Eve Kick-Start: Creating a New Eve Character

I'm new to EVE Online. My character, Araihs Revlis, was born on 15th of September 2008, 14:01 game time. So that makes me 3 weeks old today. With my Eve newbie experiece, I'd like to share some tips that helped me during these first couple of weeks in Eve. Starting with character creation.

(This post was written in 2008 and the character creation has changed significantly since then. You can read up on Character Creation and Character Creator in EVElopedia.)

Eve Kick-Start: Creating a New Eve Character

As I first started Eve (with 14 day trial), I created a Gallente with industrial career and perception attribute at 3 (Gallente Intaki) - this made it hard (time consuming) to train and fly new ships. During the couple of days with the industrial character, I noticed that perception is quite important attribute in Eve. Attributes of the character affect how fast you gain skillpoints (different attributes for different skills), so having signicantly low attributes makes some skills take a longer time to train.

I researched a bit, and found several articles about creating optimal character for Eve, but several were concentrating on how much time it takes to train all possible skills in Eve, which is a bit too longterm for me, as I don't plan to fly every ship in Eve (and if I do, I'll create Alts to be honest). For those interested, optimal character build for training all possible skills in Eve promotes high perception and low charisma, as a lot of skills (ships for example) use perception and less use charisma (apart from Trade and Leadership).

But I wanted to create more balanced character. Thus, I re-rolled and created Araihs. I chose Gallente Jin-Mei, Saan Go Caste, as I didn't want to hinder any attribute. A simple guide: Tips for Eve Online Character Creation was the one I followed, and succeeded in creating balanced character which enables me to enjoy and follow whatever career I choose in Eve, without any skill training taking too long.

So here's a tip#1 for Eve newbie: Create a balanced character (all stats 7 or above), and with slightly higher perception and intelligence. With balanced character build in Eve, you can train any skill in reasonable time, which makes it easier (and fun) to try out all kinds of things when you're new and exploring all the possibilities in Eve and have all options open for the future. If you want to specialize at some point, you can for example create a high-perception character to train and fly ships and specialize in combat, but for your main character it's good to have all options open, at least that's how it is for me.

As for career and specialization, I would recommend any new Eve player to choose Military career and one of the specializations under it. Why? because Eve is about Internet Spaceships after all - and with Military career you have the prerequisites covered to train your race spesific Cruiser and Industrial from day 1 and fly better ships than that rookie frigate right from the start if you want (better Frigate or Destroyer). And you can equip all kinds of cool equipment without training any skills.

Even if you want to pursue Mining, Trading or Industrial career eventually, flying better ships makes the start more fun as you're training the skills you want. Of course, if you want to start as mining pilot for example, by all means go for it, but be ready to train those ship skills!

If you're undecided, all the starting attribute for any race and bloodline can be found from EVE[geek]. Be sure to bounce back and forth during the character creation, checking the attributes and the skills with the two tabs in bottom left to see how the choices affect starting attributes and what skills you'll be starting with the chosen starting career and specialization.

Now that we have character creation covered and to kick-start your Eve experience, dive in the game! Or read up a bit more - Guide & FAQ : New character creation from EVE Online forums.

One last thing - if you're the kind of player who likes to study and read as much as possible about the game you play or want to play (I'm like that), then you'll also want to checkout the Ultimate New Player Collection from EVE Online forums.

Do you have any tips on character creation? Please add your comments then :)