It’s the beginning of July and the first half of 2024 is behind us. Eve Rookies continues to amaze me since we’ve managed to break some records, meet goals and go places that I never thought the community would end up. Here are the highlights for 2024:

• 283 fleets stood up
• 733 new pilots to those fleets
• 22B paid to FCs and JFCs for running fleets
• 727 pilots joined Discord
• Entered the HQ Incursion space
• Present at Eve Amsterdam

Below, I’m giving most of the above sections a little write up. Just in the event you want to read a little more about went on in the first 2 quarters of the year!

Eve Rookies has Stood Up 283 Fleets

When 2024 started, my personal goal was to go from the average of 30-35 fleets being stood up a month to 50. To help accomplish this, Eve Rookies started paying FCs (100m a fleet) and JFCs (50m a fleet) to FC since most of the time they sacrifice their own pay so more people can join.

What I didn’t expect was to hit this goal in May 2024 with 54 fleets. If you’re thinking this might be a one time occurrence, you’re wrong. June ended with 75 fleets stood up.

Incursion Fleet Mid Year Update

Incursions are by far the most popular fleet that Eve Rookies hosts. The majority of players that swing by to try it out likely are doing it for the isk. We like running them because it means getting a minimum of 10 pilots undocked and out in space.

Here’s a monthly breakdown of all incursion fleets:

Now, if we split it into fleet by type it looks like this:

Vanguard Incursion Fleets

Headquarter Incursion Fleets

We’ll get more into the fact that Eve Rookies is running Headquarters in a bit. However, before wrapping up the Incursion update, I would like to comment on the first 6 months of HighSec Incursions in general.

6 Month Interruption to Running Incursions

Sometime late December 2023 or early January 2024 there were 3 or 4 individuals who figured out they could troll the entire Incursion community by ending the focus early. They logged in lots of boxes each and as soon as the Mother Ship became targetable, they would end the focus.

In the past 3 years, MOM would get popped early for a variety of reasons. Someone felt left out of the rotation, locals didn’t want the Incursion spawn in their system(s), or it was an island spawn. However, these individuals thought it was good fun ruining the game of 300+ people.

Fortunately, today Eve Rookies is much more than the Incursion community that it started as. When the focus was ended early, we ran Homefront Operations or another type of fleet and kept on ticking. What I find interesting is even though we were only able to run a handful of fleets in the first 4 months of the year, we still had quite a lot of new faces showing up.

And those fleets were often oversized! So stuffed with lots of new folks! Not great for the ISK but who cares when you’re learning something new?

All of the Other Fleets Half Year Update

As to the other 110 fleets that Eve Rookies stood up, here’s the breakdown by fleet type:

• 1 Mission Fleet
• 40 Mining Fleets (all types in all space)
• 28 Ratting Fleets (wormhole and Triglavian)
• 15 Homefront Operation Fleets
• 23 PVP Fleets
• 3 Fun Fleets or Classes

Eve Rookies Mission Fleets

In 2022 we ran 12 combat mission fleets and 11 in 2023. These are mostly Level 4 SOE combat missions. Unfortunately, for 2024 all of the FCs that ran missions in the previous years have moved on to hosting other types of fleets.

So far in 2024 we’ve only stood up 1 Level 4 combat mission fleet, but we had a whopping 7 new peole join! So there is interest if anyone is interested in running the content! This is a great way to get into FCing since it’s mostly just telling your fleet where to warp or what order to do the missions in!

Eve Rookies Mining Fleets

This is an area of Eve Rookies that started last year in 2023. I had a player decide he wanted to host a few mining fleets. That has turned into a total of 93 asteroid, gas huffing, ice belt or moon mining fleets with 40 of them being this year alone.

This has been a very popular fleet type and we’ve introduced 81 new players to mining.

In addition to the 93 fleets that have been stood up, this addition to Eve Rookies has not only created an industry wing for Eve Rookies, but it’s also taken us into Wormhole space.

This is one of the areas where we’ve become a victim of our own success. The leader of this part of the Eve Rookies also started a player corporation (House of the Shattered Sun) which is growing at a sturdy pace. Unfortunately, he’s been the main FC for our ratting and mining fleets and now we need more people to stand up since he’s starting to play Eve Offline as much as I am!

