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 :)

All Things Eve (The Full Series)

Into Eve Online
Risk and Reward in Eve
Eve Kick-Start: Fitting Your Ship

Eve Kick-Start: Creating a New Eve Character
Eve Kick-Start: Skill Training for Newbies
Eve Kick-Start: Tutorials and Beyond

Risk and Reward in Eve

I've been mostly trading the last few days in EVE Online. My ISK balance has been steadily improving, so it's been good.

Risk and Reward in Eve

Two times I've been blow to pieces when hauling in low-sec, both times my industrial has been empty. The first time I got pod-killed as well, second time I managed to warp my pod to safety (after first undocking straight into the only other pilot in the system, who happened to be a pirate, duh).

Since then I've plugged myself with attribute enhancing implants to boost my skill training, and because of this I've been more and less travelled in high-sec only.

This morning I spotted lucrative trade route, but the buying end of the route was in low-sec, and then I realized that if I go for it, I can lose it all: If I make it to the station and make the purchase, most of my ISK will be tied to the goods in my cargo. If I get destroyed after that, it's all gone. If I get podded, I lose substantial investment I made in the implants. Even that I checked the system stats for recent activity, and it looked "safe", I didn't do it. I had too much to lose.

Then it hit me. This was fear. I was afraid to lose it all.

This is what makes Eve unique from anything I've experienced in massively multiplayer online games. I can actually lose something if things go bad. So it actually possible to risk it all (not recommended!). In other games I've played, like WoW, what you risk in the end? Not much. Your risking "to waste time" if you die, but that's pretty much it. In Eve, it's a whole new ball game.

Thus, I have to constantly evaluate the risk and reward of every action in Eve. And this is why I've enjoyed Eve so much. The rush after succesful "risk-run" is amazing!

All Things Eve (Further Reading)

Into Eve Online
Risk and Reward in Eve
Eve Kick-Start: Fitting Your Ship

Eve Kick-Start: Creating a New Eve Character
Eve Kick-Start: Skill Training for Newbies
Eve Kick-Start: Tutorials and Beyond

Into Eve Online with the same old, now fixed, laptop

Whoo, I got my laptop back, the video card was broken - so much for trying all kinds of "fix Vista" attempts and trying/installing all kinds of tools and drivers. Well, anyway, the laptop is back and it's been working nicely.

Into Eve Online

I couldn't stay out of massively online games for more than six months it seems as now I'm playing EVE Online - which is "Elite like", scifi/space game - where all the action happens in one universe (no realms, everyone plays on the same server!). Oh, and I just found out, that one can be "healer" in Eve too!

There are no classes in Eve - just skills, but training for the right skills and buying the right stuff for one's spaceship, other ships shields/armor/hull can be repaired remotely, thus healing! Yay. Not that I'm necessarily gonna play like that, I'm more into mining and trading in Eve at the start, but the options seems endless.

(for those not understanding the fuzz about healing, just look at what I posted about WoW, and you'll understand)

I totally recommend checking Eve out, as it's free to download (no need to buy the game from store or anything, just download), free to try for 14 days, and it's whole lotta fun (at least for me).

I'll be (most likely) writing more about Eve in the future, but while at it and if you're interested, and were or are playing WoW, check CrazyKinux's blog for EVE Online questions for WoW Players and then Hammer's Eve for some good guidance.

All Things Eve (Further Reading)

Into Eve Online
Risk and Reward in Eve
Eve Kick-Start: Fitting Your Ship

Eve Kick-Start: Creating a New Eve Character
Eve Kick-Start: Skill Training for Newbies
Eve Kick-Start: Tutorials and Beyond

The Day My Laptop and Vista Stopped Working

First blog entry in a while! If you subscribed when I was still active in WoW, sorry but no WoW stuff :( Just random rambling story about my struggles with my 10 month old laptop and Windows Vista.

I started having problems with my Acer 7520g laptop with Windows Vista Home Premium a while ago, problems being computer/Vista crashing or freezing and not coming back up.

I had some crashes prior to this, but nothing too serious and everything seemed to work fine, so I shrugged it off as "normal windows" behaviour.

After 9 or so months, the system got frozen for the first time. Suddenly everything stopped, screen was frozen, the picture got bit "blurry" (looked like less colors with some purple pixels on screen) and I could only restart the computer with power switch.

After first such freeze everything worked fine, Vista restarted normally, so I once again thought "it was just one of those times". But at this time I took backups of my latest files, just in case.

Second time, computer froze exactly like the last time (couple of days later). This time, Vista started loading normally, but before the login screen should've been up, the computer stuck on black screen and nothing happened. I went to repair the windows (as system suggested when I forced boot with switch).

The Startup Repair did it's thing, but Vista still didn't start. So I went back to repair, and this time used System Restore, which worked ok, but after the restore Antivirus software started malfunctioning (Norton Internet Security). I uninstalled it, as at that point I suspected it was the source of the crashes, and installed new firewall (Comodo) and antivirus (Avira) and everything seems to be ok.

I also installed Speedfan to check if the laptop was overheating (which could've caused such freeze). Both HDDs were showing about 40-45 celcius, Core was at 60-65 and Temp1 (GPU?) at 60-65. So these seemed fine (bit high, but nothing too dangerous). So I figured everything was ok now as the computer started fine when I restarted it after all the installs and fixes. So I turned off the computer that day.

But the next day when I turned on the computer, it didn't boot. Startup repair didn't work. System restore didn't work (tried all the Restore Points I had). Vista did start in Safe Mode, so I managed to take last backups of my files. After trying everything, it seemed that restore to factory settings was the only way, so this is what I did.

I booted the computer, pressed Alt Gr + F10 to bring up the Acer eRecovery as instructed in the manual. I chose to reset to Factory settings (I don't have user defined recovery point, just the "day 1" settings. The factory recovery seemed to go ok. Recovery was finished, and system went to reboot and start Vista when I pressed OK. Vista started "the first time install" normally, "Please wait" and "loading mouse cursor" showed on screen, just like the first time I turned on the computer 9 months ago.

But suddenly screen went black, and all I could see was Black screen with white underscore flashing on top left corner. There was no response to key presses or anything. After letting the computer stay at this stage for a long time, I turned off the computer and back on after a while. When Vista started it showed error message, something like this: "Unexpected error has occurred and Windows install could not be finished. You can reboot and start Windows install again. Press OK to reboot". I let the Vista start once more, just in case, but I got the same error message. Safe mode didn't work (as Vista wasn't installed yet).

So I went to eRecovery again, and reseted to Factory settings again. The install went ok, just like last time, but when Vista was finalizing the install, it stopped like last time (Black screen, white underscore flashing in top left corner) and install could not finish.

So now there is no working OS in the computer and eRecovery to reset factory settings is not working.

After the initial crashes I ran hard drive check to see if it was ok, and got no errors (although saw lot of blue pixels on the screen when it ran, but didn't think it was too serious). I also ran the windows memory check, which didn't report any errors (didn't report "no errors" either, but I think that's normal).

I'm guessing there is something broken in the computer, either memory or hard drive, or the eRecovery partition is somehow corrupted.

I'll try to create bootable Vista DVD on another computer, and run some tests again, in case I Vista doesn't crash from DVD as well (which would indicate definate error with the memory).

After this, I'll be returning the laptop to Acer service, and hopefully get fully functional, error-free laptop back (whether it being repaired or a new one). Wish me luck!