Preparing for war
As a sandbox game, EVE Online allows every person to play his or her own way with eve online isk. Some players like to trade on the market, run missions in whatever spare time they get or manufacture ships for their corporation. Others play for the adrenaline rush of PVP or the strategy of political conquest. EVE's population can be roughly split into those players that PVP regularly and those that don't, with a surprising number of pilots abstaining f Aion it altogether. But what if you're one of those players who don’t PVP and thinks it's time for a change? Maybe you've had enough of mining rocks and finally want to give piracy a go. Or perhaps your corp is the target of yet another war declaration and you think it's time to make a stand. Whatever you’re reasons, making the transition into the world of ships blowing each other to smithereens can be a tricky business.
In this informative guide, I look at the various things a player or corporation can do to prepare themselves for war and ease the transition into a PVP play style.
Recognising the differences in play style
All players have heard EVE's golden rule -- "Never fly anything you can't afford to lose." It's a common-sense rule that all new players will have drilled into them at some point, but if you've never been in PVP, the amount of ISK you consider affordable may need some adjustment. When you're mission-running in high security space, you fully expect to keep your ship for months before upgrading to something else or losing it in a mission-related mishap. The added cost of expensive ships and faction gear can be easily justified in the fact that your ship is never really in any major danger. Many mission-runners plough all of their income back into expensive modules for their mission ship to accelerate their ISK-making endeavors, ending up with ships worth billions of ISK.
PVP is a completely different story. Players go out on PVP roams and fleet operations expecting to die, but hopefully not before getting a few good kills and having some fun. Bringing your ship home in one piece at the end of the night is something of a bonus. Because they die so frequently, it's much harder to justify using expensive gear on a PVP ship. The best balance between cost and effectiveness can usually be found using tech 2 modules on a standard tech 1 or 2 ship. If you put all of your ISK into the best modules you can buy, the way someone would do with a mission ship, you'd soon discover it was a very expensive mistake. Another key difference between PVP and other areas of game play is that PVP is more of a group-oriented activity than a solo one. Players flying solo have to pick their fights very carefully, avoiding all fights they can't win. Even then, you can expect to run into a lot of PVP gangs that you can't realistically engage.