Re-entering EVE Online

<POD INSERTION, INTERFACE ONLINE: WELCOME BACK PILOT>

So you think you’re ready for EVE Online. You were a pilot once and you’re back to settle the score. Ease back on the throttle partner. This ain’t the EVE you remember. It’s a thousand times more dangerous.

Just watch this video. Yes, its a propaganda video but I will promise you this: Everything you see is real. I’ve done it. I have lead ships into the night against incredible odds, won and lost and wouldn’t have it any other way. There has never been a gaming experience like EVE Online.

FEEL YOUR HEART RACING?

Good. That means you’re ready. EVE Online is arguably the best space MMO ever created. It is certainly now one of the longest running, single sharded universes ever created. All the EVE players share one single, always running, continuously evolving universe.

What is EVE Online?

EVE Online is a massively multiplayer online game set 23,000 years in the future. As an elite spaceship pilot, you will explore, build, and dominate across a universe of over 7,000 star systems. Sandbox gameplay and advanced skill-based progression provide you with a truly unique experience as you rise to power among the stars.

The possibilities are endless in EVE Online: take sides in factional warfare. Join an alliance and wage epic battles for sovereignty over star systems. Discover wormholes leading to unknown regions of space. Uncover pirate outposts and lucrative resources hidden in the far reaches of the cosmos.

Partially Player vs Environment and partially Player vs Player, EVE is a complex universe where industry, economics, combat, resource management, technology design, planet resource harvesting and stock market analysis and manipulation are all part of the potential gameplay. You can participate in as little of these things or as much as you like. There are no assigned roles, just skills you acquire to do what YOU want to do.

The game has been in the news for a variety of reasons, tales of corporate skulduggery, vast empires clashing, pirates destroying beloved space stations, espionage bringing alliances to their knees are all part of this game. But this has also real world implications since resources in EVE have some degree of relationship to real-world economies.

The new things I’ve noticed:

If you’ve been away for a while, like I have, when you return to EVE, you will find the universe has changed, in most ways for the better. But if you’re returning, I recommend you move slower than before, learning what’s different and focusing on staying alive. EVE’s reputation as a brutal place to live is the one thing that HASN’T changed.

EXTENDED SKILL TRAINING

The most important change for the average player is – You can queue up as many skills as you have bought and injected skill books for.
This means you can set up every skill you have and have them trained up to their maximums even if you don’t play again for weeks.
Before you couldn’t train anything longer than a couple of weeks, without monitoring it. This is the biggest advancement change in the game.

REBALANCED AND NEWER STARSHIPS

Ships have been re-balanced (again) so any ships you used to fly have probably been modified and you need to check your skill level and your performance in that ship.

Since each ship has a rating of 1 to 5, indicating how complete your mastery of abilities required to use that ship.
A mastery of level one means you can fly that ship and keep it working at the minimum level of performance. A mastery of five means you probably have a 5 skill rating in any skill required to use that ship.
It also means you have a better chance of surviving combat with other pilots, because you can equip the best technology of that ship.
There is now a third tier of ships, Type III ships which are completely modular, requiring you to build every subsystem of the ship, making something completely unique and tailored to your skills. These are fabulously expensive ships and will likely take some time for you to acquire both the skills and the funding to afford them.

CHANGED SECTOR SECURITY

High Security Space (commonly called ‘High Sec’) isn’t as safe as it used to be. I have watched numerous takedowns of ships by pirates willing to sacrifice their ships to get YOUR stuff. The insertion systems for new players are reputed to still be truly safe, but the rest of EVE is something else. Remember:

Be mindful of flying around with tons of expensive equipment or in transport ships that scream “I’ve got stuff for you to steal.”
Your ship WILL be scanned and they will follow you until they can attack your ship, in High Sec.
The will blow you up and then get blown up by Concord, in turn. Then their pirate scavenging buddies will swoop in and grab whatever wasn’t destroyed in their attack.
Low Sec and Null Sec space are still ruthless and dangerous, and being fast and nimble until you have friends is still the best rule you can use out there.

NEW TUTORIALS

There is a new tutorial system in place to help you refamiliarize yourself with the interface. It still looks mostly like the old one but things have moved around and changed optimizing performance. It will take a little getting used to but a few hours and you will be moving around good as new.
There are changes in the security setups for corporations, so if you are a corporate leader, you may want to reset and reduce all security settings for anyone in the corporation until you understand the changes.
The storage spaces have now become more unified and have your ships and your gear sharing a single interface. It was a bit confusing but I got the handle of it pretty quick.

MORE DANGEROUS MISSIONS AND NPC INTERACTIONS

– If you are a mission runner, and you will need to run missions to get exotic gear, either from stations or from all of the new NPC interactions now available in every sector of space. There is so much new content, your head will be swimming.

– Missions have gotten more dangerous, the NPCs are smarter so if you go out on missions, be mindful of the NPC behavior. They ARE smarter than they were before.

These were all the things I have figured out so far. I know there is more but I can’t think of anything. If you want to look me up out there, my name is Lan Martak and I am and always will be a Thunderbolt.

Fly smart. Fly safe. Or not, you pirate bastard.