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Before commiting the game, most MMOs will offer a free trial for you. This is a guide on how to maximise your time and fun with the EVE free trial.
Maximising play time:
EVE Online offers a 14 day free trial but it's possible to squeeze a few more days out of it by getting your trial elsewhere. Steam offers 21 day free trials and use of their download servers to receive the client. A more friendly option is available to people with friends that play EVE. Your friend can have a buddy key sent to you via email that gives you a 21 day trial. As an added bonus, if you later choose to upgrade your trial to a full account, your buddy will receive 30 days of play time free.
Character creation:
Attributes only affect your skill training times. As skills have the same primary attributes, the most important attributes are Perception, Intelligence, Memory and Willpower in that order. Charisma isn't used for much at the moment and is not really important. Choosing a career at character creation only affects what skills your character starts with. After creation, any player is free to train any new skills they meet the prerequisites for. Since you'll only have a few weeks to train new skills on the trial. Advising choosing a military profession. This will give you ship and combat skills that will definitely help in your trial. If later in the trial you want to try out the industrial side of things, your account has two extra character slots that you can use to experiment. But remember that only one character on an account can be training skills at one time and you can train industrial skills on a character started as a military specialist with no penalty. Although your character picture is currently only used for a passport photo, spend a little time on it and choose a nice name. If you later progress to a full account, you'll want a face and name you would be pleased with for years to come. Also remember that when the Walking in Stations expansion hits, it's unlikely players will be able to change their race or gender.
Your first moments in space:
The game begins with your character piloting their first training frigate in a deadspace training complex. The tutorial blinks in the bottom right of the screen and I strongly advise everyone to complete it. Other small tutorials will appear to explain concepts like insurance and skills as you encounter them. Additional advanced tutorials can be found by pressing F12 and selecting the 'Tutorials' tab. EVE is famous for its steep learning curve and the tutorials are specifically created to cut out the steepest part of the curve.
Once you've finished the initial tutorial and have docked at the station, you'll find the tutorial agent waiting for you. This agent will give you a few starter missions and then introduce you to your first real agent. This new agent will give you a special series of missions that showcase areas of EVE from combat to manufacturing and invention. They're a good way to experience some of EVE's core gameplay first-hand but at any point you can tell him to shove his missions and try to find your own way in the world.
Upgrade:
By the time you've completed the tutorials, it won't have escaped your grasp that the ship you started in is somewhat limited. At this point, you need a new combat ship and that means you'll need a little isk. Each race has six different frigates and the cheap options for a sturdy combat vessel start at around 50k. Each race's top tier combat frigate can cost between 200k and 400k but the cheaper option is good to start off.
The next step up that is easily reachable within a few hours is the Destroyer class. They have the same defensive capabilities as a frigate but vastly improved firepower, making them excellent anti-frigate ships or great for level 1 missions. The final tier of ship able to be trained on a trial account is the Cruiser class. They have much higher defensive and offensive capabilities than frigates and will make short work of level 1 and 2 missions but cost several million isk to buy. If you went with a military career path at character creation and recieve a donation of isk from a friend, you could be in a cruiser within as little as one or two days.
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