New Player Success Stories

Communications Center General Discussion
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Carebears claim new players have no chance in EvE, and this hurts new player retention, by demoralizing newbros. Let’s create a thread of positive UPLIFTING stories, showing that new players really can succeed.

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I was a new player in the summer of 2018. I was shopping for shoes, and a girl mentioned that her boyfriend ran a corporation in outer space, so they invited me to play EvE Online and help them sell spaceships. So I logged in, and quickly lost interest in their little space business, but I kept playing by myself.

I still remember my first loss. Just moments before, I had a chance to fit my ship. However, I decided fitting it was a waste of time. I remember thinking, “This game is boring, there’s no challenge.” Fortunately, I was about to encounter another player. I didn’t even understand what happened. I was electrified with shock and anger, this idiot podded me back to Amarr! Oh, I was not happy.

I vowed revenge, and spent hours staring at local, wondering how I could possibly fight back against terrorists. Instead of crying about bullies and griefers, I accepted that EvE is a PvP game and started shooting. I adapted to reality.

Within less than two years, I became the leader of a top 20 alliance, paradoxically the very alliance most associated with bullying and griefing new players. These people never bullied me, they simply asked if I wanted to succeed, and my answer was, “Of course.” While everyone else was crying about evil CODE. scammers, they were inviting me to fleet and teaching me how to play the game. The New Order is a great community!

I think there is an important lesson here. You can either sit around crying and whining, or you get pull yourself together and accept EvE for what it is. If you are playing PUBG or Call of Duty, you should expect PvP. EvE is absolutely no different. If people are good enough to run multiple accounts at once, wonderful - that’s what makes EvE great, you can scale up the challenge as far as your computer (and ability) will allow.

This is my EvE origin story. What’s yours?

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Really great story Aiko, if I may say that your pilot had done so much for the community as a whole, supporting new players along with veterans and even still fresh pilots such as this pilot of mine.

Aiko Queen of New Eden, one who actively influences Eve Online politics of the New Order!

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Hear hear.

Edit-

I discovered eve whilst looking around the internet for a new game to play. I wanted something that was grand enough to involve strategy but ideally where one ship was controlled by one player. I had dabbled in Star wars galaxy with my friends but got bored quickly. The most exciting thing we did was pretending to go to war with the empire and shooting endless spawns of NPC’s…and i was never what you’d call a star wars fan.

The more i read about eve the better it sounded. It fit my description and more. The fact that it was a persistent universe where players formed huge alliances was a cherry on the top, and i was deeply intrigued by the scamming and ‘skulduggery’.

I read up on eve for a month or two before signing up. I watched every match of alliance tournament VIII, and checked the videos of previous tournaments on YouTube. I watched player vids, read blogs, wikis and any resource the internet would let me get my hands on. The more i read the better it got.

I made a trial account and, after running the tutorial and a few missions, I tried mining in low-sec with predictable results.

So i stuck to hi-sec for a while, learning the game and keeping an eye out for the guy who killed me because i had something called a ‘kill right’ that meant I could attack him even in hi-sec.

At the same time i looked around for corporation’s that would make a suitable home for me. Obviously they had to be new player friendly and such, but we didn’t have the adverts of today so finding a corp usually meant going through local chat and checking everyones info, or looking at whom had offices at the stations i frequented and sending eve-mails.

After a few days of no replies i got an answer from one of the more promising candidates. They were a decent sized (100 members iirc) training corp for an already established pvp entity which was perfect, they could teach me the game and ‘move my assets’ and protect me from the evil people in lowsec. I couldn’t wait to make new friends and joined straight away. Unfortunately no one else was on and the corp was empty. Different play times I suppose but i wasn’t deterred. I would just stay in hi-sec for now. For safety reasons…

I hadn’t been there long, a day or so maybe, and i was mining, waiting for my new friends to come online. I imagined i would be training alongside other new players under some magnanimous yet tough drill sergeant type and it would all be great. These dreams were interrupted by a red flashy in the overview however. And that’s how i found out about wardecs.

