New player on EVE universe–ready to learn exploring

I started to play EVE 8.7.2011 so this is still pretty new experience for me. Until now I have been learning basic game mechanics, learned in game skills (about 3,4M skill points learned so far) and spent time with missions and mining mostly.

During tutorial missions I got a feeling that archeology, exploring and mining could be my style on this game. Also battle in a pure form as a main career seemed  not so interested option for my playing style. After a few months I have learned that fighting is part of almost every aspect of the game in a way or another so it is pretty hard to avoid that totally. And for mining I decided in a start not to go to be pure miner and goal was going to Osprey –> Rokh style path so I can keep my options more open for example exploring.

My skills are pretty much scattered for different areas (64 known skills, four of them on level 5) but most of my skill points are on science, industry, spaceship command and drones. I guess that is pretty normal for new player without really good focus and knowledge what to learn…but I still believe that 95+% of those skills are usefully for me currently.

As I told most of time I have been mining on hi-sec space or doing mining missions. I have been trying to increase my standing for one chosen company so I could refine my ores with a better profit. I still have work to do on that area to get standing to 6.0 but that is the goal.

While wondered on internet and on EVE forums, I notice one thread which leads to this blog where writer made a test last year and documented it. Idea was to test if a trial account player can earn over 350M ISK by doing radar sites on hi-sec space in a 14 days. Writer is a pretty experienced player on exploring career but still it seems amazing on my eyes because currently have on my wallet about 20M ISK after spending my money to fittings, clones and skill books. So started to wonder that I must do something wrong here. ;)

I asked around and found out that this is still possible now days. Of course this career is pretty much luck based and sometimes you find something but mostly you don’t. But it is like treasure hunting so eventually you will find something and score big time (so I heard).

Because that blog was done by experienced player and about year ago, one person suggested on forums that I should try something similar because I’m pretty new in this game and don’t have real life EVE skills to help me. Also exploring is pretty common career now days and it is maybe harder to even find those sites if you don’t know the areas. Competition is harder.

Because exploring was on my “to do” –list next to try I might then document my experiences for a month or so. Because of the real life commitment for work and family, my playing style is pretty casual and I can play the game maybe 3-5 hours a week.

My goals/points for this test are

• How much ISK I can gather during test period. I want to point out though that ISK is not the only factor I want to test. So this will be far from optimized way to do exploring and optimize ISK because of my knowledge about EVE. So this is a learning period.
• How many radar, gravimetric and magnetometric sites I can scan down so I can check those out. I don’t want to ignore these sites types yet.
• It is stated many times by experienced players that gravimetric and magnetometric sites are not worth of time, BUT I want to test that also to see it myself. Maybe…just maybe those are now  days better or maybe I can even earn some ISK from those if I can’t find for example radar sites at all. 
• My starting point is not the same as for fresh day 1 char so I’ll have basic skilled already learned, have some basic ships with fittings and a little money to backup if I loose a ship.
• I don’t have to plans to use any alts, other players or corporation support during this period. I’ll want to check what I can do as a solo player.
• I want to do this round as safe as possible. If someone trying to ninja my site I don’t want to fight for it to the bitter end. That is also one point I want to document if I run to this kind of activity…want to see how other players behave or not. Also if the site seems to have too many and hard ‘rats’ I’ll rather fallback than loose the ship for that.  

So I guess those are my main points for this.

On a next blog entry will be about my starting point and my current skills, fittings etc. so new players like me can see what I’ll use and maybe learn something from that and do better than me. And experienced player can laugh, point with a finger and say “What a noob….that is a stupid fitting for this job.”. :) So it goes at least on other MMOs…*grin*.