Getting a NewBro into space - my advice to him, help me do it better.

"Anyone here play Eve Online?" When I saw that on our internal company newsgroup, how could I not jump right in.  We'll call him NewBro here, to protect the innocent from all you evil doers out there.  NewBro played for a while back in 2008, mostly doing mining before he quit.  Now's back and has expressed an interest in high sec missioning or exploration.

NewBro says: "Then I started reading more about probing and exploration and watched a youtube tutorial.  *That* looks like something I’d be up for.  Sneaking around cloaked in low-sec space going treasure hunting and trying to avoid big bad guys.  From what it looked like it could be a fun style of game play for me since I often just have an hour or so to play."

Here's what I've replied with.  Please chime in O Experts of Eve and help a NewBro out!

The thing is that choosing to do exploration and choosing to do security missions, will pretty much be two completely different skill paths to train for.

Edit: He has unspent skill points since he character pre-dates the removal of the learning skills, so he'll be able to skip through some of these fast.

Exploration

Inspiration: see JonnyPew / Sir Livingston's youtube videos 

Eve University Articles:  http://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Exploration_101 , http://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Scanning ,

Skills: the good news is that your Mem/Int mapping will do you well here.  Since you have three bonus remaps, you might want to consider remapping to max Int with Mem as your secondary.  Almost everything you’re going to train here is primary Int, secondary Mem.

Use unspent skillpoints to get to Cybernetics 4.  Buy a +4 implant for every attribute except Charisma and plug them in.  That will make everything else go faster.

Acquire the Astrometrics skillbook and train to level 3

Acquire the Hacking skillbook and train to 3

Those two skills will be enough to get you going, but may take 24h to get you there.  You could even train Astrometrics to 1 and Hacking to 1 first and be ready to go in an hour, if you want to get home, log in and set those up, then log off and do family stuff.

Buy a Imicus such as in this Eve University article: http://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Imicus

This will be:

[Imicus, Scanning 101]

Core Probe Launcher I

Salvager I

Salvager I

Data Analyzer I

Relic Analyzer I

1MN Microwarpdrive I

Cargo Scanner I

Nanofiber Internal Structure I

Nanofiber Internal Structure I

Damage Control I

Small Gravity Capacitor Upgrade I

Small Gravity Capacitor Upgrade I

Hobgoblin I x4

Hobgoblin I x4

Core Scanner Probe I x16

Now, since you already have some ISK then I would consider buying the Sisters Core Scanner Probe and Sisters Core Probe Launcher.  They are more expensive, but you’ll be working in high sec for a while yet and it will help give you a boost for having lower skills.

You actually won’t be able to use the Relic Analyzer until you train Archaeology.  See if you can fit one of the Scan Upgrade modules instead.

Then get out there and head for some lower traffic areas (away from Dodixie) but staying in highsec and try scanning stuff down.

Skills you’re going to want (copied from the Eve Uni article) down the road

Astrometrics: +5% scan strength, -5% maximum deviation and -5% probe scan time per level

Astrometric Rangefinding: +5% probe scan strength per level

Astrometric Pinpointing: -5% maximum scan deviation per level

Get these all to 3 or 4 and you’ll be able to handle most anything in highsec or lowsec that you want.

Archaeology       Allows you to access loot containers found in Relic Sites.

Hacking                 Allows you to access loot containers found in Data Sites.

Get these to 4

Now ship-wise you’re going to want a CovOps ship for the scan bonuses.  The good news is that the Gallente Helios is great, according to my analysis.

That means you’ll need to get your Gallente Frigate to 5, then train CovOps.

You also have some core skills that I’d highly recommend, but right now this will get you in space and learning to probe things down.

BB60: What's Op Success for CCP?

BB60: With Phoebe about to land, CSM Minutes now out, and more of CCP Seagull's vision from Eve Vegas it appears CCP has a bold roadmap, is making big changes, and is willing to take a hit in the short term to see it through. What do you see as the measurable signs that will tell us that they've succeeded? What outcome will we see as players? Is it concurrent player count or something else?

Since I suggested the Blog Banter question, you would have thought I would have a post ready to go on Monday.  Well, not really, more like some ideas.  But to make me sound more clever than I really am: Bait Blog Banter, Best Blog Banter.

I've seen some responses agreeing that concurrent player count as the banter suggested. I would argue that the concurrent player count getting back to the level of say 2011 may not be the right goal and number of subscriptions isn't something we can observe.

Why not Concurrent Players?

If overnight we banned all bots then concurrent player count would drop.  Would that mean that the changes to Eve were a failure?  If supers were no longer a coffin for the mains of long-time players, would that make Eve weaker?  I think that the concurrent player count is a decent measure, and thanks to Eve-Offline it is a readily available metric.  But when you log in is that what you're looking for?  It's a proxy for activity.

Looking for activity.

What we should look for is wide spread activity.  Instead of seeing wide swaths of null with practically no pilots and no ship deaths (random example), then one bright spot once a month where a big fleet fight happened, we see content happening pretty much every night.  Now I picked that example of Wicked Creek largely because I hadn't ever heard of it, but I see there are more kills in any one of two dozen of the systems in my FW area than in that entire region.

Now that's just a measure of PVP activity. Similarly we should look for PVE activity. We can effectively see missioning and ratting by NPC kills on dotlan. We can see manufacturing through the new industrial indices. Unfortunately we can't see measures of mining or invention directly, but since those lead into manufacturing I think we can consider that a good proxy.  Exploration I admit we can't see at all.

Now this is not to say that I think the goal is that all systems or even all regions should have a uniform spread of PVP and PVE. Just to make it more active and more widespread. Perhaps we can make an Eve activity version of the Gini coefficient with the goal that we want to see a lower coefficient between constellations.

I was to see systems changing sovereignty in null, systems changing FW control in FW.  As I've posted before, I want to see the map changing itself.

I think this kind of activity is the best long term health sign for Eve.  Huge fights may get a nice PR bump, but I wouldn't want to measure Eve by their occurance.  New players aren't going to be suddenly able to join in a capital / supercapital F1-fest in TiDi - thank goodness.  What they'll experience if they're going to be hooked on Eve is the deep richness of all the kinds of activity that the game has to offer.



p.s. Last night Ashterothi pointed our in the middle of an op that on the star map there were cynos up and down every part of null (and some in low).  A night of exploding pseudo-stars?  Let's hope they're followed by more exploding ships!