After that loss i tried to get in touch with someone in my corp. Maybe we could organise striking back at our enemies or something, but it became clear that none of the 100 or so people were really logging on and leadership just weren’t there. So i left corp after less than 48hours of joining and looked elsewhere.

The next corp was much better. I was immediately in touch with other players that were friendly, organised and informative. There were talks of ‘blue-print libraries’ and messages on the notice board about ‘how to not die’. They had a shiny player-made banner. And, of course, they weren’t at war. Yet.

When the war did eventually arrive, my new friends were ready. Messages explaining what a war was and what everyone should do about it were immediately sent out to the entire organisation demonstrating how involved their leadership was. Everyone who wanted to get involved in the fight was to meet up at a specific station, and they didn’t need to worry about bringing ships because they could be provided for free. Of course i went straight there and couldn’t wait to get stuck in.

I woke up the next day to learn that our enemy had scored some early kills against us but a target had been spotted by scouts and we were forming up to attack them. I took my free frig and followed instructions best i could from the clearly very wise ‘Fleet Commander’. Our target undocked in front of us and i died shortly after.

And then he did.

My first kill and my first visit to Jita. I was shaking so much i didn’t even realise i hadn’t fired a shot, i just about managed to tackle a barely moving drake before blowing up. After that i had a real taste for wardecs (honestly if it wasn’t for pre-2012 wardecs i wouldn’t be here now), though this would mostly be played out on a purpose built PvP ‘winmatar’ character whilst Daichi took on an industrial/krabby role in various corps but still with the occasional wardec thrown in.

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Is that a whiff of Stockholm that I smell in the air?

REDNES

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Great story. Thanks.
When I first started playing EVE 5 years ago, I had no real idea of the game’s depth and reach. I was a total noob not only in EVE but also at mmo’s. EVE was my first one. I liked the NPE back then and Aura had a lot to do with it… and the Amarrian shiny vessels.
Got to chatting with a vet, asking questions in Local and he suggested we paired up on missions to show me a few things.
He got me an Orca and showed me how to avoid ganks, we did duels in evenly matched ships and he showed me how to match skills and fits. We did some FW missions together and it was great.
It was as perfect an introduction to EVE a noob could ever want. Sadly, he doesn’t play anymore.
I joined a few corporations but could not duplicate the kind of friendship I’d had formed at the beginning and corporation politics just chaps my a- so I went solo.
Now I do PI, ratting, missions, Exploration… had a few good fights in ships belonging to all four empires. I like each one for the different benefits but the Hecate scratch that itch for now.
I hope EVE continues to interest me.

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When I was in my early teens, the local municipality was hemorrhaging public funds on my secure detention and repairs for all the damage I did. I was actually a surprisingly good student, and became acquainted with local law and ensured that nothing I did was technically illegal, so they couldn’t simply jail me or stuff me full of meds. So in a desperate attempt to redirect my chaotic energies, my psychiatrists and counselors started seeking out various experimental treatments. Nothing seemed to work, however, until one of them found out about this “little online game that people say all the sociopaths play.” I was already into video games as was evident from the thousands of hours I put into the Grand Theft Auto series, so I didn’t protest when they had me make an EVE account.

By my second week in the game, I killed my first scary low-sec pirate. I didn’t shoot him, mind you, because my Tristan couldn’t do anything to his 250km-Tachyon-sniping Armageddon. But certain things were said to certain people, and then I watched as two of his corporation members blew up his ship and punted him out of their group. Maybe he didn’t deserve it, but I also didn’t deserve to not have his nice items, which were passed over to me in gratitude.

Shortly afterward, I made my way to null-sec, where I developed a taste for shadow brokerage by embedding myself into different alliances’ intelligence communities, which was helped by my knowledge of some of EVE’s most-spoken languages and a penchant for having other players around me have “unfortunate accidents” (I was a big fan of the Clintons). Unfortunately that didn’t last, after I realized that null-sec gameplay was nothing but a fad on its way out into obscurity, and I wasn’t even able to take advantage of the botting situation because my real-life government maintained an injunction against me being able to use the online banking system in any way or form.

