It’s an exciting time to be new in EVE. Recent and ongoing changes to the game have made New Eden a less daunting place for the newbie. Changes affecting mining and mineral values have made it easier for new players to make a buck. Factional warfare, a feature that was overlooked for years, is now a great venue for new players to quickly get their feet wet in PVP and interact with other players toward a common goal. The ongoing ship rebalance initiative is effectively adding a ton of new, cheap and effective ships for old and new players alike to fly. Changes to tutorials and CCP’s ongoing commitment to the New Player Experience are working to erode EVE’s infamous learning cliff.
Despite these changes, however, EVE is still a deep, complex and often unintuitive game. Guidance is important in learning some of the more complex concepts necessary to be successful: ship fitting, d-scan, aggression mechanics, opportunity cost… In this guide I’m not going to talk about any of that. I’m going to talk about something much more fundamental. I want to talk about the two B’s: Boredom and Burnout. The two most dangerous things in New Eden.
Life in the sandbox
If you play EVE for any length of time you’ll probably hear the term sandbox thrown around pretty often in a large variety of contexts. Spend a bit of time in the forums, particularly during events like Hulkageddon, and you’ll find that there are a wide variety of opinions about exactly what sandbox means. Semantics needn’t concern us here. The important point is that as a Sandbox MMO, interacting with EVE is fundamentally different from interacting with the majority of games out there. Note that I say interacting rather than playing. This is important. The goal of this guide is to help players interact in a fun and rewarding way with the EVE universe. If you came here looking for a guide about game mechanics, or where to click then there are many other well-written guides out there.
Achievement Unlocked!
I started playing EVE with a few real-life friends when the servers went live in 2003. The game was a lot different back then. We spent the first few hours hauling useless trade goods from one NPC station to another in velators. Eventually we accumulated enough ISK to found Endland, and then we set new goals. I focused on trade, buying up minerals cheaply and dumping them into NPC buy orders after downtime for a profit. Others focused on roaming out to null-sec in mining boats, back when the primary danger was avoiding the NPC rats. We grew the corp and eventually we started recruiting, bringing others into our corporation. We had fun, we learned, we made ISK and we got shot by m0o a lot. It was good times.
We had goals. In hindsight, they were pretty stupid goals, but we had no idea what we were doing, and we had fun. When we managed to buy our first corp ship BPO, an Iteron IV, we felt like kings. Our solo null-sec mining ops became fleet affairs, with dedicated haulers and a combat wing protecting our miners from rats and other players. We had tentative relationships with the new entities forming that called null-sec home, and while our growth was slowing, by most metrics we were successful. But somewhere along the line we made a fundamental mistake. We stopped setting concrete goals. We began accumulating ISK for the sake of ISK, and the game started to feel more and more like a job. We collapsed shortly thereafter, as one after another our leadership just stopped logging in.
EVE is an excruciatingly boring game if you let it be. It lacks much of the carrot-on-a-stick features that have become standard in modern MMOs. There are no levels to grind, no purple gear to acquire, no achievements to unlock, no leader-boards to compete on. Invariably, those carrots that do exist in EVE (killboards, corp medals, holding sov) are set by other players. However, what EVE does have is tremendous: a full-fledged player-driven economy, conflicts that affect the lives of thousands of people, an active thriving community, the opportunity to define your own path. But EVE is a sandbox. It does not hold your hand, it does not put you on rails and tell you where to go and what to do, and it does not apologize for this. Your destiny is your own. The credit for your success, and blame for your boredom rests squarely on your shoulders.
Luckily New Eden is universe rich in excitement and opportunity, and with the right mindset this trap is easy to avoid. Here are three easy steps to avoid griefing yourself out of the game.
Define Your Own Path
There are no classes in EVE. There isn’t even any real list of possible roles to fill. The EVE-O site lists a handful of possibilities: Fleet Commander, Empire Builder, Explorer, Trader… This is just marketing. It doesn’t do the game justice. How about forming a wildly successful lottery corporation, a well-respected dedicated delivery company, a university that trains new players. There are few limitations on what is possible, and with this lack of limitations comes an overload of choices. Try everything in your first few weeks, learn how the game works, see what others have done before you, dream, imagine and set your own goals to define your future.
Engage With The Community
When you define your goals, think big, but be flexible. EVE is not a single player game, and if it were it’d be stupendously boring. It is important to understand that while you have a level freedom to define your own path above and beyond what is offered in other MMOs, so does everyone else. Your path will invariably intersect with the paths of others, and in some cases you will meet people who have decided that their role in New Eden is to shit on your head. This can be both intimidating and frustrating for a new player. Take this in stride. EVE is not Minecraft.
While you have limitless freedom to decide what you want to do in New Eden, you are not building a castle in the sky. You are engaged in a grand conversation, participating in a group world-building exercise that has been ongoing for 9 years. Treat the game this way and your experience will immediately improve. Interact with other players, join corporations, leave corporations, read lore, devblogs, forums, player blogs, listen to podcasts. New Eden as it is now is the emergent result of the actions, dreams and imagination of hundreds of thousands of other people. Meet these people, interact with them, become one of them.
For God’s Sake, Have Fun
There are no grinds in EVE except those that you create for yourself. If you think you’d really like to get into PVP, and are frustrated that your skills are taking forever to train, you’re griefing yourself. Buy a ship, take it out and make something explode, even if it ends up being you. Your skills will catch up. If you aspire to be an industrialist and are frustrated at your lack of funds/research slots/whatever, find an established corp, meet new people and go do industry. There is simply too much opportunity in New Eden for you to waste your time doing crap that you don’t enjoy.
Occasionally you will decide that a small amount of annoyance is okay if it progresses you toward one of your goals. This is fine, so long as you treat it as a means to an end. Reevaluate your decision often. It seems pretty intuitive, but bears stating explicitly: If at any point you find that you truly hate what you’re doing, stop doing that. If it means having to fly cheaper ships in PVP because you hate mission running, then adjust or find another way to make ISK. If it means leaving your null sec PVP corporation to go realize your dream of running a crack crew of wormhole miners, then say your goodbyes and move forward.
Remember that in New Eden you are responsible for your experience. My hope is that this advice will be helpful to those looking to find their place in New Eden.