Barriers to Entry: How the Eve Online Community Surprised Me

After fifteen years in the business, Eve Online is a name that is both known and in many ways feared. Jumping into Eve is like trying to join your partner in the D&D campaign they've been playing with the same friends for fifteen years. You hear a lot about it, it sounds fun, but at the same time you know there is no way that you'll ever learn everything they'll expect you to know or remember all the custom rules they've set up.

Oh, and hardly anything is written down anywhere.

To put it mildly, jumping into Eve if you know anything at all about the game can be more than a little intimidating. It's full of barriers to entry for the average person, and some of its players like that situation just fine. After all, if you don't bring in new people, they can maintain their status as one of the elite few ruling the universe.

This will be the first in a series of articles on the barriers to entry I've found to Eve; which is to say, things that might scare, confuse or intimidate a new player. So let's take a few moments and dive into the first: the players.

I will freely admit that after looking through Reddit and the Forums, I was ready to believe that these hostile, elite players were the majority of Eve's player base. I was convinced that anyone coming into this game would need a thick skin at least, and maybe a few drinks before poking a bear seemed the more likely outcome.

I've never been more surprised than when I started talking to some of these internet strangers.

Where They Loiter

The community for Eve Online is spread far and wide across the planet. While this will largely focus on English Speaking players, some of the tips may apply to others as well. Keep in mind it truly is an international community.  I'll break down the various ways you can interact with Eve players to In Person and Online. 

In Person

At its core, Eve Online is a social game meant to bring people together. None of us should be surprised that both CCP and the fans have found more ways to do this than forming fleets online. 

CCP Games holds two regular meetings of in-person Eve events that you could call official. The first is called Fanfest and is held yearly in Iceland. Fanfest is where CCP makes official announcements, holds panels, talks to the players and, from what I understand, gets involved with some epic nights of drinking.  The second is the largest player meet and is called, simply, Eve Vegas. In both cases you can often watch the events live-streamed or find recaps of them on YouTube... just in case your travel budget is more suited to internet spaceships than real airplanes. 

I've never been to either one, so I can't vouch for either experience. 

Want to find something smaller and closer to home? Well, the community has you covered there. You can head over to Eve Meet and find a gathering locally, or start your own.  I was actually pretty surprised, and pleased, to find the site and that there was a regular meeting of Eve players near me with their own Discord server. 

Online

What kind of gaming community would it be if Eve didn't have numerous unofficial online portals to access the players. Most corporations or alliances will have their own forums and Discord/TeamSpeak equivalents; this isn't going to be an article about those. You can find any number of streamers on YouTub or Twitch with their chats quite active, but that's also not what we're here to discuss. Rather, let's focus on the ways you can engage the broader, more general community. 

I'm the kind of player that will usually try to find an answer to my own questions first, or at the very least educate myself enough to not sound like I'm asking something others might find stupid. It's probably not surprising, then, that the first place I found the Eve community out of the game was on Reddit. I don't remember the exact thing I Googled, but I remember finding Reddit links over and over for questions I was asking. Before long I was just going to the Eve Reddit and getting lost in the posts and remembering how much I despise Reddit's UI. 

Honestly, I do not recommend searching through the various Eve Reddit threads. If you're coming for an answer to a concrete question, it can be an ok place to visit. If you just start looking through everything, you'll quickly be exposed to the angst, anger, trolling, and vitriol of the more jaded player base and may become disheartened to see what's going on. Take heart, Capsuleer, this isn't the only experience you'll have with the fans of the game. 

It was to the official Forums that I set my sites next. This was, after all, the official method that CCP has offered. How bad could it be? The Eve Forums are everything that, as a former World of Warcraft player, I expect from game forums. 

Which is to say, there are some helpful people there, and there are a lot of people trying to get CCP's attention to fix problems with their gameplay under the guise of saying it will help everyone. Right behind them are the people that want to tell them why the original poster (OP) is wrong, are just troll the OP. I wasn't willing to lose hope, and wasn't willing to think that the forums were as much a lost cause to me as Reddit had been. 

So I asked a question. I created a forum topic and waited for the responses. As you can see, several people jumped in very soon after the post went live and offered some suggestions and a willingness to help. Another poster just brought his stormcloud of "What's the point?" to the table, but that's easy enough to ignore.  This was enough to keep me looking until I found where the Forums excel. 

Do you have a question? Then ask it; read the first few responses, and give up before the veterans start tearing into each other. Do you want to read theorycrafting? Take part in the lore of the community? Then the forums are a fantastic place to do so. 

My number one suggestion for interacting with the community online, however, is Twitter. Using #tweetfleet, you can easily get people to respond to your questions, find some to follow, and make new friends. I built an Eve-only twitter account and jumped in with a very similar experiment to the one above. This time, I asked #tweetfleet to tell me how they joined their first corporation... and I had conversations for days from it, without any trolling or belittling. 

A Curated Community

I was blown away by the response that a single tweet had, and quickly people were answering, offering suggestions, and networking. Not only did I gather fodder for a future blog post, but people were willing to help me, a newbie, move past that initial question and look for a home of my own. I was offered help learning to PVP, given an invite to join an RP Corp, and had an amazing few responses from Signal Corp that finally convinced me to submit an application to them. 

Now, maybe you'll see some salty posting in Twitter once in a  while, but overall I've found this to be a much better way to engage the general community. Why is that? 

Curation. 

Joining a community on something like Twitter allows you to be in control of the personalities you expose yourself to on a routine basis. Sure, you start out by throwing a shiny object into what could be a pack of rabid internet predators, and that can be intimidating. You also get the chance to befriend those that are kind and knowledgeable, and most platforms offer a convenient Block or Mute option for those that aren't. 

Whether it's the in-game chat, Twitter, or any other platform, you need to curate your interactions and groom them into something that's positive for you. I am not advising that you just cut all ties to those that disagree. I am suggesting that you ensure you protect yourself from anyone that gets abusive online. 

Conclusion

The internet, like outer space, can be a scary place to be, but friends make it better. Whether you're in the game trying to fly to Jita, or out of the game trying to talk about the upcoming patch, you need to take precautions to protect yourself. Once you do that, stop worrying. 

There are beautiful, brilliant, engaging people in the Eve Online community and they are waiting out there to talk to you. Skip past the trolls as quickly as you can, and pay no attention to the people with flamethrowers taking pot shots at each other. Dive in to the welcome you'll find if you just look for it... and then get into internet spaceships with them and go wreck something.