So I packed up my giant secure containers, and took a one-way trip to the wild, untamed frontier of high-sec space. There, like a doe-eyed country bumpkin in the big city, I set upon making a name for myself, mostly by ridding the game of its vile, greedy, toxic, gluttonous, and notoriously-dangerous money-mongers. High-sec let my potential truly shine. After I learned that I could bribe the in-game police to look the other way—a skill I learned early on in life—so that I could operate in a morally-questionable (but necessary for the greater good) gray area of player interaction, I built my own little empire by running and being a valued member of multiple security-oriented organizations.

The villain finally became the hero, in a way. The rest, as they say, is history:

image

As an adult seventeen years later, I still enjoy playing EVE, now out of the comfort of my cell in a super-max facility, where I get full internet access and all the anime girl figurines and wall posters I could want for my good behavior. This game has truly managed to change my life!

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Wow, that’s a great story Destiny!

Who else wants to tell how they, as a new player, overcame challenges and managed to not become a bittervet crybear?

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For as much as CODE does get a nasty rep for being gankers, Aiko has a very good point. Eve is a pvp game, and anyone who’s not willing to at least accept that and therefore that all decisions must be based in the idea someone can ruin your plan, shouldn’t be playing eve.

Ganking is a great way to introduce someone to the core concepts of eve imo, that loss is common and you need to learn to deal with it. Especially if the gankers proceed to convo said player to explain what they did wrong (in actual game language, instead of “you didn’t buy a mining permit”), it can be a great experience. I’m not so sure if CODE does that last bit, but still. Carebears who whine and moan about every instance of pvp aren’t good eve players

Edit:
As for my own new player experience, it wasn’t super remarkable in terms of having a momentus loss. My first death was an exploration Heron in nullsec on my way down to Sansha space to do some hacking: Heron | Gaming513 Tyler | Killmail | zKillboard

He didn’t convo me after or anything like that, but I had already found a corp that would at the least tell me the basics and how to move on from it. I’d say my first major loss due to players was an abyssal Gila that got ganked in hisec off the beaten path in early 2020, but by then I was already 1 and a half years into eve and had enough experience that it wasn’t a big deal

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Spent most of my time circa 2007-2011 as a near 40 year old career having adult. In fact the way I got introduced to the game was some all night IT maintenance and a coworker had EVE to pass some of the time waiting out patching.

It was interesting in that it was not some lame ass cartoony fantasy game like WOW and space/scifi far more interesting but I really did not get it at first. At the time there were tons of people with a single mining laser on a badger for hours and the more established folks crapping out cans of ore that corpmates or themselves picked up on a regular cadence. I tried it and hated it but did get some isk out of the first few months especially back when we were training skills to train skills. Fast forward a bit later and somehow I got to reading about a “bleeder punisher” and began my career as an agent for the Empires to rid their space of floating junk. Amazing how many people line up to lose their ships to a lowly frigate fit for pvp when they are not.

Spent years enriching myself with great social interactions with hundreds of well meaning players telling me to die irl, f my mother, get cancer and aids, and other helpful advice. Later on solo ganking before any of the barge changes yielded even more cherished interactions with the finest gamers known to mankind. I don’t play well with others and the limited times I did attempt to “go to null and learn how to pvp” just ended up with me awoxing anyhow. Also did not play well with the group gankers either so it has been a shame in recent times after CCP ruined solo griefplay post 2013.

I do relish the cherished memories though and nothing comes close to EVE in that regard. I do wish however that for all the carebear whining and tears about how gankers are ruining the game today that CCP would cave in and return the rules/mechanics back to around 2008.

There is a giant metal bucket just waiting for those salty tears and the inevitable demand they return mechanics back to 2021.

LOL

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It took me 3x to start playing Eve. The new player experience was pretty horrible the first 2 times and I couldn’t be bothered. However, 3rd time is a charm. And both my developer on a project I was working on as well as my hubby played Eve so I had to hear about it both at the office and home. o-O

Anyways, the first time I was blown up I was trying some high sec mining. Someone from CODE blew up my little venture and that made me decide to grow up and try to bait CODE gankers. Well, that didn’t happen because I ran smack into the NPSI (not purple shoot it) community and jumped straight into fleet pvp by the end of my first month in Eve.

