilots of New Eden gain experience and understanding in a supportive environment. Eve is clearly a complicated game, with a ton to learn, so much that you never stop learning. So, the question is; What do you wish that someone had taken the time to tell you when you were first starting out? Or what have you learned in the interim that you’d like to share with the wider Eve community?”

Wow, thats quite a question. Especially for someone who has been playing as long as I have. When I first started playing it wouldn’t have mattered what anyone told me about the specifics of the game as the likelyhood is that it would no longer be relevant.

There is one thing that I have learned over the years of playing EVE that I wish I had known when I started out and it is the one thing I would impart to anyone new and it is this:

Set yourself a goal (or goals) and train the skills that let you achieve it (or them)

Sounds simple and obvious doesn’t it? Well it wasn’t to me when I first started out in 2004 and I trained skills all over the place. It got to the point that when I finally found something that I wanted to do about a year ago (yeah it took that long) I didn’t have the skills needed to be effective.

Your goal can be pretty much anything, thats the nature of EVE. It may be to fly a certain ship, or set up in business as a manufacturer of a certain item. It doesn’t really matter as long as you know what it is and stick to it.

One thing I would say is that if its a ship you’re aiming for, find out its strengths and weaknesses, what its good at and what you need to fit it with to be effective. There is no point getting into a ship if you can’t fit it properly. Find out if its an armour or sheild tank and train appropriately. Train the weapon that the hull gets bonuses for. Simply training for the ship and making the rest up as you go will get you in an awful mess, with skills all over the place.

One thing that helps with finding out what you need to train is the relatively new certificate system. The certificates will give you a rough idea of what is needed to be effective in a variety of roles and provide a guide to the support skills needed for the various races’ hulls.

So, I wish someone had told me to set a goal and stick to it, instead I spent the best part of 6 years with a mish-mash of skills and no real mastery of anything.

That being said, there is another peice of advice that I would hand out to everyone who signs up for a new account.

Try everything at least once.

There is so much to do in EVE and no clear path that you are led through, that a new player may become disheartened and lose interest just before he finds that they really do enjoy scanning, or mining, or PvP, or whatever. Just because they left before they tried it.

I’ve been playing EVE for more than 6 years now, on and off, and I’m still learning new things, finding new tricks and tips, and getting better at the game all the time. The learning curve is notoriously steep, and I have found over the years that it doesn’t level off completely, there is always something new to find out.

These two tips (I know we were only asked for one) might seem contradictory, and at first glance they are. The thing is though, if you set a goal to get the best skills in one particular area (flying a drake for mission running for instance) then once you reach that goal you then set another one, and it can be in a completely different direction.

For example, Rokkit Kween can now tank pretty much any level 4 mission, which was my goal for her when I started out. (actually my original goal was to do the level 4 epic arcs with her, but the thing thats taking the time with that is getting the standings with Caldari to be allowed to talk to the agent) Now I have her training probing skills and getting into covert ops frigates to hunt down complexes and exploration sites, end eventually head off to solo some class 1, 2, and 3 wormholes. Its still very much a PvE role that she is playing at the moment, but that could change once I’ve proven to myself that she can salvage, hack, archaeologise and pop sleepers as efficiently as possible. Who knows what I’ll be doing next?

M out

Other participants in this months Banter are: