The Short History of a Total Noob

Beginnings

I started playing EVE Online back in December, as a sort of Christmas present to myself.  My character is about five months old, but I've really only been playing for six weeks or so.  I'm still very much a newb, and ask dumb questions all the time.  Be warned that I may end up asking you guys more than a few.

As you probably already know if you read my previous post, I'm a Minmatar pilot.  I started off in the Military School and did the Career Agent missions in a system called Hadaugago, if I remember rightly.  I got stuck on the Exploration Career Agent and gave up after spending about an hour trying to probe for a signature, but I had little trouble finishing the other agents' missions.

After finishing with the Career Agents, I felt kind of lost.  I had heard of the Epic Mission Arc, but had no idea how or where to start it.  I didn't even know that there were things like agent levels.  I tried spending some time mining in a Burst, but quickly became bored after a few days.  Deciding that the time had come to move out of the NPC starter corp, I made a topic in the recruitment forums looking for my first player corporation.

Crunchy Crunchy - My Corp

A then-new corp by the name of Crunchy Crunchy saw my post and sent me an EVE-mail about joining. I didn't think too much about it.  They were the first people to ask me, and they seemed nice.  Luckily, I still don't regret my decision.

Being a new corp, Crunchy's chat was rather empty, but there were plenty of other people in the alliance who were old veterans willing to help me out.  A lot of the people were ex-PvPers who had gotten tired of nullsec and decided to start a more peaceful mining life, and all of them were quite happy to teach me the basics of the game and get me set on my feet.  One guy in particular decided to pretty much adopt me as his personal newb, and I got a free cruiser, a lot of ISK, and a lot of really helpful lessons from him.

Mission Running

After properly fitting out a Thrasher with his help, I set out to do some Level One missions.  My friend shadowed me for the first few to make sure I didn't do anything truly idiotic, and then I was on my own.  Level Ones quickly became easy for me, so I joined more experienced people on Level Three's and Level Four's, getting a whole lot of cash for doing very little other than getting rid of some tackler and E-War frigates that occasionally showed up.

I started on the Epic Mission Arc after about two weeks of grinding Level Ones.  The first handful of missions were very easy and got me far more ISK than your average Level One, but I soon ran into a certain mission called "Burning Down the Hive."  I faced my first warp scrambler/disruptor there.  My destroyer did not fare well, and I lost my first ship.

I recovered, but had no desire to return to that mission.  I still haven't, although I'm certainly capable of doing it now.  I spent quite a long time doing Level One missions in a Thrasher, and only just recently left my destroyer for a Rupture cruiser.

I got started running Level Two missions in the Rupture.  It was an artillery fit, not at all like the autocannons I had been working with earlier.  Without any missile skills other than Rockets and no drone skills whatsoever, I had to do some fancy flying to be able to lower my transversal enough to hit close-in frigates at all.  I also had to spend some time finding a proper orbit distance, although my corpmates helped me out with that.

Eventually, I trained up drone and missile skills enough that frigates weren't too much of a problem.  I began feeling rather complacent in the power of my death-dealing, flying nailgun (the Rupture does kind of look like one, doesn't it?) and stopped checking EVE Survival for mission details.  Considering I almost never read the agents' blurbs, this set me up for a fatal combination.

I went into Recon 1/3 without any idea that I was not going to come anywhere close to being able to kill all of the enemies there.  I went into it like a normal mission, and was able to tank the damage for a while until all of the ships had spawned in.  I could barely scratch the Arch Gistum T2 cruisers, but instead of wisely warping out once my shields began dropping precipitously, I tried to burn for the acceleration gate.

I made it.  Somehow.

Then I just sat there on the other side.  A whole bunch of ships spawned in, and knocked out the last bit of my structure.  I went off to buy another Rupture, and learned to always check EVE Survival before I went on a mission.

Looking back on it, this supposedly "short history" wasn't all that short.  Oh well.  This concludes the introduction portion that I had planned, so now we can actually get into the meat of this blog.