Around month 3 I showed up to a regular Sunday fleet in a Malediction (interceptor usually used for scouting). I somehow found myself in the “bait squad” non-consensually. :rofl: However, I decided what the heck and rolled with it. Especially since I’d gotten really good at DScan due to the easter event. I didn’t catch anything on that fleet but I didn’t get blown up either and soon I found myself flying with other NPSI groups.

One thing I should mention is after hearing my husband’s complaints about being a null citizen, I had firmly decided I wasn’t joining any corp. Honestly, being a part of the NPSI community would have made that possible if I wasn’t lured in by the awesome people of FUN Inc.

At around 6 months in the game, the CEO was looking for more people to FC. My dear, sweet, loving husband “casually” mentioned I used to be a public raid leader for another old MMO we played. What everyone heard was “Kshal wants to FC”. :face_with_monocle: So by the end of my 6th month I had taken out my first fleet and I think it was around my 8th month a corp mate and I were running our own newbro roams.

One thing I should have mentioned is I started streaming the same time I started playing Eve. In the real world I do internet marketing and noticed (at the time) there weren’t any new players streaming. This turned out to be FANTASTIC for recruiting new players to the rookie roams. :smiley: I also met other streamers and people within the Eve community to do collaborations on. One of those people would be Princess Abbie (Bombers Bar FC).

I think it was around my 9th or 10th month Abbie recruited me to help him start a newbro incursion group. Ultimately we weren’t able to get it off the ground since we had to schedule around our NPSI fleet activity and the HQ groups kept competing to pop the incursion end boss. So every week when we scheduled an incursion fleet, the incursion focus would be over. Doh!

But, Abbie and I went on to co-FC fleets and overall I had a blast. We even managed to do a ganking 101 class with CODE which was really fun. Bonus is with the information on the mechanics of a gank, I’ve never been ganked.

Then at the beginning of this year I started making very short and to the point youtube tutorial videos. One of the things I hate about eve tutorial videos is how you have to forward through tons of talking to get to the thing you want to see. So the videos may not be masterfully edited (though they’re getting better!) but they get the job done!

In March I launched www.everookies.com to kind of be the written companion to the youtube videos. There’s some things that are just better as an article vs. video.

At the end of March I was asked to try to revive the newbro incursion project since the HQ groups came to an agreement on popping MOM. This meant that I could actually say that Tuesday nights (as long as the focus is still up) we will fleet up. With some help from some great people, I was able to launch Eve Rookies Incursions.

What makes this incursion group special is we only do the easiest of the incursions and anyone who can get into our basic praxis ship(s) can fly with us. We even haul around ships that can be borrowed for a 250m deposit. I get my ship back, the pilot gets his deposit back AND walks away with 60-90+ million an hour. We don’t require anyone to keep upgrading themselves, we don’t require anyone to end up in our optimal ships and we don’t require regular attendance. We went from flying 1 night a week to 3 fleets set in stone and several impromptu fleets happening as FCs have availability.

9 months later and we have pilots from all the incursion groups, public and closed, showing up to fly with us. We have pilots that decide they want more challenge and upgrade to their chosen HQ group. We have one of my leadership become a FC in one of the HQ groups. I was told the incursion community didn’t need another group. Clearly it needed THIS concept because we’re established. March 2022 will be our 1 year anniversary month!

The end of January 2022 will be my 2 year anniversary in Eve. In 2 years I’ve managed to become a content creator, FC, community leader, kill more isk in 1 year 7 months than my husband in 6 years, hit 400b killed in 1 year 10 months, and make more really good friends in and out of game than I made in other MMO’s in YEARS.

It’s been a crazy 2 years. I don’t know if you can really contribute any of this to the first gank since I’ve always been a pvper in other games and it was only time in Eve. Lets see what crazyness I get into for year 3!

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