My first MMORPG experience was Dark Age of Camelot, and over the years, I’ve played World of Warcraft, Guild Wars 2, and lost my social life to both Final Fantasy 11 and Final Fantasy 14. So, when I was invited to Eve Fanfest 2025 to learn more about Eve Online, I naively thought, how different
My first MMORPG experience was Dark Age of Camelot, and over the years, I’ve played World of Warcraft, Guild Wars 2, and lost my social life to both Final Fantasy 11 and Final Fantasy 14. So, when I was invited to Eve Fanfest 2025 to learn more about Eve Online, I naively thought, how different could it be? The answer: very.
I entered the orbit of New Eden as a little space newbie and quickly found myself overwhelmed with the sheer amount of information I needed to absorb and all the things I could do. There are some tutorials for new players like me, but even those were hard to digest, and I found myself turning to wikis and YouTube videos to figure out what on Earth was going on. I felt utterly lost. I accidentally left items behind at space stations, warped away at the first sign of gunfire, and lived in fear of the vast, uncompromising galaxy that sat before me.
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After arriving at Eve Fanfest in Iceland, I quickly learned that despite how different the gameplay might be, one constant remains: much like every other MMO, the community is its beating heart. I met plenty of people who were more than happy to give me some beginner tips, share some juicy drama, and teach me the New Eden lingo.
The Learning Curve That’s Actually A Cliff
“In Eve, you don’t have a learning curve, you have a cliff,” Eve Fanfest VIP Amanda Sleze (Amiomia) tells me as I lament over my failings in the game. Sleze has been playing Eve Online for just under two years, yet still considers herself a newcomer.
No matter who I speak to at the event, they all tell me I’ve struggled because I played alone, and Eve doesn’t do the best job of teaching you the ropes. It’s the community that teaches through guides, videos, and support via in-universe corporations. Sleze tells me she streams Eve Online on Twitch, so she always has the support of her viewers, and recommends that the first thing newcomers do is to find others, but not in-game, outside of it.
“EVE is one of those rare games where the first thing you need to understand is that you’re going to need to learn a lot about the game outside of the game,” Sleze warns me. “More than half of the gameplay happens outside the game client.”
Discord is the main method of communication for players, encompassing social, politics, and diplomacy, but this is also where I’m told I’ll find information and tutorials. “One of the first lessons that anybody has to learn [is] that the answers are out there, not in the universe necessarily.” I learned at Eve Fanfest that fans have nicknamed the game ‘Spreadsheets in Space’ because most of their time is spent working on spreadsheets outside of the game to put their plans into motion.
Trust Is A Two Way Street, Karma Is One Hell Of A B*tch
Communicating with other players to learn from them is daunting, as if you’ve read anything about Eve Online, it’s likely one of the many stories of espionage that usually involves a veteran player pretending to be a newbie so that they can infiltrate a corporation and take it down from the inside.
Newbies aren’t usually trusted, and as one myself, you can be left feeling paranoid that you’ll be targeted if believed to be a fraud. But the fact of the matter is, you’ll be targeted regardless, because Eve Online is cutthroat.
Many large-scale in-game corporations will use third-party tools to double-check your character background when you apply, allowing them to see if you secretly have some suped-up character hidden away somewhere.
Despite the risk from strangers, Sleze reminds me that “ships are replaceable, especially at the beginning, so don’t be too afraid to trust people. If you’re asking for help, that person might shoot you, but the next person you will run into will replace that ship, because they have a good heart. Everybody wants the new players in the game. Somebody will take advantage, but karma will come back.”
Former Eve Council of Stellar Management member and Fanfest VIP Petra Ouwehand (Kshal Aideron) warns me that “Eve players have a long memory” and provides another example of a soon-to-be karmic retribution. She runs the Eve Rookies community, which is currently just shy of 4,000 members, and is aimed towards helping newbies find their feet and like-minded allies. She takes certain precautions, such as only having so much ISK in the corporation’s wallet at a time, but that hasn’t stopped her from falling foul of rogue players before.
“Eve players are diabolical. If we can take something and take advantage of it, we will,” Ouwehand says. Despite the charitable nature of Eve Rookies, when they first started and before they realised any player in the corporation could redeem contracted ships, a player with ill intent joined, redeemed 20 billion ISK worth of ships, sent a mocking message, and disappeared into the vast expanse of space.
Ouwehand tells me she’s been tracking the player for four years now. “I know where his home base is, I know where he flies in and out, so I’m just waiting for him to undock something worth blowing up.”
