Day 4 & 5 – Certifications and Skills

Hi again, unfortunately I missed out on getting any game time in yesterday, so today’s review for Eve online’s 14 day free trial is day 4 & 5 combined!

So what’s new today?

Today I learned that Eve online has a new “newbie-friendly” certification scheme in place to help new pilots work out what skills they need to be training.

If at any time you’d like to check the game out for yourself, scroll back up and click here to enter Eve Online’s 14 day free trial.

Eve online is both blessed and cursed when it comes to complexity. On one hand, its fantastic that there’s a rich and diverse range of skills, but on the other, it can be a huge learning curve for anyone entering the game…

Hence the addition of the new certification system. The system is in place to show new players what skills they need to train to meet certain “archetypes” in the game, and how to plan their skill training to reach those archetypes.

For example; I want to pirate other players, and do some mining in down times. So, I open up my character certification screen, shown below.

Certification Planner

As you can see on the screen shot, there are green ticks, yellow circles and red crosses. The green ticks tells you that you’ve completed the required skill, yellow circles tell you you’ve trained a prerequisite, and can immediately begin to start training towards that skill, and red means you haven’t even acquired a prerequisite skill yet.

You can right click any of the skills in this screen to find out more, or to find out what the prerequisite skill is. Or alternatively, if you’ve decided you want to get the skill now, you can right click the skill, select “market details” and then buy the skill immediately — no fussing around trying to find the skill again after you’ve left the certification planner. Eve is generally very smart like that.

Oh and another cool thing about certifications — you can use it to prove to potential corps that you’ve got the right stuff, or on the other side of the coin, you can use it to screen potentials for adequate experience and skills trained.

“Yes sir I DO have what it takes to become part of your filthy band of pirates, just look at my warp scrambler certification!”

Skills: What You’re Probably Wondering…

Ok, so I’m talking about a certification planner, and haven’t really talked much about the skill system in Eve yet.

Eve’s skill system is:

1. Super detailed,
2. Broad and deep (lots of different skills with lots of specializations under each skill group),
3. Complex,
4. Interdependant (you need ‘a’ to get ‘b’ to get ‘c’)
5. Why Eve is so amazingly deep and realistic, and
6. Often confusing for new players!

When you start a game in Eve, you start with around 5 or so skills. Skills to pilot your vessel, shoot its guns, manage its warp drives, and mine rocks.

From that initial starting point, tutorial missions can add another dozen or two more (if you complete all three agent missions).

And from there its completely up to you. Eve online lets you be a super specialist, or a jack of all trades. You can be a manufacturing mogul that can crank out vast quantities of weaponry and ships, or you can specialize in trading goods from system to system, or region to region. You can be a faction motivated Minmatar freedom fighter that pilots the most epic spaceships ever made, or you can be a Gallente pirate that uses speed, skill, and deceit to make a profit.

Here’s a look at some broad skill headers from the market screen, with a few examples from the leadership branch.

Skill's Available

Because of Eve’s immense level of variety and freedom, the skill system can be difficult to learn, but once you’ve got your head around it you really become motivated and excited about training towards the kind of role you want to play.

Unlike games like World of Warcraft (which I love by the way!), where you have 9 classes, and 3 specializations in each, Eve online offers up a more organic, “real world” style of character development with many shades of grey… or black and white!

Traditional MMORPG’s like WoW, AOC, Warhammer, LOTRO, are set. You have to choose certain races, classes and then specs. For example, an Orc Affliction Warlock for WoW.

Eve online on the other hand has a race choice, but then the rest is more fluid. Do you want to fly Amarr ships as a Minmatar? It would be a bit weird since they were once enslaved by them, but you can! Do you want to be a pirate but also have a bit of manufacturing skill to turn components into other valuable goods? Or are you a trader who needs to turn to the “dark side” now and again, so you add some combat skills into the mix.

These are probably poor examples, but you get the idea, right? You can mix and match you skills so much I could write another hundred posts on the possibilities.

Here’s a screen of my current skills trained.

Character Sheet

I’ve recently got enough skills trained to use MWD’s (micro warp drives) and use warp scramblers, so soon I hope I can report on my first PvP combat in and around the Everyshore region!

Stop by again soon, but in the mean time, why not try Eve for yourself? Click here to get 14 days free, no credit card required.