Oh yea, the overview.

So last night was spent productively - for Saylah. Last time she tried EVE, she didn't last too long. But having gone and overdosed on fantasy over the summer was willing to give things an other try. So I caught up with her in game last night. [Letrange puts on a brand new set of welding shades] Where I learned that her last go-around with EVE was spent in a corp full of newbies. [Letrange fails to be blinded by all the light bulbs going off over the heads of experienced pilots].

Gotta love a good set of shades.

So I proceeded to spend a good chunk of the evening straightening out a few things. First thing of course was the obligatory "last patch introduced weapons linking". As with any other EVE pilot that one went over easy.

After answering a few questions about skills and modules. Saylah complains about the dificulty of navigating and figuring out how people know what stargates are in a system. At this point a good half of the experienced pilots needed no more than 3 micro seconds to guess the problem. "Don't tell me her entire last stay, no one told her about the overview". "Corp of newbies". Ah, right. Remember when a new character is created the default overview settings DON'T show stargates. This makes newbie navigation rather dificult. Not to mention fustrating.

I won't bore most of my readers with the details but as you can guess a good chunk of the evening was spend with the obligatory "this is how you setup your overview and your tabs" session. Part of this was teaching that asteroid belts had NPC rats, that it wasn't just missions where you found them. There IS as skill for targeting. It allows you to have multiple targets tracked and ready to fire at. Oh right chaning the map to show the security status of systems so you can more easily avoid low sec. And so on.

As you all know "Find a good corporation" is sometimes a crap shoot in EVE. For newbies we should probably add "Make sure there's at least one experienced pilot willing to pass on knowledge to the newbies". EVE is not the easiest game to learn. And althought it comes with certain things setup certain ways, they are not always the best ways to have your interface depending on the situation. Experienced players know that setting up the overview for various situations can be an art more than a science. The tutorials are better than they used to be, but in some places it feels like a lecture series where the coach can explain not only what went wrong but why it went wrong.

It'll be interesting to see the difference even one session like last night makes in her EVE experience. Because being able to navigate star systems is kind of important in EVE.