Top Ten EVE-Related Web Sites

One of the most important tools in the a successful EVE Online player's toolbox are EVE-related web sites. A good suite of EVE-related sites can save you a ton of labor, keep you informed about political events, let you know how best to adapt to game changes, and to instruct yourself in new areas of the game.

These seven sites are my favorites because they are continually useful to me as I play EVE. Some of them have helped me get rich, others help me keep up with how to PvP, and others just keep me entertained with all the going-ons in EVE Online. I hope you find these sites to be as useful as I have.

EVE-Central
http://eve-central.com/home/

This is the single best EVE-related site in existence, because of the amount of work that it saves. Users upload their market data, and EVE-Central stores that information. Other users can then access that information via the web for price checks. This is great. It means that you don't need to log into a character in Jita, just to see how much an item should be sold for.

EVE-Central also has a trade finder function. This tool compares the prices of all known items in two solar systems or regions, and finds beneficial trades. For example, if Hammerhead II drones are for sale in Jita for 800k isk apiece, and there is a buy order in Rens for them, for 1m apiece, EVE-central will point that out. If you are heading from or to Jita from a system, you might as well check this before you go, to enrich your

One of the chief downsides of EVE-Central are that it relies on user uploaded data. Despite this dependency, EVE-central usually has relevant information for most items that appear on the market. The other downside is that items that don't appear on the market, like most faction items and some mission-related items, cannot be tracked. Fortunately, these are instead usually traded on the contracts market. Since you can see contracts in any region in EVE, you don't need a price-checking alt character to check them, and EVE-Central is unneeded.

EVElopedia
http://wiki.eveonline.com/wiki/Main_Page

CCP's own in-house EVE wiki isn't the best for politics or player-organization history. But it does have a collection of fairly up-to-date and instructional guides, especially with regard to complex game mechanics like POS reactions or exploring. Be warned, though, that even CCP's own wiki isn't always up to date with the latest game changes.

Scrapheap Challenge
http://www.scrapheap-challenge.com/index.php

Although not the refreshing alternative venue for discussion that it once was, scrapheap still maintains battle reports, guides, and ship fittings that all have their uses. It also serves as the recruiting venue for several elitist groups that would prefer to not to recruit directly off of the main EVE site.

Be aware that most of the ship fittings and advice are geared toward more advanced EVE players, and especially toward the PVP-oriented kind of player. The political news is more interesting and dry than that found on other sites that carry EVE player discussion.

Eve Forums
http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp

The main EVE forums have their high points, and they have their low points. Many of the specialized sub-forums dealing with missions, mining, and so forth have decent if outdated guides in them.

The "Corporation, Alliance and Organization Discussions" sub-forum is the gem amongst the sub-forums, though. At one point CAOD, as it is known, was a stodgy forum full of bluster, mostly posted by duly-appointed public relations officers. Wars were declared by duly-appointed public relations agents because of incautious posts. Alliance leaders postured and beat their chests about their in-game successes. It also used to be a decent (if poorly moderated) spot to discuss current events in the EVE universe.

All that changed sometime around 2007, when two things happened. First, 4chan was becoming more popular, and so more people on the internet were familiar with the concept of trolling. Secondly, the Goonfleet corporation began posting in earnest, in their distinctively useless, cluster-bombesque style. In the face of so many posts with arguable merit, the tone of the forum changed for the worse. CAOD was coarsened and the level of dialogue ruined, at least for the foreseeable future.

Despite the very poor signal to noise ratio, major political events are still to be found there, along with a large amount of commentary. This is great, because it gives nearly unfettered access to players' opinions. You might not be able to get a definitive version of what has actually happened in relation to a particular event, but you will get a sense of what other players think about that event, which can be just as good in a game that is so intensely political.

EVE-Survival
http://eve-survival.org/wikka.php?wakka=HomePage
CCP changes their agent missions all the time, rendering any collection of mission guides obsolete every four or five months. However, mission-runners need guides or they will lose ships.

EVE-Survival is probably the best mission guide site, with the most generally updated and useful guides about them. The guides include a lot of exposition and comments, which can serve to keep a guide updated, even when it was changed in a recent patch. There are also tips for burning through the missions as fast as possible, and warnings about hidden triggers that might otherwise destroy your ship. This site is a must for mission-runners.

Kugutsumen
http://www.kugutsumen.com/index.php

This is the premier site for airing EVE Online's dirty laundry. Kugutsumen was started by the disenfranchised hacker, AnthonyZ, who was permanently banned from EVE Online following his much-publicized revelation of a CCP developer cheating on behalf of his alliance. Frustrated with his inability to post publicly on CCP-owned forums, and embittered with heavy moderation, he started his own web site.

Since then, it has maintained a fairly decent stable of regular posts, including daily null-sec news posts, a blog with highlights, and the occasional leak of various corporations' internal information.

Be warned, though, it is largely un-moderated, and not necessarily a safe for work site. Also, it is run by a bona fide hacker, so you'd best have your security on if you are going to browse his site.

Dotlan
http://evemaps.dotlan.net/

Dotlan is amazing. It is primarily cartographical in nature, but organizes things so effectively and intuitively that CCP should probably be trying to hire him. It has system information, sovereignty information, capital ship movement information, and corporation statistics. It even has moon scan information, though it is often incomplete and not 100% reliable.

It tracks who controls what in null-sec, and who is winning in factional warfare. It even has pretty graphs for individual corporations and alliances, so you can see when their membership does a nose dive. I find the printable maps to be especially legible, and easily marked up for my own uses once printed.