What do you have now? EVE’s requirements are pretty low, even with the new graphics pack. Works fine on my old 1800.
Yeah, if you are going to be mining, get into a Bantam. Not a great ship, but decent all around and it is a good beginner frigate. And if you are planning on playing for a while, train up your Learning skills. I got my Frigate skill up to where I could handle a Merlin, along with some secondary skills for weapons, then ran missions while I trained up all 11 Learning skills to 5. (At the time, you needed to get the lower skills to 5 before training the advanced skills, they have since changed it to only needing to get to level 4.) You need to play for a year or two to actually save enough time to make up for the time used training the Learning skills to level 5. I have been playing for 2, so it was well worth it for me.
One other thing about EVE that is unique as far as I know. You can purchase timecodes for playing with ISK. So if you get to the point you can make enough income, you are playing to pay, with no cash needed.
Got started last night with a Gallente/Gallente/miner/entrepreneur and ran a few missions. It looks like a great world (Ok, universe!) that I would love to really get into.
I was looking at getting one of those while in the pod. Do ships come with weapons and mining equipment as standard or are those extra purchases?
Extra. A ship by itself is essentially just the chassis, propulsion, and cargo space. In order to actually do stuff, you need modules. For example, to mine asteroids all you need is a Mining Laser, which will pull ore into your cargo hold. You’re usually given a decent amount of lowbie equipment to start, IIRC, and it’s dirt cheap on the market anyway.
And you should have a decent start on money, if you did the tutorial and the first set of missions they sent you to at the start. You probably want to stay out of 0.5 even after you get a Bantam though. The rats are a bit tougher, but more importantly, there are more PC pirates there. I lost a Covetor to a pirate in a .6 system a few months ago. Was very irritating. But it did give me the impetus to finally buy a Hulk, which really increased my income.
Actually, I think I have some extra 125mm hybrids for frigates. I will check and send you an email in game if I do.
I did all the first tutorial missions, and then that guy sent me to some other guy, who has a mining mission for me - but I can’t haul enough. Does that mean it’s time to get a bigger ship, or what?
Yeah, that’s what I figured.
Did the tutorial, a couple of missions from my second contact, and a bit of mining. I’m up to about 160K ISK; plenty for a Bantam in The Forge.
Cool! Thanks.
I played Eve for a while, and built up enough money and skill to use a battlecruiser, but I eventually grew tired of it. The primary reason was that quest running and just travel in general is just really slow. The combat grew stale after a while because of a lack of variety for me, and it definitely seemed to me that the game is more oriented around people for whom combat is only a small portion of the game.
The thing that really grabbed me was the interaction between people in a corporation, I was “hired” by a high-skill miner in the corporation I joined to aid him in transporting his mined ore back to the station for safekeeping and refining. I saw a lot of opportunity for enjoyable activity like that, but only if you were willing to spend a lot of time in the game and really be involved with a corporation. Playing solo quickly grew dull for me, as I would actually alt-tab out and play WoW or something else while my ship was traveling somewhere. If a game can have downtimes of 5-20 minutes for travel, I really don’t feel like I’m having much fun.
Anyway, depending on your attitude and expectation, I can see Eve being really fun for a lot of people, as well as insufferably boring for a lot as well.
Just the opposite. EVE is, at its base, a PvP game. That’s what a great many people do for fun, with ratting or trading, or whatever, only thrown in to make cash to afford PvP ships. “Quest running” is to combat in EVE what masturbation is to a 12 person orgy. If you’re not taking part in 0.0 skirmishes against real players, then you’re not getting into real combat.
For folks reading along, don’t give up on the pew pew until you’ve actually tried fighting real, live human beings.
Hauling is just about the most boring job in EVE, bar none.
Forming up a roaming gank squad and invading enemy sovereign territory, however…
Travel does have time. It’s part of how the scale of distance is maintained, but more importantly, how the economy works. If players could get resources from Point A to Point B in no time flat, there’s be no real incentive for shopping different markets, trading items in different regions, charging to haul stuff around. And transit can’t be instantaneous, or PvP would be real damn odd. One of the most reliable and profitable combat strategies is the gatecamp, where you get to a chokepoint ahead of your enemies, and set up a trap on the other side of a star gate, pouncing on them once they go on through. With ultra-quick transit, there’d be no point in the different ships’ roles; if interceptors don’t give you more speed and maneuverability than battleships, why wouldn’t every gang just consist of all battleships?
But oh so profitable. I sunk a lot of money into maximizing the cargo space in my Badger mk II.
Good lord why? If you really wanted to haul you shouldn’t have been in a T1 Caldari hauler - get thee into an Itty V or at least a Mammoth. Heck even a Bestower outhauls the Badger II.
