Luckily one of my RL friends who had started WOW with me, left much sooner than I had done. He began to cast his net out looking for something else. He found Eve. He had been interested in it several years prior to actually investing the time in it. He had been playing for about a week when he talked me into giving it a try.
When you talk to anyone who has played Eve, they will all tell you one thing first and foremost there is a very steep learning curve. Most in Eve call it the learning Cliff. This is no hyperbole. Yes there are some basic, and I mean basic, learning tutorials. But they barely scratch the surface of this extremely deep game. You learn just enough to be a danger to yourself.
My current character is the best of a bad lot. He is relatively focused for such a low SP character. I topped 10 Mil last night (which for those who know, know is nothing, barely scratching the surface). With that said he has some pretty gaping holes. Even with a strong focus he is a long way from being remotely competitive when it comes to PvP. He also has very low secondary income skills like mining, and industrial skills. He can do a bit of PI but not nearly enough that it can pay for itself. I use it mostly to help the corp fuel our various POS's (Player owned Structure).
When I took the time to read up on things, I ended up with Eve University as my first corporation. By the time I had experienced Eve by myself, I wanted to get a little direction. To some extent I did get a bit of that with Eve University. There were large fleet ops that proved invaluable. This was an experience that is hard to get anywhere outside of 0.0 space, and occasionally Faction Warfare. However, I cut short my time with Eve University because of a lack in what I saw as effective leadership. For an institution that prides itself on teaching Noobs, there are shockingly strict and punishing to mistakes. They tended to enforce rules by offering dire threats to those that broke them, and following through. Noobs make mistakes often, kicking someone out for getting a rookie ship blown up during wartime, and then setting them to -10 is fanatically harsh. It was then that I followed my RL friend into the Corp he had been with since the beginning, The Whiskey Prospects.
Walking into a Corp like this one was an enormous shock. I had played many MMO's to this point and had never had much more than a neutral experience to the guild/corp play. There was always some petty drama, or childish chat. It was amazing. Our youngest member is in college, but most are men and woman with careers and families. I now feel that if I ever went to some of the states that my members live in, I would try and make an effort to meet up with them. I consider many of these people to be RL friends now who I share a hobby with.
When I first started out there, I was alone for only about two or three days before I was immersed into the deeply Team oriented Wormhole Operations. I have taken some breaks every now and then to run some Level 4 missions to pad my wallet, but I have been in WH space for the most part now for 3 months.
This three months have not been without its troubles, I have been burned in WH space several times now. Roaming Mercs, who appear to be griefers hired to cause us trouble, or just a group of people looking for a quick thrill. For the most part these are experienced pilots who have loads of skill points and are good at PvP. There has also been several tense moments for the corp. But right now, things have settled down, and people are making money.
So that is the basic run down on my experience to date. I plan on adding more things as time and interest permits.
