Difference between revisions of "Wear a Cloaking Device"

Revision as of 19:41, 13 September 2011

Ladies and Gentlemen now learning to live as capsuleers:

Wear a cloaking device.

• If I could offer you only one tip for the future, cloakiness would be it. The long term benefits of cloaking devices have been proved by scientists, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience.

I will dispense this advice now.

• Enjoy the power and beauty of your frigate. Oh, never mind. You will not understand the power and beauty of your frigate until it's reprocessed. But trust me, in 2 years, you'll look back at screenshots of your frigate and recall in a way you can't grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how much fun your frigate really was.

• Your frigate is not as useless as you imagine.

• Don't worry about pirates. Or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to run a level four combat mission with an Impel. The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind, the kind that appear at 4am the day after a patch, and leave the forums full of blood-stained tears.

• Do one thing every day that scares you.

• Sing (for your ransom).

• Don't be reckless with other people's safety. Don't put up with people who are reckless with yours.

• Explore.

• Don't waste your time on mission-profitability whines. Sometimes you're ahead, sometimes you're behind. The game is long and, in the end, the competition is only with yourself.

• Remember the help you receive. Forget the smacktalk. If you succeed in doing this, tell me how :)

• Keep your old thankyou letters, throw away the ransom notes.

• Train Astrometrics.

• Don't feel guilty if you don't know what you want to do in the game. The most interesting people I know didn't know on day 2 what they wanted to do with their careers in space. Some of the most interesting capital pilots I know still don't.

• Learn your support skills. Keep your clone current, you'll miss it when it's gone.

• Maybe you'll join a nullsec alliance, maybe you won't. Maybe you'll start a corporation, maybe you won't. Maybe you'll be stuck in the mission-running rut in four years time, maybe you'll be taking out titans with a Velator in your alliance's latest noob ship fleet. Whatever you do, don't congratulate yourself too much, or berate yourself either. Your choices are half chance - so are everybody else's.

• Enjoy your frigate. Use it every way you can. Don't be afraid of it or what other people think of it, it's the greatest instrument you'll ever own.

• Run radar sites, even if you have nowhere to do it but a few hisec systems.

• Read the EVElopedia guides, even if you don't follow them.

• Do not read "sins of a solar spymaster", it will only make you feel boring and stupid.

• Live in nullsec once, but leave before it makes you hard. Live in hisec once, but leave before it makes you soft. Travel.

• Accept certain inalienable truths: scammers will scam. Alliance CEOs will rage-disband. You, too, will quit alliances and join new ones, and when you do, you'll fantasize that in the good old days alliances were stable, pilots were honest, CEOs were wise, and corpmates respected their leaders.

• Respect your leaders.

• Don't expect anyone else to support you. Build up a trust fund. Make some smart friends. You never know when money or friends will run out.

• Don't mess too much with your training plan, or by the time you're four years old your plan will look point-5.

• Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it's worth.

But trust me on the cloaking device.

(A repost of an adaptation of The Sunscreen Song written in one of the many "what is there for a noob to do in EVE Online" threads on the old forums, adapted from "Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young")