The Defias Blog

The following was originally posted by a player named consider telos, of Rionnag Alba Corporation, from Triumvirate. Alliance on the Eve-Online General Discussion Forum in a thread titled Advanced EVE Pointers. The entire thread is full of information that EVERY noob needs to know about EVE (Everyone vs. Everyone) Online, but that so many never learn until it’s too late. As the title suggests, though, some of the information contained there might be more useful to novice-intermediate pilots as 1-day-old noobs won’t have any idea what the posters are referring to. Here is consider telos’ post in its original form; I have not edited it other than to apply bold text to certain points which I wanted to emphasize.

Ladies and Gentlemen of the class of ’08,

If I could offer you only one tip for the future, polycarbs would be it. The long term benefits of polycarbs have been proved by scientists whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience… I will dispense this advice now.

Enjoy the power and beauty of the drake; oh nevermind; you will not understand the power and beauty of the drake until your not allowed to take them on fleet ops. But trust me, in 6 months you’ll look back at screencaps of yourself and recall in a way you can’t grasp now how much tank lay before you and how fucking fabulous you really looked.
You’re not as shit as you imagine. Don’t worry about the k/d ratio; or worry, but know that worrying is as useful as an assault frigate

The real troubles in your life are gatecamps that never crossed your worried mind; the kind that blindside when fallen asleep at your keyboard drunk, on some idle Tuesday night. Do one thing everyday that scares you.

Mine Veld.

Don’t be reckless with other people’s hearts by smacking, don’t put up with people who are reckless with yours.

Bump ship out of docking range

Don’t waste your time on 0.01 isk wars; sometimes you’re ahead, sometimes
you’re behind…the race is long, and in the end, it’s only with some undercutting son of a bitch fucking cunt! Boast about the compliments you receive, forget the smack; if you succeed in doing this, tell me how. Keep your old hate mails, throw away your old bookmarks.

Smack.

Don’t feel guilty if you didn’t setup your character attributes correctly at the start. The most interesting people I know didn’t and have been playing for 2 years and have 22m sp.

Lulz.

Get plenty of tritanium. Be kind to your ships, you’ll miss them when they’re popped. Maybe you’ll join a corp, maybe you won’t, maybe you’ll join an alliance,maybe you won’t, maybe you’ll quit at 40m sp, maybe you’ll rob your corp on your 1st anniversary…what ever you do, don’t stroke your e-peen too much or circlejerk yourself either; your choices are controlled by a super lag server, so are everybody else’s. Enjoy your nanofag ship, use it every way you can…don’t be afraid of it, or what other people think of it, it’s the greatest instrument you’ll ever own.

PEW PEW PEW,

even if you have nowhere to do it, but on your own blue list. Read the component description properties, effects, even if you don’t have a fucking clue what they mean. Do NOT comment on goon or bob threads, they will only make you ugly. Get to know where your CEO lives in rl, you never know when they’ll steal all the money out the corp wallet and be gone for good. Be nice to your corp mates; they are the best way to sponge money and the people most likely to drop you a cyno in the future. Understand that friends come and go, so fuck them, you never liked them anyway.

Live in Venal once, but leave before it makes you hard; live in the drone regions once, but leave before it makes you soft.

Travel.

Accept certain inalienable truths, jita mineral prices will rise, alliance leaders will philander, you too will get greedy, and when you do you’ll fantasize that when you had low sp, prices were reasonable, alliance leaders were noble and noobs respected their directors. Respect your directors. Don’t expect anyone else to support you. Maybe you will sell gtc, maybe you have a basement full of isk farmers; but you never know when either one might run out or die of starvation. Don’t mess too much with your ship setup, or by the time you’re on a fleet op, you have no idea to fly your ship and you die like a total r tard noob. Don’t play caldari roulette with the self destruct button, in fleet ops in front of everyone, if you can’t keep track of when to turn it off.

Advice is a form of nostalgia, dispensing it is a way of salvaging/looting the swag from the wreck, tractoring it in, leaving the crap parts and reprocessing it for more than
it’s worth. But trust me on the polycarbs..