Patriotism? 
At the time I was sticking primarily to Caldari ships.
That was part of what people told me going into it, was that the PVP and 0.0 sec space experience were the core of what made Eve so cool. The problem with that is the time and corp commitment needed to get to experience all that cool stuff was too time-consuming for me to get into before I got tired of it.
Maybe I’ll give it another shot after a while…
The Badger II is the T2 Caldari industrial. And while an Itty V can outhaul it, you need Caldari Industrial V to fly a Charon. I didn’t see any point in getting both industrial skills to level 5, so I am in a Badger II until I can afford the Charon. I may pick up one of the Transport ships, but probably not.
Zsofia, you can make more than one trip to finish the mission. A bigger ship is always good, if you can afford it.
Lute, I sent you an email in game, from Lokiathar.
FinnAgain, the PvP is not really fun for me. I don’t really want to spend the time getting involved with a corp to get to 0.0 and fight there. I like playing casual, mining, making, and missions.
And since my PvP so far has been against gate campers who are not actually interested in combat, just blowing people up with the least amount of danger, I don’t really think much of the PvPers in the game. I realize that there are people in the game that don’t think they are hot shit because they just blew up my Badger II and pod with 2 BCs and an interceptor, but I know who I see more of. (Of course, the idiots would have made a lot more by letting me pay for safe passage then they made from the little that was left of my ship. But they didn’t even ask.)
The Badger II is a tier 3 hauler, but it most definitely isn’t T2. I’m well aware of the choices faced by Caldaris wanting to haul, having a Caldari character myself. I trained up for the Impel, which is for my isk the most capable and flexible cargo ship around. Freighters are of course in an entirely different class, but I don’t find my Providence’s cargo capacity limiting in any respect.
The Besty is easily the choice for casual hauling, the Itty V for dedicated T1 hauling and, IIRC, a rigged Impel for T2 hauling.
The problems with freighters, and they are some fairly massive problems, are that they’re slow, make very tempting targets in lowsec or 0.0 and, perhaps most critically, cannot haul from jetcans or wrecks, making them totally useless for mining ops and/or picking up hauler spawns in 0.0.
If you need to carry components to build a mothership or something, yeah, a freighter makes sense. Same thing if you’re trading huge volumes of material in Empire. But for anything else?
P.S. getting involved with a 0.0 corp or alliance shouldn’t be a headache, or take a lot of time/effort. Ditto for getting good PvP with 'em. Or, for that matter, in lowsec. If the bunch of folks who you pirate with in lowsec, or the corp/alliance you fly with in nullsec are an actual drain on your resources instead of a bonus? You’re in the wrong outfit, I’m afraid.
Don’t mind me, I was thinking Bustard for some reason. But since I was flying Caldari ships, especially the Osprey for mining, which meant I was training Caldari Frigate, it made more sense to keep going for the Caldari Industrials and Freighter. And the Charon being the largest freighter was just icing on the cake.
(Needed to do a new reply, waited too long for editing.)
FinnAgain, I am hauling around ships to sell in Empire. Moving them to a trading hub in an Industrial takes forever, since it requires multiple trips.(5 frigates at a time is really boring, even just 6 jumps at a time.) Since I am not going into lowsec or 0.0 space, those limits don’t bother me.
And the time requirement for a 0.0 corp is the fact that they want dedicated players, not someone that logs on every couple of weeks to do some mining, put stuff up for sale, switch out skills, and run a few missions. I have talked to several people in player corps that I could play with and have fun with. But I do not want to put that kind of time into the game. I don’t do it for COH, which I enjoy even more then EVE.
Today, I did a gang mining op with some people in my beginner corp. I had a pretty good time, but I only made 3 million on it. For the time I put in, I could have done better mining solo. But that is because we split the haul evenly, despite the fact 2 of the people were in Bantams, one was in a Retriever, and I was in a Hulk. If we had kept track, I probably easily outmined all the others combined. But it was company, I got a decent haul of minerals, and 2 people on trial accounts got 3 million ISK to play with and learned about parts of the game they didn’t know.
But when I log on tomorrow night to switch skills, I won’t be on that long. And I probably won’t be on for anything else until that skill finishes or I need to give Lute some equipment.
I’m liking the game, the slower pace is nice but does take some getting used to. I’ve been running the training missions and doing a little mining on the side. (just veldspar so far since I don’t know where anything else is) Did get the little mining ship reward with the 448 capacity cargo hold so that helped a bit. I’m still at only about 300k ISK but I’m getting there! So far so good, I really see the potential to dig deep into this game.