The words veteran and noob get bandied about a lot in Eve. I would counsel you to use the latter as little as possible, as to anyone past their first month or so it is the worst insult there is. No-one likes to think of themself as a noob. However the question must be asked; what makes a veteran? When do you have the right to start dispelling advice?

Well the first thing that should be said is that Eve is huge. Never mind the size of the galaxy, the amount of detail in the mechanics of it and their interaction is simply staggering. Whilst there are some established 'best ways' to do things it is always possible to think outside the box and come up with some viable and effective way to do whatever it is you want. Be careful of reinventing the wheel, though.

The thing to beware of most is anyone who thinks they have it all sewn up. You can see them all over; people who think their way is the only way. Ask their advice but never take it as gospel (and that includes this blog). There are so many reasons to argue for veteran status; character age, time spent online, time spent in combat, time spent in PVP, ISK earnt, out of game research done, skillpoints attained... The list goes on and on. Equally each of those has an argument against it. Someone could start a character now and only log in to change skills once a week for five years; Are they a veteran? Skillpoints grow harder and harder to attain; level 5 in any skill takes longer than levels 1-4 combined for around a quarter of the advantage. We could argue forever about which is more important.

Ultimately if you have an answer to give someone, then don't be afraid to offer it, whether you have been in the game five minutes or five years. But the second you think you know it all...

Then there is a word for what you are. And it isn't veteran.

1) Get some experience of being in a player corp before starting one, to see what works and what doesn't. There is nothing that puts people off joining a corp faster than seeing corps of one with a 2 day old CEO who has only just left the training academy and barely had time to get through the tutorials.

2) There are 2 valid reasons for starting a corp:

Providing something that no-one else does.
Providing a home for an already established group of friends.

If you don't meet those criteria it will be assumed you just want to boss people around.

3) Don't recruit for a new player corporation in a system with a level 4 agent, you are unlikely to get many takers.

4) Recruiting in local anyway is generally considered in much the way as a telephone sales call. If you must do it keep it brief and have some connection to what happens in that system.

5) New corps that are not in a militia or an alliance are unlikely to attract much interest at all at the moment. Consider joining one to expend your playerbase.

6) You'd better be around a LOT, at least in the early days. Until you have reliable directors you are the first and only figurehead for the corp. If you're never online it's a pointless endevour.

7) You also need to know what you're talking about at least within your corp's specialist field, or younger players than yourself will soon drift away.

8) Recruiting for a small corp is the hardest job in the world. When people join a corp they usually do so to have people to talk to, as well as to share resources, The fewer people there are in a corp, the less likely it is there will be someone else there when you log on. Have at least a couple of core players in the corp to start with that you can rely on, or be prepared to be happy being in a corp of one.

9) If you're taking tax from people you'd better have something to give back in return.

10) Corporations full of new players are prime meat for pirate corporations. It costs a tiny amount to declare war upon you so that your corporation can be shot and even podded anywhere. Yes, even in HiSec space.

Given the release of Empyrean Age and factional warfare missions I feel it is time to introduce the concept of PVP to the PVE player. The worlds of PVE and PVP combat are very different, and it is understandable that specialists in each skillset have very little understanding of the other until quite late in their gameplay experience. This is for a number of different reasons but primarily because PVP is a fleet activity and PVE is a solo one.

That is not to say that neither can be done the other way; the main contact a PVE player will have with PVPers is pirates can flipping or baiting, which is usually a solo activity, at least until the pirate hooks a PVE fish. Pirates can also often be found solo in low sec preying upon new players who wander in acidentally and do not yet understand the game mechanics, or other pirates in lesser ships.

However the bulk of PVP is conducted in fleets with a very different mindset. The differences are:

1) Income.

PVE missions and belt ratting provide a steady income in usually quite small increments. PVP fleet warfare often means long periods with no, or even negative, income punctuated by occasional massive payoffs. Usually those payoffs are from PVE goals (officer spawns in lowsec complexes that require running the gauntlet of other PVP fleets, for instance) or from killing those foolish enough to fly in lowsec with hideously rare modules.

2) Ship Loss.

A PVE player will only lose a ship if they make a mistake, on average once every few months or so. A PVP player has to leave station with the mindset that they will lose the ship more often than not. This is where the necessity for fleet warfare comes in. In PVE you can safely fly an expensive ship because you know exactly what you will be facing. PVP is almost always an unknown quantity where anything could happen. It is better to have three ships that combined have the damage of one when the cost of the single ships is three million each and the single ship is 70 million.

3) Skills.

This is the one that the PVE player gets hung up on the most. I have spoken to a lot of players who have said to me that they are waiting till they get better at the game before attempting PVP. I have to admit I have been guilty of this in the past myself. However it is important to realise this: PVP DOES NOT REQUIRE MORE SKILLS THAN PVE.

Keep repeating that to yourself until you understand it. Different, maybe. More, no. Any holes in the quantity of SP you have can usually be made up simply by having a larger fleet.

There are some skills useful in PVP that are largely useless in PVE for some members of the fleet:

MWD instead of Afterburner
Warp Scrambling
Recon Probing skillset
Electronic warfare skillsets (sensor dampening, sensor jamming, webbing, etc.)
Cloaking
Remote projection skillsets (transferring shields/armor/cap to other members of your fleet)
Cap draining skills (though these are less useful than they used to be)

Also in General guns work better than missiles, which is not to say that missiles are useless.

Just as in PVE of course more skills are better than fewer but don't think you need many millions of SP before you can join in. There will always be someone bigger and better than you but that shouldn't put you off having a go. A brand new character with the right skillsets can fly an electronic warfare specialist ship with remote projection and ew modules all ready to use, and has the advantage of it costing nothing to replace a clone should you get podded.

4) Patience.

Until now PVP was fairly random and involved a lot of waiting around and taunting before it would begin, whilst PVE had missions which could be logged into anytime you felt like shooting at something.

Now with the advent of Factional Warfare there are specific goals that can be completed anytime you wish, even if there is no other PVP player around. Like a PVE player you can log in anytime, get a mission, and set out to complete it. There will be some NPC players to fight, as in PVE, but there may or may not also be PVP players there to try and stop you too. Missions will change each time and not be set and knowable in advance. They will probably have a fleet, but there may be one or two or even no other PVP ships there at all.

This is Factional warfare. This is the Empyrean Age. This is now. Get in your ships and take part.

For those of you outside the corp:

There have been a number of changes to the corp setup recently. The most significant change is that the corp has split in two, allowing us to set up a hisec laboratory facility and give access to jumpclones to our members. I have also set up a corp outside of the alliance to allow us to join in with factional warfare when the war starts on June 10th. That should be fully operational and open to all alliance members and their alts as of 2nd June, with a current maximum of 200 members.

Also today the blog total number of unique visitors (since I installed the counters just over a month ago) hit 1000. I'd like to thank you all for stopping by and do come see us in our corp chat PVE or our alliance channel SAFE-PUB if you are interested in joining us.