EVE Online Learning Curve for Beginner to Advanced Players
EVE Online is not like any other MMO in existence. In fact, it is pretty much an anomaly in the gaming world for many reasons, the notorious EVE Online Learning Curve being one of the primary ones. But still, it exists, against all odds, for 15 years at the time of this article is being written. And it is still Charles Darwin’s wet dream.
Table of Contents
A Rookie’s Nightmare
Mastering EVE Online learning curve comes in two major steps. The first learning curve is all about joining the game and finding out how to pilot ships, navigate systems, shoot NPC pirates and sell your loot, ore or products on the market. The second learning curve is leaving the beginner safe oasis and embarking on the path of becoming an advanced player… And this steep learning curve is like nothing we have experienced in any other MMO.
Talking about starting fresh in EVE Online is truly beating a dead horse; there are thousands of tutorials out there to cover the basic principles which you can check out. CCP, the company behind EVE, has also done everything they could to create more user-friendly tutorials in the past several years. Despite that, unlike any other MMO, EVE Online starts with the proverbial kick in the teeth. New players are basically being shoved into a ship and kicked out into the space. Some of them figure out very quickly what they want to do; many never do and quit the game within the first couple of hours. A more persistent portion of new players wander off the beaten path and get blown up in the low-security sector. For many, the game stops there as well.
And many new players will simply get lost in the spreadsheet nightmare that is EVE. However, if you love Excel, EVE Online will find a place in your heart by default.
EVE Online is not a game for weak-minded and faint-hearted.
EVE Online punishes your every bad move by harming you financially. Whatever you have can and will be taken from you. You can work for six months to afford yourself a perfect ship to run level 4 mission only to lose it within seconds due to a ganker attack or, even more laughable, a simple disconnect. Your freighter can be blown up by suicide gankers in the middle of a high-security sector, while you get to watch from your rescue pod how everything you ever earned in the game gets hauled away by your (un)friendly neighborhood pirates. But if you want to be a part of EVE Online, you must accept that this is the nature of the game…
Beginner to Advanced
So, you learned how to pilot a ship, set up a small fleet of your friends and mine the local asteroid field? Great! In theory, you could keep going like that, but I wouldn’t bet on it. Sooner or later you will be noticed by gankers or established corporations will find you stepping on their turf. You will be ambushed and blown up by suicide-gankers, High-Security sector or not. Others will declare war on your corporation, which enables them to fight in high sec space. One of the most frequent reasons for people leaving EVE Online is because someone declared war on them. They responded by logging off or the duration of the war declaration and often never returned…
This, too, is the nature of EVE – it forces players to go with the flow and move forward, or be pushed out of the game, one way or another.
So, you either stop and wither away here, or you go to the next step, which is becoming an advanced EVE Online player. This also means that you have traded up for yet another highly complicated EVE Online learning curve, one that should define you as a VIP EVE player. To achieve this, you need to adopt the following philosophy first:
“EVE Online is not a game; it is a lifestyle!”
World of Warcraft, PUBG, Starcraft is games. EVE Online is not a game or a hobby. It is a second life that will fight for the dominance of your primary life. It will consume your friendships, your spare time, your relationships. It will lure you to play the game with multiple accounts. At a certain point, I had five active, simultaneously running EVE Online accounts, and thought I had problems. However, even then I never played more than 3 hours per day, which outed me as someone who was not ready to become a true “pro”. After joining an alliance and talking with some of the members there, I quickly found out that I was still a rookie compared to some of them. One guy had ten active accounts, the other twenty. The record-setting example was a fellow who had no less than sixty active EVE Online accounts, fulfilling dozens of roles ranging from industrial to piloting experts for all titan class ships. There was also a number of toons he traded with on the EVE Online character market.
The advanced EVE Online player is someone who has joined the right corporation, which in turn has made a right pick for the alliance. This person is making millions and millions of ISK (EVE currency) per hour, outmatching anything miners and mission runner could make in high-security space. He (EVE players are predominantly male) is a crucial pilot in all fleet operations, rich enough in both financial terms and skills to field the greatest of ships. He is also someone who is playing an important role in the day-to-day operations of the alliance he is an important part of, whether he is in the logistics, diplomacy or recruiting. But the most important part is the fact that this person is a natural born politician, liar, and a demagogue. He thrives on drama and feeds on noob tears of “carebears”, miners and industrialists.He’s been around for years and seems to be content to stick around indefinitely.
This, too, is part of the EVE Online. It requires a tough stomach. You need to ask yourself if you are that kind of person and if you are prepared for such a commitment. If not, cut your losses and quit the game right away.
If you are, I just might interest you to go a step further.
From Prince to a King
If you traveled this far up the evolutionary ladder, you might consider taking a jump towards the top of the food chain. To reach for the stars and become a true royalty, a king of EVE Online.
I am perfectly serious. No other MMO has a place for such important players and such a disproportionately huge gap between “normal” players and Kings of EVE. In World of Warcraft, for example, you can become a very good player, a well-geared player, take part in raids and perhaps even be a guild master. But it ends there. Your ability to influence other players or the very nature of the game is practically nonexistent.
In EVE Online, stars are the limit.
You can aim to become a corporation leader or even an alliance leader.You can become an industrial magnate or a banker. You can reach for the stars and change the face of New Eden, and by doing so perhaps become something of a famous notoriety in this dog-eats-dog sandbox MMO. The principle is simple, and if you are ready to devote your life to this cause, here is what you need to do:
Make money.
And then, make money work for you.
EVE Online is focused on one thing: PvP. Null sec PvP, to be precise, or wars of the null security sector. In order to fuel those wars, alliances need money, a lot of money. That amount of money can’t be made from running missions, mining or ratting in low sec. This amount of money can be made only by EVE online entrepreneurs that are pretty much like their counterparts in the “real life”. People who think in different ways and find solutions for problems ordinary folks can’t even fathom.
Let us not name anyone in particular, since they all love their privacy, but there are bankers and stockbrokers in EVE Online that have made trillions (FYI, one trillion = thousand billions) ISK and have grown so rich that they have in fact hired other bankers and investors to work for them and multiply their wealth. There are people who started and operate different EVE Online gambling sites, where they made huge fortunes off, and people who have invested in such projects. Other have created useful EVE Online tools and make a lot of money from their supporters as well.
You may think me for being a fool for even mentioning this, but this is actually quite possible to achieve, with some investment of money and time.The very beginning is hard, but since it is possible to buy ISK online things have gotten easier. For an amount you earn an hour of real-life work would take you weeks to earn in EVE Online at the beginning of your career, so it is best to ask yourself how valuable is your time? I have personally invested real cash to make sufficient money to buy toons and start moon mining a while ago after realizing that I would need months of grinding and farming to earn it in the very game.
Finally, the true secret is in making passive income in EVE Online.This can be achieved on so many different levels, but mostly involves investments and trading, where you make money work for you instead of spending all your days mining and hauling cargo to the stations, where someone gets rich off your work while you make pennies. Sadly, we can’t really make suggestions where and how to invest, since this is all about finding niches which get oversaturated one the word is out.However, we can tell you that you need to learn and research, look for niches other didn’t think off, find solutions for the problems others gave up on.That is the steepest EVE Online learning curve of them all.
Finally, come to think of it, the EVE Online learning curve is pretty much like life itself. Right?