Some Eve Online players like to stream snipe, effectively hunting down players so they can destroy them in-game while they’re streaming. Sleze hasn’t really had to deal with this as she always keeps her location public, stating there’s “no challenge” ing for snipers in going after “such a helpless puppy”, so they find it boring and leave her alone.
Not every stream sniping story has a sorry ending however, especially when the would-be snipers become the sniped. Sleze tells me about a content creator who was saved by snipers, and eventually was recruited to his saviour’s corporation. “Somebody found him and realized he was streaming. Instead of deciding to gank him or kill him, they decided to hang around and kill anybody who was coming into the system because that’s going to be more kills.”
Many dramatic tales are shared with me throughout Fanfest, including the notorious story of a Moon Swarm Federation player who had been a leader for years and suddenly decided to betray his team.
He went to the main staging group star, turned off the market, took everything out of the hangars, killed all the clones, and caused “catastrophic amounts of damage”. Senior community developer Peter Farrelll tells me the damage was on such a scale that it caused the server to struggle “to process all of the things going offline at once”.
Fortunately, the silver lining of such large-scale betrayals is that going through such a crisis creates stronger bonds between allies. Farrell tells me, “We just wanted a grimdark world where people could do some backstabbing, dystopian sh*t, and it turned out that it became a really good funnel for creating friendships. We’ve embraced it ever since.”
Ouwehand also points out that Eve Online doesn’t allow name changes. “All these people that pulled off these betrayals and these heists, they’re never going to be trusted again. Trust is everything in this game.”
Using the Moon Swarm Federation player as an example, she tells me he can’t ever come back. Even if he rolled a new character, people would know his voice, so instead he “won Eve”, which is what Eve players say about those who quit the game. She tells me that some turncoats in the game do so to ensure they stop playing. “Some people burn out or are so addicted to Eve that they want to find a way that they really can’t come back in. A lot of times, it’s a thing that they do. A self-destructive thing to ensure that they don’t come back.”
Eve Pros Give Their Best Newbie Advice
While the big dramatic stories about Eve Online may dominate news sites, Sleze tells me the reality is that “people are way nicer to each other than you would expect” and there are as many heartwarming stories to be found as there are dramas.
“Everybody is helping each other out. You will see that, especially for newer players. Of course, there are people out ganking. Of course, there are people out hunting. They will maybe shoot you, but then they’ll realize you were a new player. They will give you a new ship. They will sometimes give you extra ISK, and you’re better off than before. Everybody wants the [new] people to be in there because that keeps the game alive.”
Sleze says one of the hardest things to overcome is the fear of your first death and when you lose your first ship. She tells me “It’s a bit like ripping off a band-aid, because once you have it off, it’s not that bad.” as until that point, you’re being overly cautious about surviving, and that caution and anxiety prevents you from embracing some of the more fun and riskier things to do.
“One billion ISK is nothing. If you lose anything that’s less than one billion, don’t cry. It’s okay. You’ll get that back within a week, so don’t get discouraged.”
Farrell’s advice is that the player sharing the same space as you has just as much to fear. “That person who’s jumping into that system is almost certainly just as afraid of you as you are of them. Because they’re like, ‘Oh, this person might be like some badass that I don’t know about, maybe this person just created a new account to try and bait me, so I’m going to try and avoid them.’”
Ouwehand’s best tip is “If someone blows you up, ask them why. The person who gets blown up isn’t going to be amused, but Eve players love letting everyone know how much we know. If you go and ask somebody, ‘Why did you do that?’ They’ll tell you exactly what you did [wrong], and probably give you a little bit of an ISK, pat you on your head, and send you on your way.”
Eve Online Wants New Players
Attracting new players is a vital part of any MMO’s existence, but for Eve Online, the game’s complexity and reliance on learning from other players who may be wary of trusting you can be a roadblock. There are things already in place to help mitigate this, such as corporations and alliances aimed at new players and third-party tools to spot any potential subterfuge of new applicants, but CCP Games is upping the ante in trying to make things smoother for new players finding their first corporation.
With Eve Online’s upcoming Legion expansion, Freelancer jobs will be added. This allows corporations to hire other players without inviting them into their inner sanctum. Part of the beauty of this system is that the freelancer might notice they are taking jobs repeatedly from the same corporation and decide to reach out, or maybe the corporation will notice the same newbie completing their contracts and invite them in. Farrell tells me, “It really cuts down the barriers between someone starting out or someone looking to play with other people, and those groups looking for them.”
