With a real-time skill training system and over five years on the clock since release, it's easy to think that you'll never catch up to older players. This is a topic I covered in depth when I debunked some common myths about the EVE skill system. Having more skillpoints doesn't make a player inherently better than one with fewer skillpoints. In every avenue of gameplay from manufacturing and mining to mission-running and PvP, new players certainly have a place in New Eden. You may not be able to fly battleships and tank the enemies in a tough mission, for example, but you can join a friend's mission and help blast the enemies to pieces or run lower level missions solo.
New players now start with almost a million skillpoints distributed based on the type of character chosen at character creation. Choosing the right type of character at the beginning will allow you to try out your preferred play style without spending days waiting for the basic skills to train. A new character creation process is under development which should come out with the next expansion in March. This new process aims to introduce players to what the game has to offer before they make their choice on what kind of character they want. In addition, the new certificate system that was recently implemented can help young players by showing them which groups of skills are important for a specific task like armour tanking and which skills will help you fly a particular ship.
Tip #4: Practice, practice, practice:
Remember that everyone started off with little knowledge and learned through practice and experience. The game will seem very complex and overwhelming at first but nobody expects you to pick it all up instantly. Pick just one thing that seems fun and try it out, pretty soon you'll find yourself getting better at it. Be it mining, PvP or playing the market, there's no substitute for real experience in EVE. If you start to get bored of what you're currently doing, you can always try your hand at something else.
Having an expensive ship and all the appropriate skills at level 5 isn't EVE's equivalent of a high level character. Someone with poor skills but a lot of real gameplay experience can be more effective than a rich character with high skills but no real experience to speak of. To test this theory, some friends and I recently started new characters with the aim of being highly effective players without training over a million skillpoints. The lack of skills trained made our ships deal less damage, limited us to only a few market orders and left us with poor mining and refining skills. Despite these restrictions, we did manage to compete successfully against much older players in both PvP and market trading thanks to our existing experience with the game.
Tip #5: Learn from others:
Something that's easy to forget is that the second M in MMO stands for "multiplayer". When you get into difficulties, remember that there's an entire community of a quarter of a million players and some of them will help you out. In addition to the "help" and "rookie help" channels you can reach in-game for assistance, many of the players in your starter corp channel will be able to answer any questions you have and help you out with advice and sometimes isk.
Perhaps the biggest important tip on beating the learning curve in EVE is to join a good player-run corporation aimed at helping new players. Taking advantage of the experience of older players, even a complete newbie can compete against players many times older than them. Corporations like EVE University exist for the sole purpose of showing new players the ropes and helping them explore everything EVE has to offer.
Summary:
A lot of people find EVE to be an interesting game but never make the transition from being interested to actually playing. If you've ever felt like this or had a poor free trial experience in the past, why not try the new 21 day free trial offer (or stick with the non-steam 14 day trial) and keep the tips above in mind? Once you get past the initially steep learning curve, EVE Online is one of the most rewarding and immersive MMOs on the market.
