First few days

The first thing to say is that so far the learning curve for EVE has not been as steep as I expected...though that may be that I'm missing some vital learning somewhere that'll come back to bite me!

After an initial tutorial which got me into my first ship and took me through the basics of flying and combat, and learning a few essential skills I was directed to another location where there were 5 Career Agents.

Agents are mission givers (rewards are credits, skillbooks, modules and ships). The Careers Agents provide 10 missions each covering Combat, Advanced Combat, Industry & Business plus an additional 5 missions covering Exploration.

All of the missions were clearly explained, though there were a couple of time where I forgot to install a module or pick up some cargo, which meant I needed to return to my starting station.

As previously mentioned, I'd already decided that I wanted to join EVE University and so before I started these career missions I submitted my application.

An Introduction

Eve Online (stylised EVE Online) is a player-driven, persistent-world massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) set in a science fiction space setting, developed and published by CCP Games. Characters pilot customizable ships through a galaxy of 7,800 star systems.^[2][3] Most star systems are connected to one or more other star systems by means of stargates. The star systems can contain moons, planets, stations, wormholes, asteroid belts and complexes.
Players of Eve Online can participate in a number of in-game professions and activities, including mining, piracy, manufacturing,trading, exploration, and combat (both player versus environment and player versus player). The character advancement system is based upon passively training skills in real time, even while not logged into the game.^[4] 

-Wikipedia (link)

I've been aware of this game for years (it often appears in the gaming press - and even non-gaming press), but it's fiendishly steep learning curve, reputation for 'spreadsheets in space' and general 'hardcore' tag has put me off ever giving it a go.

Until now.

I've backed Star Citizen for a while now, but my current gaming machine wont run it and it's going to be a while before I can afford to buy a decent gaming laptop (luckily Star Citizen is not flagged for full release for a while yet).  My machine will happily run EVE though, so after lots of research on the EVE Online forums I decided to take advantage of a Buddy Offer to start a trial (this gave me 30 free days rather than the usual 14 or 21).

Eve is such a huge game, though, that I decided that if I was going to give it a go then 30 days wasn't long enough, so I subscribed for an additional 3 months. This time gets added on to the end of my 30 days.  As I'd used a Buddy Invite that someone had posted on the eve forums, I was also able to take advantage of a promotion that CCP runs rewarding players for bringing in new subscriptions.  That player in turn donated a substantial amount of the in-game currency, InterStellar Kredits (ISK) to me.  CCP were also running a promotion to encourage subscribers to buy 3 months rather than 1 month subscription, so I also ended up with blueprints for three ships, as well as 1 each of the four racial scanning frigates (all with fancy paintjobs) and a mining frigate.

My previous research had confirmed that the game could be as hard to learn as I'd been lead to believe, but also that there were several in-game teaching corporations set up to specifically help new players.

I chose to join EVE University.

This blog will chart my progress within New Eden.

Wish me luck!