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.
