EvE online, you don't have the stuff
Ok, 10-20 tips (general)
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General
1. Don't Panic.
I am somewhere in between serious and joking on this one. The first time you look at an items description, or look at the market, or open up the contracts screen, or (god forbid) start trying to get t2 bpo research, you may feel a sense of panic. THIS IS NORMAL. There is a TON of information given to players. In the long run you will come to LOVE that about eve, but for now just don't worry about it. You will learn it at some point. There are a lot of resources to help you learn that.
2. Be Careful
As a newbie you really don't represent much of a target for people. Unlike other heavy PvP games griefing noobs is not common in EvE, because time is money.That said, be CAREFUL. Once you do start getting a wallet, or get into a nicer ship people will come after you. There are a lot of ways to get burned, one of the most common ways for a new player to get fucked is called 'can flipping' . Don't worry about the details just yet, but this is done to noobie miners to trick them into PvP at which point you kill or ransom them. I used to do this. Great fun.
3. Have Fun
So, the world is dangerous and complicated and you are afraid to do anything out of worry you may do it wrong. P-shaw! Have fun. Go explore in 0.0, don't be afraid to die. Try and visit every solar system (still not sure if anyone has done this). Don't let eve become like a job, EVER.
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Specifics
4) Don't fly anything you can't afford to loose.
Unlike in a game like WoW, when you die your ship is 'sploded and you loose basically everything. If you were doing a mission you may be able to go back and grab what few items remain in the wreckage, but don't count on it. Therefore, don't ever fly anything you can't afford to loose. Case in point - When I started getting serious about pvp I had the skills to fly battleships and assault cruisers (very badass ships). However, in the end I built up 20 some odd "Rifters" (a common low end, and very cheap frigate.) One of those ships cost me ~400,000 isk fully fitted, whereas a battleship would cost me ~200 mil isk fully fitted.
I expected to loose ships therefore I flew something I could afford to loose.
5) Don't fly drunk/high/wasted
I used to fly lvl 4 missions a lot. One night I got hammered and jumped in my battleship to go run a mission. I fucked up, wasn't paying attention and my ship 'sploded. I was pissed. I knew there wouldn't be many items left but I wanted to salvage what I could, but mainly I wanted revenge on those NPCs. I quickly threw together another battleship and went back in there. Guess what? It 'sploded. At that point I was out a solid 400 million isk (minus insurance, I'll cover that later). Because I decided to fly drunk.
EvE is complicated enough that loosing any cognitive ability could seriously fuck you up. If you are going to do it, do it in a cheap ship.
6) Insure your ships
This is mostly true. You have the choice to buy insurance on a ship at any time. When/if your ship splodes in a certain amount of time, you get a payout on your insurance. Usually the insurance doesn't come close to the cost of the ship, but its still worth it. For example you pay 4 mil for 3 months with a 20 mil payout if you loose ship X (which is worth 100). That can really take the bite out of a painful loss of a ship. There are multiple levels of insurance you can buy on a ship, generally I go for the lowest because % wise its the highest return, but the choice is yours. The only time I don't insure a ship is when I either don't think there is ANY chance of me loosing it. And I'm not sure I can think of an example of that.
7) Bigger is not always better
Coming from another MMO you will have a lot of misconceptions about progress as a character. You will undock from in your little frigate and you will see a towering battleship next to you and you will get a sense of awe. You will think that guy is like a lvl 60 to your lvl 1. THIS IS INCORRECT. At 15 million skill points (which is a lot) my character often flies frigates. Why? There are a lot of answers to that. A well piloted frigate will demolish a cruiser. They are faster and harder to hit. They also don't hit as hard, but you would be surprised what you can do with one.
This misconceoption totally screws up new players all the time. They will rush their skills to get into a cruiser then go buy one and slap whatever fittings skills or money allow and think they now have a better ship than their old frigate. If you are 2 months in and you are in a battleship you have rushed it and now have a very expensive and very poorly fitted ship, that I could probably destroy with a frigate. And there is nothing more hilarious than watching a 200 million isk ship blow up at the hands a 200k isk ship.
8) Never smack talk
This isn't wow, this isn't team fortress, this isn't like anything you have ever played before. Your actions have consequences. There are some great stories on Eve-pirate where you see what happens to smack talkers. For instance. You talk shit to someone. Turns out they have a lot of money and some powerful friends. They have hit squads hired to kill you any time you are in low sec. They declare war on you any time you are not in an NPC corp (more on that later). They kill your friends, family, and you wake up with a horse head in your bed. Seriously though, you would be surprised how much damage a single person can do to you if they want.
Probably the best example of this is the story of the Guiding Hand Social club
http://eve.klaki.net/heist/
Read through it. It's why I started playing the game.
The up side to the no smack talk thing is that you won't hear it that often. And interestingly enough its almost always the people that don't smack talk that are the really dangerous ones.
9) Join a corporation
You knew them as guilds. Guilds are stupid. Corporations are not. Yatzee's review of EvE was entirely bad because he ignored this. Corporations allow you to do all sorts of things, up to and including existing safely in 0.0 (which you will not do easily without one). Without a corporation your ability to succeed will be seriously hampered. That said they also bring some risks. If you are in a 'player run corporation' (different than the NPC corps you start in) you may have a war declared on you by another corporation. This can either be really fun or a total nightmare. The safety net of empire space will be gone, and open pvp will be available for anyone involved in the war. However, this happens less than you might think. Logistically it is very expensive to maintain a war, and people will rarely do it without just cause. What defines just cause is up in the air, but remember that as a member of a corporation your actions represent your corp, so don't be the douchebag that mouths off to the wrong person and drags everyone else into a war.
Like I said, its a bit different from WoW.
10) Know someone with more experience that can help you out, either financially or educationally.
In this case that would be me. Learning this game from the ground up without any help is taxing. Its how I learned. I made a LOT of very expensive mistakes. If I only had someone who could have helped me out.....
11) Do your homework.
There is a SHIT TON of information about eve out there. And I'm not talking just about guides and whatnot. Just go to EvE-online.com and look through some of their new player info. Or look through some of their item descriptions. Or just look at whatever. There is a ton of info out there, and it behooves you to know how to find some of the info you will need in this game. Of course, see #11 I can help you when I am online, but I'm not always online. On that note some of the most important help I will give you will be showing you how to answer your own questions. You will never be in a position where you don't have to look something up. That's because 1) the game is very complex, and 2) the game is very dynamic. Take the market for instance. What was true about the value of an item last week (or even last hour) may not be true right now.
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More to come later!
