Came from Earth and Beyond after it went into sunset, was gutted. Although played and finished everything after the server was remade by some fans.
First day was jan 2004, got out of the station and flew around the system and thought that was all the game had, didn’t realise there were star gates to leave. Spent around a week till i found out you could leave the system and there was much more out there.
Got podded by Moo after a while, which was my first loss. Played for maybe 10 years straight then on and off since then.
My first day of eve was close to when it launched. I got in the game and trained up how to use a hauler and started a business moving commodities around from stations that sold low to places that it sold at a high price. I made decent money off that, then started talking to miners offering to haul their ore. I saw people mining in cruisers with smaller cargo spaces , mining into a jettison can and some guys had secure containers. I would haul their ore and just bought it off them. Then I met this guy whose name was from some book and he invited me and my crew of miners to his corp. They were exploring null sec and producing battleships. They explored north of Jita, all the way around the north and formed IRON. We found a station out there and after some training I was mining in a battleship getting mega ore.
My first thirty minutes in Eve Online involved undocking from a Gallente station in a Rookie frigate, shooting ships, getting Concorded, shooting more ships, getting Concorded until someone told me that I was shooting at friendly ships and wait 15 minutes. Now I realize why my standings are so low with the Federal Navy. Then I was asked to join B.O.B and said no. Spent a few days trying to get out of a really f*cked up pirate corp that was always fighting about someone getting into the corps hangar and stealing that or this. Which broke out into a corp fight. To this day, I refuse to join any pirate corp…or shoot at NPC allied ships.
Boy, did I have an advantage over you 2. Swapped to this game with apx 30 players who had worked together for yrs. While not a cake walk back then, it did help.
Luck these days does not play into it much anymore. There is so much info on the game that was not out there when we started, and believe me, we had to learn the hard way as well.