This is my response to Eve Blog Banter #16 by CrazyKinux.

Its quite hard for me to think way back about what I wish I knew that I know now. Primar­ily because a lot of what I learned early on is no longer applic­able in the game. How­ever, I’ll give it a shot.

0.0

Play­ers from beta had an advant­age in this regard. While all the regions — and the galaxy in gen­eral — was com­pletely dif­fer­ent, play­ers from beta already had cor­por­a­tions and coali­tions planned for May 2003 when the game launched. They knew head­ing out en-masse to 0.0 would be the most prof­it­able ven­ture, and they knew that isk was king.

On the one hand I wish I knew this as well, espe­cially since I spent the first few months of my time just min­ing, because mis­sions were com­pletely crap, and there weren’t any rats worth killing. The only real altern­at­ive was trad­ing, and it wasn’t quite what I envi­sioned when I was read­ing a pre­view for the game. But on the other hand, if I had ven­tured out into 0.0 to mine and make it rich, its doubt­ful I would ever have met the group of people that I did, and that mat­ters more to me than any money (vir­tual or real).

Charisma doesn't matter

To be fair, there’s a whole load of skills now that use cha­risma, but its still a second thought to most pilots. I pumped everything into cha­risma when I star­ted. This was before the more recent addi­tion of every race/bloodline start­ing with the same base attrib­utes. I was under the mis­taken impres­sion that a higher skill in Empathy would allow me to ‘barter’ in a way and sub­sequently buy NPC goods at lower prices and sell high. This mis­taken idea is partly what lead me to re-roll to Min­matar; some­thing I have never regretted.

At the time there was a few trade skills and one or two social skills. I’m not sure lead­er­ship even exis­ted, but don’t quote me on that. So hav­ing loads of cha­risma made you totally gimped.

Check zeros

This hap­pens to every­one at some point. Its late, you’re in the arse-end of nowhere, you need to go to bed before you fall asleep on your key­board and end up with ‘QWERTY head’ syn­drome. To achieve this, you need to get back to your personal/corp HQ ASAP. Shuttle time then!

Except that shuttle cost 10-100x what it should have, and check­ing the trans­ac­tion log, it shows you bought it from ‘Joe King’. That’s isk you ain’t get­ting back.

Check zeros. Count them. Do this if you are feel­ing even slightly weary or tired. If you deal in large amounts of isk for orders or whatever, count them even if you’re awake.

Trust

That’s my three for per­sonal stuff. I want to add a little some­thing about trust though.

Its a com­mon mis­con­cep­tion that you can­not trust any­one in Eve. This is pat­ently untrue. Yes, there are many many instances in the press and on the for­ums point­ing to abuse of or com­plete fail­ure of trust. This is more to do with mass media and sen­sa­tion­al­ism. If there was a news post about “largest e-bank in Eve doesn’t scam any­one, you’re money is still safe”, it would be for­got­ten... Actu­ally, I lie, people would take their money out pretty fast, assum­ing some­thing dodgy was going on... But that all feeds from the notion that we can’t trust each other.

I was there for Mor­bor. This was the first (that I’m aware of) pyr­amid scheme scam in Eve. I actu­ally made some money out of it, since I sent a small amount and got decent returns to entice me into ‘invest­ing’ more, which of course I never did, because I’m not a chump. Lots of people were though, and he dis­ap­peared with over a bil­lion isk at a time when a bil­lion was a hell of a lot.

Any­way, I’m ram­bling, which I tend to: you may have noticed.

The point is, most people are trust­worthy in Eve. Use com­mon sense when deal­ing with any­one though. Con­tracts in local are scams — not always true, but rule of thumb. Give other pilots money by all means, but do so under the assump­tion that you’ll never see that isk again — much like the ‘only fly what you can afford to replace’ rule for ships. Also, if someone gives you isk, its a bribe. Always. *waves to Tyrrax*