EVE Online is a tough game to learn without a lot of effort and assistance. The good news is that there’s now an easier path to getting started: the EVE Academy, a new companion website to the 18 year old MMO, was created specifically to show new players the ropes, and potentially teach a few old dogs new tricks as well.
The EVE Academy’s main goal is to introduce players to EVE and try to break the game down into four distinct “classes” to help create a more manageable scope to their early EVE experience. These classes — Explorer, Industrialist, Enforcer, and Soldier of Fortune — don’t have any real in-game meaning. Instead, they’re a way to help new players create goals for themselves inside EVE’s sandbox.
Each of these classes has a dedicated page that breaks down the basics of what a player can do to fulfil goals that align with that class. For example, the “Enforcer” class is what the Academy calls a player who wants to focus on PvE activities, and so guides players through destroying NPC space ships, completing missions, and earning money and reputation with the game’s factions. The Enforcer academy page features a video overview of what kind of gameplay this style of play might introduce you to, and what type of player might be drawn to it. Further down the page is a video dedicated to explaining the mission system in EVE and how to get yourself started.
There are also links to other video tutorials created by the EVE community itself. These feature players and content creators well known in the community for providing help to newcomers, and they go more in depth on specific areas of gameplay. CCP Games, EVE Online’s publisher, partnered with a number of players in the community when establishing the EVE Academy site.
One of the more important bits of the Academy are suggestions on what skills to train on your new character and exactly how to set up your first few spaceships. EVE has thousands of different skills that all affect a character and the ships they fly. Compounding this are hundreds of different ship types, with numerous choices of weapons, engines, and defensive modules. These are choices that new players often get wrong, due to EVE’s massive complexity, and these wrong choices can lead to a lot of frustration in a game where your ship can be permanently destroyed if you make the wrong choices. By giving community-approved guidance on what players should be doing early in their EVE careers, the EVE Academy is setting new players up for success, rather than heartbreak.
With a game as difficult to succeed in as EVE Online, a website like the EVE Academy is a great addition. Almost any EVE veteran will agree that new players are one of EVE’s most precious resources, and no one likes to see any player walk away from the game. Hopefully the site will help newcomers go on to be the industrial moguls, infamous spies, terrible pirate lords, or galactic warlords of EVE’s future.
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