An update?

[Massimiliano]

Hello sirs.

Could anyone give me a run-down on the scene on EVE?

I'm toying with the thought of picking up a 14day trial and thought it'd be fun to bot if possible?

What's the situation at?

Fly safely!

[Phygar]

This does a decent job of explaining eve in one video. Just as a warning, what you are about to read is very unstructured and you probably won't learn much from it, I'll try to give you the best advice I can for a new player. I just want to cover the aspects of the game that you can hopefully use to determine if you wish to start playing at all.

The 14/21 day trial is good for getting a feel for the game and its complexity, but you won't be introduced to the player-driven aspect of the game. The botting scene isn't as strong as it once was, but it still exists. Botting is difficult and requires you to invest time and money into training characters and ships before you can get started. You'll need to spend a few months training a character before you can consider using it for botting. I don't think there are any free bots at the moment, and I can't really recommend any as it's been a while since I've botted.

If you decide you find the game interesting join a corporation right away as the PvE/Solo content is extremely repetitive and should only be done if you're trying to make money. If you want to spend a little time getting adjusted to the game in a carebear corp that's fine, but once you feel comfortable I would highly recommend getting into a corp that does PvP and getting good at flying frigates exclusively. As with most things in this game, it will be a matter of weeks or months before you will be making a decent amount of money. You can try to make money by trading, but it's not as steady and it's arguably the most difficult. The fastest thing to train for to start making decent money would be a Basilisk for incursions. It would probably take about 2 months before you could start making money with it. Really, your only other option to make money in game would be ratting, which would require you to be in a nullsec(0.0 security) alliance where you can kill NPCs in relative peace. Being competent at this would probably take more training time that incursions, and its a lot more boring as well as more risky. For a new player, buying PLEX would be the best way to get some ISK in your wallet. One plex will afford you hundreds of frigates, which you should be flying almost exclusively until you get more skillpoints.
If you have $20 to spare, buying a plex is your best choice for money until you can do incursions, rat, or figure out how to make money with trading.

The "scene" in eve revolves mostly around sovereignty wars between Alliances living in null security space. Right now the game is as big as it's ever been and there's a good amount of conflict going on. This map shows the current sovereignty in an easy-to-look-at format. The area in the middle of the map is made up of static High-Security and Low-Security space. In high security space, you are safe under the vast majority of circumstances. You won't be killed unless you're a miner, or you're flying a weak+expensive ship and someone wants to kill you at the cost of losing their ship to CONCORD. In Low-Security space, anyone can kill you with basically no penalty. The main difference between Null-Security and Low-Security space is that Players can control the majority of Null-Security space. I definitely would say that the player driven aspect is the strongest in eve compared to any other MMOs, even if the content isn't as interesting. Everything happens in one server and everything is persistent. There are sites like Eve News24: News from Eve Online, 0.0 updates, Opinions and gossip. that document the daily events in eve.

It's extremely hard for me to explain everything about eve in one post. I know I really haven't explained the game, but I think that most people would agree with the advice that you should get into pvp as soon as possible, and I think that's the most important thing to take away from it. If you have a reddit account you could join the corporation "Dreddit" to get started in nullsec. If you need a guide ISK: FREE Industrial-Sized Knowledgebase is great and free. You can also use the rookie help channel ingame for any questions you may have.

[Massimiliano]

...

Thanks for the write-up.

I've been following the Reddit community for a while now just lurking. I gotta admit that I were looking into this game for botting exclusively and the thought of training up a char for a month or two before being able to bot doesn't comfort me

That being said I currently enjoy just flying around looking at shit.

Thanks again for the info, it was much appriciated.

[Phygar]

I did a little bit of research and it looks like StealthBot is the best at the moment. It's pretty expensive at $25 every 3 months, but it can do just about anything bottable. If you Make a mining character you could start botting on him very quickly with the new mining frigates. You won't make very much money, but it should still beat the cost of buying PLEX. Compared to running missions or ratting, having your bot mine is a piece of cake. You don't have to worry about your bot getting stuck on a rock and losing your 2 billion ISK ship, and you don't have to wait nearly as long to be competent at flying the ship. Honestly, I think you should give it a go. I think you can probably run as many bots as you want on one subscription, so $8.33 a month to pay for multiple accounts and piles of ISK isn't bad at all.

Once you get your bearings I would make a missioning/ratting character as you'll make 10x as much money per character. Nobody cares about mission bots, unlike mining bots where hunting them is a sport. Just be prepared for it to be a pain in the ass. It took me a few weeks to get my bot configured properly when I was using questor, but once I got it working I was making $400 million a day, not counting the losses from my ship dying or downtime when the bot wasn't running correctly. I think I died 3 or 4 times over a span of 3 months, and made a net profit of around 16 billion. It's not bad, but if I were to do it again I believe I would do it a lot better.

I think when I was running mining bots, each one was making about 30-50 million a day per character. I got hit by a banwave at one point for running basically 23/7, but if you do it smart you should be fine. They banned my two mining characters for 2 weeks, but my main didn't get banned.

[Teveel]

7 Days to train my 5 toons to mining barges with hauler setup and eve before they trained mining barge I was botting them.