General Discussion

MMORPG.com EVE Online Correspondent Sam Guss writes this report on going through his first war with his corporation in EVE Online and offers some handy tips to players who might be in the same situation.

It's bound to happen, whether you are in high sec, low sec or null sec. The WarDec (slang for War Declaration) is brought upon your Corporation and you now have to prepare for it. Your first WarDec is a tricky thing, especially if you are new to Eve Online and the gauntlet of emotions will run through you, starting with enthusiasm, going through frustration, boredom and back to excitement. This article focuses on a WarDec in low security space and as-is the nature of war, may or may not apply to your particular conflict. There are some tidbits here that should apply to every first time wartime pilot.

For our corporation and alliance, our WarDec happened because we let the wrong people into the alliance. Coming to us in the disguise of offering training in PvP to our new pilots and offering some additional protection in our low security systems we control, within a week spies were implanted into our organization and they withdrew from the Alliance and WarDec'd us. That was the first wave of emotion to hit the Corporation and myself: anger. In a nutshell, these were experienced PvP pilots and many of us are on the newer side of EVE. We had presented ourselves as a target and would now have to pay the price.

Read the article here.

 I don't understand, how can someone find you in EVE when you want to hide? Especially so far as the article mentioned.

I have to admit I hev never been in a Corporation and never been involved in a war.

You don't lose all SPs above 900K, you lose some number of points. It's a relatively small percentage but it still can hurt.

 Some agents are able to locate any player, for a price. They're called locator agents.

If you build enogh standing with them, they are very happy to find people for you 

Originally posted by mattatt

 Some agents are able to locate any player, for a price. They're called locator agents.

If you build enogh standing with them, they are very happy to find people for you 

Plus, you never know if that neutral Character still in one of the newbie Corps in your sector isn't a spy for the people looking for you. XD

In response to MarineBoy: Locator Agents are a type of NPC agent that, for a fee, will give you the location of other players.

As mattatt says - if you have 2 million skill points and you get pod-killed with only a 900k clone you will lose 55,000 skill points from the category you have trained the most.

This is 5% of the difference between the skill points you have and the skill points your clone can take.

eg; 5% of (2,000,000 - 900,000) = 5% of 1,100,000 = 55,000

Apart from that minor error, nice article.

Yes, as we learned recently in our first time being wardec'd, unaffliated alts play a huge part of the battle.  Everything from spying on and within your corporation, following your fleet around for intel, to actually suicide ganking you in smart bombing ravens, it was quite a lesson in the reality of empire combat. 

As the war played out, we learned all about being camped in a station, breaking out of a camp and we chose to fight to the death, and we died by the hundreds.  While most of our losses were in small ships, the count/isk count was pretty high, but as mentioned, every time we did manage to take one of them down it really heartened us and made it all worthwhile.

It was a great learning experience, and we finished every battle giving our opponents a "GF" in local.  PVP is really what EVE's all about and for many of our players, was their first taste of what it involved.

Soon, we'll be unleashing some mayhem of our own. We've changed. 

 ... nice article ...

IMHO, there is one "rule" in EVE that is very important ... "Don't use things you cannot afforde to lose"

It is hard at start but one can make decent funds just when skills are ready. Other option is to have rich friend.

 We were never war-dec'd, but a member of the alliance was. This particular member was a mining corporation, so several fighters from another corps in the aliance transferred temporalily to their corp to help protect them. 

What we learnt was that it's best to keep lookouts in every system entrance you need to protect, to give the miners the precious seconds they needed to jump to safety.  As we were doing this scouting in full fighting ships, we had to mantain several battles for control of certain lookout areas. This is where the friend declaration of enemies came in really handy, because as we begun learning eachenemie's tactics and bigger ships, we knew how much time we could remain in battle waiting for reinforcements before having to jump out, as we knew exactly who else could join this battle on their side and the ammount of firepower he could carry. 

For  the members of our own corporation that transferred, it was a big learning experience.