Farrell recalls his own experience as a newbie in 2004, before there was any kind of in-game tutorial, and he tells me that if I ask around enough, his story will echo that of many others. “I had never really played in an MMO before. I went out and did some mining, and I got so frustrated that I quit. A couple of months later, I was like, ‘Oh, I’ll try this again.’ Did the same thing. Made a huge mistake in the game. I didn’t know how the game was supposed to work. Trained the wrong skills. I’ve screwed up again. I quit.
“A couple of months later, I picked up again, and someone flew up next to me in space. They saw that I was struggling, struck up a conversation with me, and they were like, ‘Yeah, you’ve been doing this wrong. We’ve been watching for the last three hours. This is the most inefficient way to do it. Here, use this ship. Use these two modules. I’ll give them to you for free. We just want to see you do it the right way. No strings attached.’ I begrudgingly followed their instructions, and I was mining ore seven times faster than before.”
That player helping Farrell made the game finally click. When he eventually ran into them again and offered to pay them back, they refused and told him to pay it forward with the next struggling player he saw, and he did.
Farrell tells me he got into PvP in much the same way: a group of players saw him doing it poorly and taught him the ropes, and he joined up with them and, a couple of years later, went on to become the leader. “As soon as I found a group of players to hang out with, the game made sense.”
Ouwehand had a similar experience to Farrell, warning that players will have a “love and hate relationship with [Eve Online]”. She first played in 2015, back before it had a tutorial. “I never figured out how to get undocked … I rage quit, uninstalled, and I was done.”
In 2018, when Eve launched free-to-play options, she returned and finally learned how to undock. “Floating around, something killed me. I rage uninstalled, and went back to Elder Scrolls Online.” In 2019, she found that third time’s the charm saying and finally found her feet.
Eve Online is now 22 years old, and Farrell admits that makes the game “very intimidating” for new players as they think there’s no way they can catch up to veterans. However, players can specialise nowadays as there are so many different types of gameplay. Everyone plays their own way. If you want to brave playing solo, you can. If you want to do PvP, the universe is your oyster. If you wish to avoid battle entirely, you never even have to leave the station. You can stay docked and become a master of the markets instead.
As a result, Farrell tells me, “You can be better at one specific activity than someone who’s been playing for ten years. They might have other advantages over you, and probably quite a few, but you can still carve out a niche for yourself.”
More Than Just A Game
Like many MMOs, Eve Online is much more than just a hobby. It’s a social hub where players have met friends and spouses, and many players have attributed the game to helping them find new career opportunities.
Farrell tells me about a player named Oz who became “space famous” for being a market guru. “He’ll just create these amazingly detailed spreadsheets and predictive models of what’s going to happen. Then he started essentially a money management fund in the game, where you can give your money to this guy, he’ll invest it for you, and you just have to hope that he’s truthful about what he says.”
I can’t help but ask Farrell if he knows what Oz does for a living, and Farrell tells me, “He does some finance stuff in real life, so that’s where he gets the chops.” But it’s not just about what you know in the real world, helping you in-game. “There are a couple of players here talking about [how] they’ve picked up some soft skills from the game that they are now taking to start their careers and take it into the professional realm.”
Ouwehand is one such player, as she attributes her role of running the Eve Rookies community as the reason she landed her community manager role years later. The recruiter noted how she was already managing a “mega community”, and that sealed the deal.
CCP Games may have created the game, but the players create the history and traditions. Sleze tells me of a particularly heartwarming tradition for players who pass away, “We have a cemetery in-game. There are cans that you can put out, and you can name the can [after] the person that has passed away. It’s really beautiful.”
One of the things that the team finds exciting is how players end up using tools. Though they might be created for one purpose, players might use them in another way, with Farrell telling me, “My favourite thing is just the stories that players make. We want them to use this a certain way, but we know there’s no way that’s how they’ll use it. So just giving players tools to tell these stories is just so much fun.”
Sleeze gives me a great example of this. Another memorial tradition is that whenever somebody passes away, their corporation or alliance organises a Cyno Vigil, with everyone lighting their cyno. She tells me are “firework things” so I can understand the Eve lingo, and which I’m led to understand is to do with something similar to warping. It leaves me imagining something like the Ravager funerals from Guardians of the Galaxy.
During Fanfest, Reykjavik is taken over by Eve players. No matter where I went, whether it was within the event itself or tucked away in some pub corner, you saw people wearing their event lanyards and chatting the day away. Every player I met was so happy to talk about the game despite my lacking experience and knowledge, and I left Iceland with so many tips and corporation invites that I’m ready to try Eve Online again, but this time I’ll do it right.
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