Quote Originally Posted by yaki View Post
Such a huge waste given that he's talking about stuff you can easily get to after a few hours of gameplay.

Putting more than a few tens of millions of SP on a single character is arguably a bad idea. You can skill up one character from now until forever, but you can only use so much stuff, and anything extra just drives your clone cost up when you die.
In my limited experience, I agree completely. Spending a few million working on a specialized guy for missions and one for mining, say, makes sense. I can't see spending all that time on just one guy. Especially since, as you noted, the epic L1 arc missions are pretty freakin easy and quick to get into.

After my first month of Eve, I was daunted by the skills that took weeks to train, too, but I was making the mistake of thinking that I needed a bigger ship as opposed to a broader or more specialized set of skills to be able to use the right tools for the job in a smaller ship. My Caracal was pretty stupid easy to get into and I've gone from having no skills further than halfway through frigates to having cruiser IV and level 3 skills on assault missiles, shields, caps, rigging, drones, EW, survey, etc. to allow me to basically permatank NPC BCs (one at a time) and missile them from 32k range with light missiles. Sure, I'm sorta broke but it's been a hella fun week and a half getting back into things.

I really think the biggest problem is how little the game guides you into proper skill training for noobs so people end up training skills all over the place and then getting pissed when the skills they want are not only expensive but take a week to go from 1-5. Having EVEMON available to help plan stuff is HUGE. Most folks see the Tech 2 stuff and go "DAMN. Requires L5 skills which will take me MONTHS." When really, to get good Tech 1 stuff only takes about a day each to go from skill 1-4, meaning you can be into a battlecruiser in a couple weeks if you manage your money and skills right.

At least, it's been my experience, anyway. :P