2nd Anomaly from the Left

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?”

Hmm.

Most of the other bloggers have pretty well hit the nail on the head covering basic combat principles (“Never fly what you can’t afford to lose.”, “Fly what you are good at flying, not just what you are skilled to fly”) that the only thing I would considered adding are these three things:

1.   ”Your ability to make isk determines your ability to PVP.”  It may be just another way of saying “Don’t fly what you can’t afford to lose”, but it goes a bit deeper.  Often I see, even veteran players, sitting out on OPs because they don’t have the isk to replace any losses or didn’t set themselves up in a way that allows them to participate while in the process of replacing lost ships.  Be smart and keep a supply of ready to go replacements.

2.  ”This isn’t Star Wars, and you’re no Luke Skywalker.” – There is no “Force” in Eve and no amount of hope and dreams that can save you from bad fits and bad tactics.  This is a pretty hard lesson to learn for the simple reality that most (if not all) are huge Star Wars fans, and being able to act out in the same manner gave us the initial draw to Eve. 

3.  In the end, Eve Online is about preperation.  The better you prepare, both in game and mentally, the better your game experience will be.

The only other thing I would like to have been told is how to use the markets and investing in Eve.  Learning to work with those investments would have certainly allowed me alot more isk to play with in the long run.