BB #47–Wise men say

Intro:

Ripard Teg over at Jester’s Trek wrote a post called Don’t Do Anything Stupid and offered it as the basis of a Blog Banter as he is curious what others feel on the subject. Personally, I’m restarting manufacturing that I haven’t done in years and finding myself having forgotten almost as much as I knew the first time around.

So this month’s Blog Banter will gravitate around knowledge, specifically EVE knowledge. Some examples of topics to cover: Is EVE too complex for one person to know everything? Is it, in fact, too complex for one person to know everything about one topic? How do you maintain any knowledge or skills related to EVE over time with breaks and expansions? Does CCP do a sufficient job documenting the features of the game, and if not, what could they do better? How does one determine where the gaps in their knowledge even are?

My response 

We all know that famous pic of Eve’s learning curve. The thing with Eve in my opinion is that it’s it more overwhelming than it is difficult. There are many things to do and a lot of things to learn so as a new player (and more so in the past than it is now with the new tutorials) that you just don’t know where to start.

Once you learn the basics though, common sense does take you a long way. Fitting ships for example is not too hard once you grasp the basics of shield and armor tanking. Of course there are some specialist roles / ships that need some more knowledge, but that’s what blogs, the eve forums, and the wiki are for. Eve is indeed too complex to know it all. But it’s not necessary to know it all to be honest. I do think after more than 7 years in the game I do know quite a bit, but it’s more general knowledge. I don’t know the first thing about capital ships for example, since I never use them, nor do I have a need for one.

Getting back to that learning curve pic, when you start you feel as if you need to know it all in order to properly play the game and to enjoy it more. But once you start carving out your niche, like industry, mining and maybe a pvp’er, playing tackle in a bigger corp, you start to find out that you don’t need to know it all. Just know your particular area of the game, use some common sense, use the wiki, blogs etc. and you’ll be alright.

Regarding the question how do you determine there are gaps in your knowledge: That is a hard one. I do try to keep up with Dev Blogs on what’s coming and reading Eve Blogs, but sometimes a new module or a new game mechanic does escape me. When people in alliance chat discuss the new thing I do ask what they’re talking about and try to read up on the subject.

Links to the other participants at :

http://www.ninveah.com/2013/07/blog-banter-47.html