User:Diane yanumano/certs

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Introduction

It seems to be a more or less well accepted fact that the certificate system in EvE Online is less than entirely useful as it currently stands. Articles tend to stress relatively complicated ways of approaching what skills to train. Long descriptions of the skills and how they interrelate are quite important to undersand, but for the beginning pilot, they tend to overwhelm.

The game has a system that can help simplify the decision as to what skills you train by allowing you to focus not on the individual skills so much as the underlying foundations of what pilots end up doing in New Eden. This is the certificate system.

But this too can be overwhelming to the new pilot. Because the game does not demand a certain progression or dictate roles and goals, the pilot is more or less left to her own devices. When she looks at the certificates, to choose wisely, she needs to know more or less what she wants to be when she grows up.

This article explains and details the certificate system, explains how to use it to plan your training, and briefly argues why you should use the certificate system, at least in the beginning.

The Certificates

The certificates are grouped into eleven categories. Most certificates have four grades: basic, standard, improved, elite. They can usefully be organised into supergroups, like so:

• Professions
  • Starter Professions
  • Business and Industry
  • Harvesting
  • Leadership

• Flight Skills
  • Core
  • Defence
  • Drones
  • Electronic Warfare
  • Gunnery
  • Missiles
  • Navigation

What you see here is a fairly clear division between the skill sets for flying spacecraft and skill sets concerned with doing specific tasks with those spacecraft. Flight skills everyone needs at one point or another, but the professional skills are all about what you do with or without your spacecraft.

Flight Skills Certificates

Let's look first at the flight skills. At this point, even the neophyte pilot is more or less familiar with these terms and what they could possibly mean for them. Core skills are required to underpin the other skills, while gunnery and missiles increase the usefulness of turrets and missiles. For example, the Gunnery class certificates at the basic level include

• Battleship Energy Turrets
• Battleship Hybrid Turrets
• Battleship Projectile Turrets
• Cruiser Energy Turrets
• Cruiser Hybrid Turrets
• Cruiser Projectile Turrets
• Frigate Energy Turrets
• Frigate Hybrid Turrets
• Frigate Projectile Turrets
• Turret Control

Turret Control - Basic requires the following skills:

Gunnery III Sharpshooter I Rapid Firing II Motion Prediction II

This certificate is supposed to represent 'a basic level of competence in handling all kinds of turreted weapon.' If we look at the skills, we see some basic components to what should be an intuitive understanding of in what being able to operate a turreted weapon should comprise. Almost all of the certificates are like this. They take a groups of skills that general go together (with respect to game mechanics) and then label those skills with a certificate.

Core certificates are gathered in five sub-categories and one 'master' category:

• Core Competency
  • Core Capacitor
  • Core Fitting
  • Core Integrity
  • Core Navigation
  • Core Targeting

Again, we can see how the sub-categories form the most fundamental skills associated with piloting a spacecraft. The 'competency' certificate gathers the other five together. For example, the Core Competency - Basic certificate requires all five of the other competency certificates at the basic level. The Core Capacitor - Basic certificate requires

• Energy Systems Operation III (which provides a 5% reduction in capacitor recharge time per skill level)
• Energy Management III (which provides a 5% bonus to capacitor capacity per skill level)
• Energy Grid Upgrades II (which provides a 5% reduction in CPU needs of modules requiring Energy Grid Upgrdes per skill level)

Clearly, these skills are going to be invaluable for piloting a spacecraft: cap is life.

The certificates I have called 'Flight Skills Certificates' are those you should be particularly interested in when planning for present and further ships and fittings. Go to your Character Sheet, click on the Certificates tab and read up. Nothing is going to substitute for familiarity with the specific requirements of the certificate themselves and the skills that fall under them. Again, be aware that the certificate has no further function than guidance. Train the skills you need for a particular ship or fitting, but do not slavishly train for a certificate without knowing why you are training that particular skill to that particular level.

Professional Certificates

Careers v. Professions v. Occupations

A career and a profession are clearly not the same thing and both of these are different than an occupation. One way to look at it is to see professions as skill sets and careers as the sets of activities you perform with those skill sets. Occupations would then be specific activities themselves. A real world example is the distinctions between lawyer, public administration, and running a non-governmental organisation. Being a lawyer is being a member of a profession, but administering non-governmental organisations is a career which people from many different professions can pursue.

The certificate system can be seen as a helper on the professions side of this picture, while the detailed understanding of the skills trees should be seen as the career side. Specific occupations may require specfic skills that either fall out of the scope of a certificate or fall under what seems to be an entirely unrelated certificate. Useful metaphors might be the distinction between law school (where you learn what the law is) and the training you get in a law firm (where you learn how to practice the law) and the sort of courses requried to achieve the certificates/diplomas that technical schools/colleges award and the training offered by a specific technical company for a specfic job.

The EVE Careers Guide[1] has an interesting breakdown of the various career paths available in EVE. Not only are the normal industrial and military careers considered, but discussions of role playing careers and metagame[2] play[3].

These are some of the basic occupations that you can get into very early and very easily in your career:

• Courier
• Miner
• Rat Hunter
• MIssion Runner

The starter professions can be seen as the core around which Business and INductry, Harvesting, and Leadership certificates revolve. Muchof what is required to complete these higher level certificates rest in the starter professions.

The 'Starter' Professions

The certificate system allows you to train into six 'starter' professions in three broad classes: business, industry, and the military.

It is a misnomer to call these professions 'starter'. A better word would be 'main' or 'core'. There are quite a few more skill sets we should be calling 'professions' than these.

Each of the starter professions have racial variants.

We'll see the first grade of each of these professions with a mind to understanding what the skill training amounts to and what you are able to do with what you've trained.

Business - Entrepreneur

• Basic
  • Racial Frigate II
  • Trade V
  • Retail IV
  • Daytrading IV

Business - Executive Commander

• Basic
  • Racial Frigate II
  • Leadership V
  • Shield Operation IV

Industry - Engineer

• Basic
  • Racial Frigate I
  • Industry III
  • Mass Production I
  • Laboratory Operation V

Industry - Prospector

• Basic
  • Racial Frigate I
  • Industry III
  • Refining V
  • Mining V

Military - Soldier (Caldari)

• Basic
  • Caldari Frigate III
  • Missile Operation IV
  • Standard Missiles III
  • Shield Operation III

Military - Special Forces (Caldari)

• Basic
  • Caldari Frigate IV
  • Shield Operation III
  • Electronic Warfare II
  • Missile Bombardment V

Advanced Careers

As has been said, these six core careers should be though of as root professions, like 'lawyer' rather than manager. But there are quite a few careers that are more highly specialised (or take longer to make them more than marginally worth the time) and require more skill training. We'll see just a few of these as introduction to what you might do once you are well on your way in training into a profession.

• Scientific Careers
  • Archaeologist
  • Hacker
  • Cartographer

• Adventure
  • Bounty Hunter
  • Pirate

• Military
  • Scout
  • EWAR Specialist
  • Tackler
  • Covert Ops Specialist
  • Sniper
  • Fleet Commander

• Corporation Management
  • Chief Executive Officer
  • Accountant
  • Instructor/Mentor

• Industry/Engineering
  • T2 Manufacturer
  • Research Engineer
  • Hauler

Supplementary Reading

Information from the EVE wiki

Certificates - Planning the Future (devblog)

EVEMon - Windows character progression program

Mac Eve Tools - MacOS X character progression application

the guide

Authors

Diane Yanumano