Enjoy the power and beauty of the drake, and battlecruisers in general: Every tier 2 battlecruiser is a thing of beauty. The Hurricane, the Drake, the Harbinger, the Myrmidon… so full of win. So many noobs think that the big ship is the better ship. They don’t understand the ship descriptions, they don’t understand game mechanics, and they’re so eager to be the biggest, baddest thing in EVE and pwn everybody that they don’t take the time to shut the fuck up and listen when the experienced players tell them how things work. As we speak, I’ve got one idiot who has trained Caldari Battleship to level 2 and has begged, borrowed and stolen ISK and minerals to get himself a Rokh. He doesn’t have the skill Large Hybrid Turrets, yet, so he fit medium blasters on it. He then complained that he wasn’t doing as much damage as he had done in his Drake.
I had to explain to him that the Rokh is a battleship, and as such it gets bonuses for LARGE hybrid turrets… not mediums. And this, after I told him for a week, “Don’t get a Rokh, you can’t fly it yet.” This player, at the time of this post, is 48 hours away from being kicked out of [DFIAS] and needs to get his head out of his ass in a hurry. I don’t mind noobs, as long as they learn… this one is too hard-headed so far.
I’ve got another pilot who ratted in a Myrmidon in 0.0, then ratted in a Dominix as soon as he could. He found himself taking longer to kill the rats and his tank being broken. He was confused by this, since the Domi has more natural hitpoints, more powerful weapons (he had large hybrids trained to the minimal lvl 1 at the time), and as such seemed to be the more powerful ship. As it turned out, he had battleship skill trained only to level 1, which meant very small bonuses, and therefor very small damage compared to the Myrm, which he could fly with all related skills trained to at least level 3, many trained to 4 or 5.
The bigger ship is NOT always better… I’m considering a moratorium on flying battleships with less than 4M skill points in [DFIAS], but I’m trying to give my people the benefit of the doubt.

Don’t feel guilty if you didn’t setup your character attributes correctly at the start. Like many people just beginning in EVE, and with less than a perfect understanding of the way EVE’s SP/Attribute system works, I wanted to be able to do a number of different things with just one character. I wanted to be a good combat pilot and do stealthy, covert-ops type stuff, but I also wanted to be able to make my own gear (like tradeskills in WoW). So I made a Sebiestor, since they were described as engineers and inventors, and I took the career of Military with Special Ops as a specialty. I figured this should give me a pretty good all-around character for the style of play I’m generally attracted to.
I was wrong. I’d only screwed myself on my initial skill training times, and to a VERY limited degree, even my long-term skill training times by starting the game with less-than-maximum possible Perception and Willpower attributes for training combat-related and spaceship command skills. Here I am now, having broken 4M SP (and I haven’t even begun training for battleships, mind you), and having no problems at all. In fact, the higher intelligence and memory attributes that I began play with has helped me as I’m currently training skills in the Electronics and Drones skill trees.
The fact of the matter is, yes, having certain attributes as high as possible will help you if you’re into one specific set of activities, or if you’re creating an alt with only one purpose in mind (like a mining alt, or a trade alt, or a cyno alt). But for a first character that’s going to be your primary source of entertainment in playing the game for a long time to come, it doesn’t really matter what your attributes are in the long run. One or two points of Willpower aren’t going to make or break you when you’ve maxed your learning skills and you’re wearing +5 implants and your Willpower total is over 20 to begin with.

Read the component description properties, effects, even if you don’t have a fucking clue what they mean: I read the description and attributes tab of every item and every ship I see that I’m not familiar with. In the beginning, a lot of this stuff was Greek to me. I didn’t know what a MN was, I didn’t know why scan resolution was important, I didn’t understand transversal velocity and tracking speed (to be quite honest, I still don’t understand all of these points 100%, but I understand them well enough to know what does or does not belong on any ship I fly and most importantly why it does or does not belong there - just don’t ask me for a detailed report worthy of an MIT professor).
I learned by reading the stuff over and over and over again, and seeing how it worked in play. I looked at loadouts posted on Battleclinic.com, most of which are crap, but I found absolute GEMS of information in the posts made by veteran capsuleers, explaining WHY the loadouts were crap and suggesting more effective options, even telling the poster what skills they’d need in some cases. I read about transversal velocity, didn’t really get it 100%, then I saw that my Stabber could hit fine with 220mm Autocannons but could not hit at the same range and speed with the 425mm Autocannons and I understood. That’s just one example, of course, but I could cite dozens just like it. One of the most important things for new players to do in this game is to READ all those numbers as you play until they DO make sense - and never be afraid to ask questions. As long as you’re not hard-headed about it, most genuinely experienced players will be willing to teach you. If you’re in a player corp and you find your corpmates unwilling to help you learn the game, then you need to find another corporation that will foster your development… consider [DFIAS]!

Don’t mess too much with your ship setup, or by the time you’re on a fleet op, you have no idea [how] to fly your ship and you die like a total r tard noob. This is too true. A pilot who customarily flies a Stabber-class cruiser with the standard speed tank and autocannons who then switches to shield tanking with artillery cannons will die VERY quickly, due to not being familiar with what his new tactics need to be. Don’t fly a new setup in combat until you’ve had plenty of opportunity to test it under ’safe’ conditions, you’ll lose a lot less ISK.

The original thread that consider telos’ post came from is very informative, so if you happen to be a new player, or even if you’re a semi-experienced player, check it out - you might just be surprised and learn something new after all.

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