Eve online: lessons learned

So, after playing Eve for two weeks, what have I learned?

First, it's more demanding than a social world like SL. Objectives need to be met, progress needs to be made. You will never get anywhere without a bit of commitment. Of course one can choose not to go anywhere, but then the game could become boring quite quickly.

A player can make progress alone, but it's not easy. It's best to join a corp as soon as possible! I'm quite happy with the corporation I joined: there's always a couple of fellow Traders online, and all my n00b questions were answered - correctly I might add - within a couple of minutes. I'm sure I would have spent hours researching the answers to some of my questions, if it hadn't been for my fellow corp members. The corporation is (in my case) a useful support group and a very welcome social element in this high tech universe.

Skills are more important than ships or armor. For a game that's set in space and often involves shooting (either defensive or offensive), that may sound a bit over the top, perhaps. But still, if you don't train your skills, you'll never get into the ships necessary for the better missions, the higher rewards, the bigger battles or mining operations. Without the skills, you're pretty much stuck in high security regions doing smalltime mining ops. You're simply not going anywhere without properly trained skills. The good part is: in Eve, skill training is easy. But still you have to do it; and you better get to it because it takes time.

You can buy skills and train them subsequently. But it's better to acquire some real skills too, by running missions. At first I was a bit hesitant about doing missions. I was having fun chasing rats in higher security sectors (0.7 or 0.8), why should I do formal missions? It turns out that mission running does pay well; the rewards are often quite good. And, sometimes there's better loot to be had, during missions. It is more dangerous however, I had to retreat and repair my ship before finishing one of my missions; my ship was too damaged by sustained and heavy enemy fire to carry on with the battle. But before I can pilot a bigger, better ship with more firepower, I need more skills. See the previous point! Finally, mission running has a positive effect on your security standing and, probably, on your informal standing within the corporation as well.

Fly safe!