My EVE Story
I started playing EVE in 2021 after years of reading the stories that came out of New Eden. Scams, betrayals, wars involving thousands of players, ridiculous political drama — that was the EVE I wanted to experience.
Then I actually downloaded the game and had absolutely no idea how to get to any of it.
I finished the early missions, ran the Sisters of EVE Epic Arc, made painfully little ISK and eventually decided to try PvP. I bought a badly fitted Stabber, flew somewhere I probably shouldn’t have, died almost immediately and had no idea what I was supposed to do next.
What kept me playing wasn’t another tutorial. It was another player.
A training corporation reached out to me, gave me some direction and introduced me to the parts of EVE I’d actually joined the game to experience. From there I’ve been a line member in nullsec, ran new-player education inside a major null bloc, founded and ran a training corporation, FC’d public fleets and eventually found my way back into nullsec and smaller-group PvP.
I’ve gone from being the rookie who didn’t know what he didn’t know, to spending years helping other people get through exactly the same problem.
That is still why I’m running for CSM.
Exordium Is a Big Step Forward
The landscape has changed since I first ran for CSM.
Exordium is probably the biggest change EVE’s new-player journey has seen in years. Putting new players together, giving them somewhere to learn and creating a clearer starting point for their journey makes a lot of sense.
But Exordium can’t be the destination.
The thing that makes EVE special is everything outside it: corporations, alliances, wars, industry, piracy, wormholes, Faction Warfare, public fleets, ridiculous schemes and the communities that create all of it.
The challenge now is making sure new players successfully make that jump.
I’ve said in both of my previous campaigns that I don’t think EVE’s retention problem gets solved by building an endlessly longer tutorial. At some point you have to stop teaching someone how to play EVE and help them find people to play EVE with.
That hasn’t changed.
Retention Is a Community Problem
People talk about the New Player Experience as though it’s something that only matters to new players.
It isn’t.
Today’s confused rookie is tomorrow’s FC, industrialist, pirate, CEO, spy, logistics pilot or person who somehow convinces 200 people to spend their Sunday evening shooting a structure.
New players staying in the game means more people joining fleets, more people building ships, more people creating corporations, more targets in space and eventually more people creating content themselves.
It also matters for veteran retention. Most of us don’t keep logging into EVE because the UI is particularly beautiful or because we desperately want to run another anomaly. We log in because there are people we want to fly with and things happening around us.
A healthy flow of new players into those communities keeps EVE alive.
What I’d Champion on the CSM
A Better Path Out of Exordium
Exordium should be the beginning of the player’s journey, not a bubble they eventually leave without knowing where to go next.
When players are ready to leave, EVE should be putting meaningful options in front of them.
Faction Warfare. Exploration. Incursions. Wormholes. Industry. Nullsec. Public fleets. Training corporations.
Not a giant wall of text explaining them, but clear routes into actually experiencing them.
The ideal outcome is that a player finishes the introductory experience thinking, “I want to try that next,” rather than, “Okay… what now?”
Better Visibility for Genuine New-Player Communities
This has been part of my platform every time I’ve run and I still think it matters.
EVE already has organisations capable of teaching new players extremely well. EVE University, EVE Rookies, Brave, Gooniversity, public fleet communities and dozens of smaller training corporations collectively have decades of experience doing this.
Fenris doesn’t need to recreate all of that.
It needs to make it easier for rookies to find it.
The corporation finder and recruitment ecosystem should do a much better job of distinguishing organisations that genuinely support new players from corporations firing mass recruitment mails at anything with a pulse.
If someone finishes Exordium interested in PvP, mining, wormholes or industry, helping them find an active community doing that activity is potentially worth far more than another ten tutorial missions.
Losses Should Teach, Not End Careers
Eventually those players need to experience the real EVE.
And in the real EVE, ships explode.
That’s a feature, not a problem. My first PvP loss ultimately helped set me on the path I’ve taken through the game.
The problem is when a genuinely new player loses something that represents most of their wealth and the lesson isn’t “here’s what I did wrong”, it’s “I now need to grind for several evenings to replace that.”
I’d still like to see insurance looked at, particularly at the lower end of the ship tree, so that new players can afford to make mistakes.
You should be encouraged to undock the ship, lose it, learn something and try again.
Fair ISK Opportunities for Low-SP Players
There should be viable ways for a new player to finance actually playing the game without turning their first few weeks into a second job.
That doesn’t mean showering rookies with ISK.
It means making sure the gap between “activities that are accessible to me” and “activities that generate enough money to replace the ships I’m encouraged to fly” isn’t unnecessarily wide.
The objective should be simple: let people spend more time doing the thing that made them interested in EVE and less time grinding so they can afford to do it.
More Early-Game Storytelling and Epic Arcs
I still think Epic Arcs are one of EVE’s most underused tools.
The Sisters of EVE arc gave me one of the first pieces of structure I had after starting the game. It gave me somewhere to go, introduced different systems and made New Eden feel slightly less incomprehensible.
I’d like to see that idea expanded.
Exordium can teach the fundamentals. Shorter Epic Arcs and structured journeys can then introduce people to the wider universe and its different playstyles without trying to turn EVE into a theme-park MMO.
Show someone a door. Give them a reason to open it. Then let EVE happen.
What Has Changed Since My Last Campaign?
Quite a lot in my own EVE career, but surprisingly little about why I’m running.
I’ve spent time at opposite ends of the organisational scale. I’ve worked with new players inside one of the game’s largest alliances, run a small training corporation and now spend more of my time back in nullsec, PvPing and FCing.
That has reinforced rather than changed my view.
Whether you’re running a huge alliance or trying to get ten people into fleet, EVE depends on people.
And getting somebody from “I downloaded this strange spaceship game” to “these are my people and this is what we do together” remains one of the most important journeys in New Eden.
I’ll challenge ideas when I think they need challenging, listen when someone knows an area of EVE better than I do, and look at changes through the lens of what they do to the wider ecosystem rather than just the part of space I currently live in.
Most importantly, I’ll keep asking the same question I’ve been asking since my first CSM campaign:
How does this help somebody find the EVE they came here looking for?
TL;DR
I nearly quit EVE because I couldn’t find the game behind the tutorial.
Other players showed it to me.
Since then I’ve spent a significant part of my EVE career doing the same thing for others.
Exordium is a major improvement to how people start EVE. Now we need to make sure players successfully graduate from learning how to fly a spaceship into participating in the player-driven universe that makes EVE worth playing.
My priorities remain:
- Build strong pathways from Exordium into the wider game.
- Make genuine new-player communities easier to discover.
- Make early ship losses recoverable enough that players can learn from them.
- Give low-SP players reasonable ways to fund the activities they enjoy.
- Use Epic Arcs and structured content to expose players to more of New Eden.
- Treat new-player retention as something that affects the health of the entire game.
EVE thrives when its players stay.