A Newbie's Guide To Being A Pangalactic Superwarrior

written for my new alliance, The Bastion [BASTN]



Hello new person!

Welcome to this corner of the internet.

Before we go too much into specifics let's have a quick recap on how the internet works. Here's a reddit post about kittens.
http://www.reddit.com/r/aww/comments/25qo0d/found_these_brothers_outside_my_gfs_house_i_fed/
Currently 3043 people like this post.

Here's a brilliant and technical analysis of Eve physics from an expert space warrior
http://www.reddit.com/r/Eve/comments/25s7ti/ship_motion_in_eve_online_lots_of_math_greek/
Currently 24 people like this post.

Expressing this numerically, if you're a kitten THREE THOUSAND more people like you than if you're an expert space warrior. You're more than twelve thousand percent more liked.

We can put this into a mathematical expression:

Kittens > expert space warriors. By tons!

If your Eve life ever feels difficult or frustrating just remember this simple, empirically proved statistical fact - you're twelve thousand percent better than the narky bitter vet who shouted at you. And that's awesome.

Down to details, it may seem daunting that you're in an alliance that jumps across the universe to fight people. There's two important things that help you though, in fact the game mechanics advantage new players in this.

- you can deathclone to anywhere your corp has an office. When we deploy we normally rent an office at or next door to the target system.

- you can operate in almost any fleet in a tech 1 frigate. With a brand new character you just need to learn the microwarp drive and the warp disruptor to be a really effective tackle frigate pilot. Ewar frigates (Vigil, Crucifier, Maulus and Griffin) are also super fun and really really useful.

Let's recap - we can get you there. We can get your ships there - just ask a friend or your corp to get someone with a carrier to help move your ship. You'll probably have to change the ships' names to [Yourname]'s Slasher etc.

It's also likely that our market wizards will stock the deployment market with newbie friendly ships - these are often on alliance contracts.Some corps will have ships available, find out how your corp does this.

Once you get there your enemy is inactivity and your main weapon against this enemy is sociability. Talk to people. Make sure you have all the IT things sorted - jabber mumble. Get a microphone and talk to people.

Practice practice practice. Go out with one other person and practice tackling them burning perches and warping back, scouting and so on.

Now very occasionally there will be fleets you can't come on. Black Ops fleet work by teleporting ships but they can only teleport ships that fit covert ops cloaks so the minimum to be part of the operation is usually a Stealth Bomber. If in doubt ask the FC (Fleet Commander) if you can be of use.

Now once in a while you may get shouted at. As a FC let me explain why. We work in horrible conditions, we have to listen to multiple audio channels where different people are talking at once, while multitasking a ton of complex things. We have to monitor local, private chats, jabber chats. We have to know what the bad guys are doing, just did, are about to do and might do. In addition there's often aggravating alliance spacepolitics which makes us grumpy. (In one of my former alliances I was the senior active FC and our Recon people still didn't consider me spaceimportant enough to give me any actual recon).

FCs get grumpy.

So we might yell shut up or something but it's because we're busy stressed people in the middle of doing a really hard job.

If we annoy you please remember where we started this discussion - you are literally and provably TWELVE THOUSAND PER CENT better than us. We're internet nerds, you're kittens. So neer neer ner neer.

If you get really pissed off then please a) sleep on it. (A lot of times if I think I was rude I'll contact people after a fleet to apologise). b. raise it with your corp ceo or a diplomat. (No need to just let it go, newbie relations is really important - a FC may need to be made aware he's doing his job wrong). And finally c) if you really can't stand a particular FC simply stop joining his/her fleets. There's lots of other fleets to go on.

On to specifics, how you have fun as a new player in fleets:

- stay alive. Tackling is not a matter of just burning into a huge blob of ships and dying, often your best first move is to get 200km off a fight and watch it. A Tackler is often most useful at the end of the fight when the bad guys are trying to escape. One of my favourite memories is a fight when I was flying a Crow, which is a glorified tackle frigate and I caught two battleships at the middle and end of the fight then caught the enemy FC at the sun in his Damnation command ship and got his pod too. My tackling caused about a billion isk damage to them and turned a loss into a disaster and all because when I got shot at early on in the fight I warped off to a random planet then back. I actually warped off to survive three times before I landed all those juicy tackles. So keep alive - you're important.

- be prepared. Trying to set up IT or something during a fleet sucks, get everything ready and working before. Make sure there's ammo in your ship etc. Nothing wrong with taking it out for a test flight (unless we're camped in by bad guys).

- understand intel and geography. A big part of Eve is simply learning the map. Have dotlan open during fleets and check where we are as the FC moves the fleet about. http://evemaps.dotlan.net/map

- have isk. In addition to pvping it's good to work out some way of making money. Looting during combat can help although if you missed a juicy tackle because you spotted a wreck of something expensive the FC might get cross. never mind, you're a kitten. If you don't have isk and you need it just ask people for some. You can pay it back down the line later when you're some superfat space cat.

- everything is free. Newbie ships are often given out free and if they aren't free then they cost isk which you can get just by asking veterans for free money. Effectively while you're new when you want to pvp you can do so for free so don't let money be a reason not to take part. Later on it's nice to have money for fancier ships or whatever but T1 frigs are so cheap there's no reason for a space holding alliance to see people left out because they can't afford one. In the grand scheme of things the 10 rifters you lost in various dumb ways are insignificant compared to the value of the moons we hold because you and the others are active.

- be sociable. People who burn out in this game burn out because they get frustrated by the many problems the game throws at us. If you ask for help we can fix pretty much anything. And people like looking after kittens.

- keep busy. If you don't have work ask for some. In a t1 frigate you can check whether moons have towers (mind you warp off quick before it shoots you!), you can build up our bookmark collections, you can roam and see if you can find something your size to fight, you can grab a few friends and just fly around looking for trouble, you can camp gates, you can rob ESS ratting thingies, you can take a siphon and steal the bad guys' valuable moon goo, you can rehearse tackling and flying techniques on jettisoned cans. (Try orbiting a can at 20 km only doing manual piloting). Even a simple thing like reporting names in intel channels can be very useful.