Goonswarm has put together a new guide for new players and made it available publicly in .pdf form.
Traditionally, the new player portions of their Wiki (which is a gold mine of information, lore, and bee caricatures that I have spent hours pouring over) has been viewable by all. Their recent effort to update their guide for new players took an odd turn and eventually came out in the form of a pulp science fiction magazine, complete with ads and tales of the astounding.
Rifters of Outer Space!
The .pdf is available for download here.
A Great Scientific Discovery!
While oriented towards Goonswarm, the whole thing is worth a look whether you are a newbie, an old hand, or have no real interest in EVE. Better than Breathtaking Dogfights.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 
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Where would EVE be without the efforts of Goonswarm. They’ve given so much to the game – both in generating game material and hilarious drama. Even EVEMON was originally a Goonswarm project.
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@Mekhios: You HAVE seen the article on Eve in China, yes?
Well, there you go.
Carebears.
Carebears everywhere.
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I certainly have. Would love to see what the Goons could do to the Chinese server.
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…
Oh dear living @#$%-a-duck.
Follow that train of thought along, though.
ChinaEVE is currently a Carebear world, with large alliances more or less working together to make as much ISK as possible for its people.
If it’s anything like the modern Chinese political landscape, what this is is a small number of mandarins claiming a large, but not huge share of all ISK, while the collective reaps a modest reward (likely in the form of semi-frequent PLEX distribution, or more likely, heavily discounted PLEXes purchased from said mandarins; after all, why make ISK when you can make real money).
This is balanced, for the most part, as no-one is upsetting the apple cart and everyone is working together for the “common good”.
Now, think about what the goons tend to do best: destabilize.
I think you’d see small wars break out first, as the Goons make a space for themselves. A lull occurs, as the Goons develop personal relationships with the major factions and collect intel in the mean time. Then generalized griefing and targeted support in the resulting tit-for-tat in conjunction with more poking of holes in the overall web of alliances.
At some point, we’d see a complete destabilization of the ChinaEVE market. Then as the impact on RWM production starts to be felt, you’d get a brief lull imposed by said mandarins, until it became public on exactly how much money they’re making at the game.
Then it would get ‘interesting’, certainly in the Chinese sense.
I would think that six months into GOONS@ChinaEVE you would have a massive multi-coalition war to end all wars going on, with an explosion of hacking worldwide as people get stuck in, followed by ChinaEVE being either shut down by CCP or blocked from external access via the Great Firewall.
The drama alone would outclass every single opera in the world being performed on a single large stage, while every soap opera ever produced was displayed on hanging screens above it.
With fireworks, tinsel, confetti and a giant holographic Hatsune Miku singing Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” being projected into the sky.
…
Do…um, do we have any Goons here on the blog who might want to suggest an idea for a foreign dramatic production to the upper command?
^.^;;;
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@Drebin — would you, please, elaborate how, in your opinion, are they making RL cash on *Chinese* server?
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@Solf: Sell ISK-bought PLEX through a third party auction house for RWM? Or is this impractical?
I don’t think you need to quote Chinese though, or am I missing something there?
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Asterisks around ‘Chinese’ were for emphasis :) My point being that usual understanding of Chinese gold-farming is that they sell virtual money to the NA/EU market. I don’t know if there’s viable market for such in China itself.
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My understanding of Chinese gold-farming is similar, so I would assume we’re working from an overlapping set of facts/assumptions on this.
I don’t know if PLEXes are transferable between server clusters, though. The article did mention that the Chinese were on a separate system entirely from mainstream EVE. It may be that PLEXes can’t be transferred. If so, then the only market for them would be internal. Massive amounts of ISK floating around would likely cause a huge inflationary spike, making it pretty easy to get PLEXes, if there isn’t some sort of hole for it to go to. It’s in the best interests of everyone to reduce ISK inflation, so I would guess that there is some sort of ISK-management going on. The simplest way I can see that is for a large amount of made ISK to simply vanish.
So I figure a large portion of ISK made is going to a small elite, who then turn around and purchase PLEXes for resale at heavy discounts.
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