You've decided to follow a career in solo PvP. You've realised that you have a lot of room for improvement. If you chose to subscribe, and focus on this career you will start seeing results about 1/2 way through your first month. During that first month you will see significant improvements as you train more skills.
This sounds about perfect. What sort of progression would you prefer?
But therein lies the catch.. you won't really have any chance of having a satisfying fight until AFTER your trial is over. For your entire trial period it is nothing but loosing. As a result a lot of potential players interested in solo fights never make it past trial and as a result there are so few solo PvPers in EVE.
Agreed that it is daunting as a newbie to get things started in the PVP section of the game. I've just started playing EVE (6 days left for trial, but will definately sub when it ends) and this is one of the things I actually like in the game.
The need to take things slow, plan ahead. In every corner of the game you are reminded of the simple fact you are a microbe in a jar, and that there are loads of bigger microbes out there.
But I sure agree with you when you say it is an absolute new player killer experience. I guess a big majority of people never even finish the 14 days free trial, simply because it is very limited (skill-wise, skillpoints-wise), even though the game is advertised diferently.
Good Luck! Give me a shout in game (My character name is Toterra the Second) and I can give you some direct advice/assistance.
One thing you should know is that if you subscribe you don't loose your 6 remaining free days. The subscriptions just adds days to the end. For some reason CCP is not clear about this.
Cool, thanks. I didn't know the free days would be added to your gametime.
What I find interesting regarding the new player experience is that new players would even think that solo PvP is a worthwhile or achieveable goal within the 14 day trial period.
Starting out with the game, I was so overwhelmed with learning all the basics of the game that PvP was an activity no where on my mind. Next to that, even if I was interested in PvP, I certainly would be in a corporation that would be coaching my actions, which normally would be throwing me in a gang environment, not a solo one.
Lastly, if you're really looking for new player solo PvP, I think you'd have to look for it exclusively. Meaning you'd have to join a corp like Brave Newbies or RvB, the latter which I know it's possible to get worthwhile low SP fights in.
It could be achieveable if they added something where only trial or less than 1M SP players could fight.
My experience as a new player as been the same as the poster in FW. Hard to find a non-bat solo player for a fight and when you do it's a T2 fitted ships with high skills that you can barely touch.