That opinion reflects that you’ve never been ganked coming out of the Abyss nor been ganked while in a mission in high sec in a deadspace pocket.
You can continue believing that, and ignoring all the associated risks means one day you will get your ship blown up.
“coming out” - you can’t get interfered when you’re in Abyss, and suicide ganks in highsec is a low probability when there is no profit to be made: don’t be a target mantra.
High sec is not a safe place, I understand that. My friend which got caught in smartbombing suicide near Jita gate on the second day of playing EVE understand that too.
But there is distinct difference in chances to get blown up in 0.9 and 0.4 systems. It is about secops, while main topic is PvE content itself.
How appealing is the “controlled environment” of the Abyss if you got ganked 100% of the time when emerging from it? It’s not like Eve Online: The Game ends when you emerge from your “controlled environment”. There is no end-game lobby screen. You could run every Abyssal room perfectly and be proud of that achievement with your practice-making-perfect, but none of it matters if you don’t play the rest of the game, can’t get your loot home, and cannot transfer your narrow “controlled environment top-tier PVE skills” into other parts of the game.
You just have some very weird constraints that reflect a very weird mentality/approach to the game.
EDIT: I focus on Abyss but this applies to every PVE activity, it is a sliding scale gradient of activities (as you already recognize – some are more dangerous than others). You just draw the line in a really wibbly wobbly weird way of what is “in limits” and “out of limits” for a gang of 5 friends to do.
There isnt really much fleet based pve about tbh .
Incursions or abyss are the only 2 i can think of that are designed that way .
Id take out 4 cruisers and a scanner and grind combat anoms and ded sites , or have all charecters grind to lvl 3 missions so you can pick and choose your missions so not lose standings or have to sit out the 4 hr cooldown .
Beyond that perhaps try hooking up with a low sec corp and grind sites and anoms with blue status , watching local and d scan of course .
This is a great topic actually. Unintentionally or by design, OP stuck with the worst conditions that still sound reasonable.
Best thing a new player can do, is have a RL friend who is well established in a veteran group and join that corp. A bunch of friends suddenly deciding to start playing EVE today are actually going to fare a lot worse than one newbie going it alone. OP’s situation has only one teacher and is going to be messy.
This rules out PvP and also some decent PvE money makers, right off the bat.
Cruisers aside, EVE is not a good fit for what the OP is trying to do.
I get that a small group of newbies and RL friends want to stick together, but for group content in EVE it is important to have a lot of people in your group doing varied stuff at all times. This is because EVE is very time consuming at the higher end and most activities require a lot of preparation.
Hello there. I’m the fearless leader of Eve Rookies who runs newbie oriented incursion fleets.
It was linked above, but here is the information again Eve Rookies Incursions -
Until we came into existence incursions were out of reach from newer players for a pretty long time. There’s a huge investment in skills and isk just to get started. This isn’t counting the commitment of time to move your stuff from focus to focus. We eliminated as much of the skill and isk investment as we possibly could.
Eve Rookies is an open community, everyone is welcome regardless of who they are, their association, how long they’ve been playing, etc. We just ask that your incursion character isn’t in FW or war dec’d and that you can get into that Praxis.
Just throwing it out there as a potential solution to your problem (and honestly I built the community as a direct answer to the lack of new player friendly PVE content).
FoBs can be run by 2-5 people. I have seen it done in next to nothing. Pay outs are nothing great but provided some group content. Little bit of exploration, some theorycrafting on fleet comp and then finally running the FoB.
https://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Forward_Operating_Base
But tldr, most content that could considered to be group content will not be safe for a 2-5 man group in one of many ways.
Good luck on finding something that fits what you want to do though!