Bridging the "Cliff"

What to do after you hit the Cliff? Now a lot of people are going to tell you different things for example: just try everything, or go make money, or just play. Find the one style of game play that you like and do that. While all these are great suggestions they don't really point you in any direction and they don't address the two biggest challenges with the cliff. So if your just finishing your 14 or 21 day game trial subscription or your just activated your subscription for the first time lets bridge this cliff and get you moving in a direction.

What are the two challenges you need to confront when you hit the "cliff"? First, you don't have very much isk to try different play styles out and second you don't have very deep skill training in anything to make a lot of isk thus compounding the challenge. For example you don't have any Planetary Interaction skills yet, if your on a trial account you may rudely be awakened to the fact that you can't train industrial ships. You might be shocked to find that the Accounting skill (Used to lower the cost of Trading on the market) cost 4.5 million isk and you have only 3 million isk to your name.When I found out it cost over a million isk to buy a cloaking device I think I stopped playing for two days. Now that you understand better what your limitations are lets take a step back and get a perspective of the greater game here for a minute.

With the above reasons in mind I want to explain something to you before you play this game much longer. Eve Online is what you might a Real Time MMO, this is for two reasons your skills train in real time and your plans to play the game are going to happen over real time. You can't log in one weekend grind for 48 hours straight and be level 100 and have all the skills and gear there is in the game. It just isn't possible. Your going to have to, at the very least, write down some goals read a little, and maybe just maybe, think. I know its hard but life sucks and then you die but that's it, it's ok to die, because you know what? You get a clone in-game that will forgive your mistakes and bring you back to life(just not your expensive implants).

The reason I like this game is because it is long term and you can actually make plans on how to play the game and you won't be patched over making all your hard work irrelevant after only a three months. This is the exact reason I stopped playing WoW, two years ago. Because after you have been playing for several years you realize you will never get ahead ever! The reason they patch all your gear into oblivion every three months isn't to help you go anywhere its to keep you subscribing for the game. Opps, did I just give away their scam of a business model. Sorry folks, grinding for the same gear I just spent three months grinding for is in of itself a mindless arcade game that just takes a couple days longer to beat. Back to Eve, long term, stay with it, long term.

My advice is when you reach the cliff you need to do two things:

• Make some isk.
• Make a skill training plan.

And if your lucky enough to have a vague idea of where you want to go in the Eve universe, I suggest making a good skill plan around that as well as a good outline of what you want to do your the lucky one here.

How do you make some isk? Now if you have an idea of what you want to do in game and you are training towards that good for you this guide isn't for you. To start making some isk you can do two simple things.

• Mining (See my Investment Guide to Basic Mining.)

• Run Missions

That will give you some income to A: try different aspects of the game out or B: get going on that plan for galactic domination you outlined or what ever you are trying to do.

How do you make a skill training plan? Download EveMon first of all. Then do some searching around the web, you can find a lot of guides about professions in Eve and they usually mention a few key skills that you will need. Use these as a templates and put together a list of skills you want to be working towards.

Remember think long term, when I say long term I mean one month is short term, three months is getting there six months is getting about right, a year? not unheard of.

Note: If you start down a path say a month into training some skills and it just isn't your thing that's ok, start working towards something else. My main has deep skills into a wide assortment of random things. Life happens your plan is just a template of what you hope you want to do.