By the way, if you’re interested in learning all about industry and wormholes in a non-toxic community, House of the Shattered Sun is taking applications!

Eve Rookies Ratting Fleets

Eve Rookies plays host to 2 different type of ratting fleets. We do wormhole ratting (all classes) as well as Triglavian hunting fleets.

This year we have ran 28 different ratting fleets and introduced 91 individuals to the content. As you can see with the amount of individuals we have had join for the first time, there’s a lot of interest in this content! We’re always looking for partners to help us host this type of fleet for the public!

Eve Rookies Homefront Operation Fleets

So far this year we’ve done 15 Homefront fleets. This is kind of one of those fleet types that we do when there isn’t anything else to do but people are available for an activity.

One of the struggles we have with this particular fleet type is it’s very limited in the number we can take out. While Vanguard Incursions are fleets for about 10-13 people, we regularly put 14-16 and more experienced pilots may drop but still hang around to help with DPS without taking payout.

Then, on top of this there’s the problem that the fleet may run for 2 hours and only do 1 or 2 sites. We want to keep people engaged and just flying around doing nothing isn’t it.

I’m not sure if Homefronts will ever be a “regular” fleet type, but we are glad that they’re there for those times we need to spin up something quick.

Eve Rookies NPSI PVP Fleets

I’m no longer the ONLY pvp FC for Eve Rookies! Every other week I run a kitchen sink Dessies and Down pvp fleet, but for the longest time I’ve been the only FC.

Just in the last month we’ve brought on a UStz JFC and also have another newbro friendly FC to run fleets!

But, looking back at the first half of the year I’ve run about 18 or 19 of the 23 fleets. The others I had guest FCs that I talked into doing it. It is gratifying to get lots of new to PVP folks every time I take out a fleet though! That’s why I do it! We had 125 new to pvp folks come out in the past 6 months to see what it’s all about!

Paying the Eve Rookies FCs

On January 1st I made the announcement that Eve Rookies would start paying its FCs for every fleet of 2 or more hours that is stood up. At first, the FCs were unsure about this initiative. They told me that they FC’d because they enjoyed it, not because they get paid to do it.

My stance on this is everyone that FCs a fleet is sacrificing time and energy they could have put in to making isk. Often times in fleets that make ISK, FCs will forgo payout in order to either fit more people into the fleet (VG incursions) or to give everyone else a little more ISK in their wallets.

I greatly appreciate that they donate their time to Eve Rookies and that’s why the payroll exists! Here’s the 6 month breakdown:

Yes, my wallet is crying at this point!

The Eve Rookies Community is GROWING

The Eve Rookies community is growing in leaps and bounds. Up until May 2024 the average amount of new Eve Rookies Discord members was about 75 a month. However, in May we not only stepped into the Headquarter Incursion space, but we absorbed active members of a failed HQ community.

The month of May alone saw 274 new members join our Discord which puts us only 250ish new members away from 3,000 at the time of writing this update! Here’s the 6 month breakdown:

As of right now we’re averaging 105 new members a month which is more than I ever imagined when I started Eve Rookies back in March 2021.

Eve Rookies Joins the Headquarter Incursion Space

When I started Eve Rookies, everyone asked me when we’d start doing Headquarters. My reply was always “never.” Not only wasn’t there space for yet another HQ group, but it wasn’t really new player friendly.

However, as the opportunity to fill in a spot in the Headquarter community arose, I felt good to saying yes. At this point in Eve Rookies history the community had a rock solid leadership base an an army of dedicated FCs.

One thing that both I, as the CEO, and the leadership team of Eve Rookies has been good at is finding and reacting to need in the greater community. The HQ community needed 2 things:

1. A place for pilots to go to have drama and toxicity free fleets
2. A place that pilots who have never done incursions to learn

So an idea formed in my head. We already have a thriving Vanguard community. Why not offer those who want a bigger challenge to try HQs while keeping our shield VGs 100% newbro friendly? With so many activities for pilots to partake in that had handouts and were accessible to low skills or alpha, it was now OK to have some activities that weren’t as accessible.

We decided that Shield VGs are for everyone. They’re 100% newbro friendly, alpha friendly, there are handout Praxis and no upgrade requirements. Then, the armor VGs are the “intermediate” step. The pilot needs more commitment in the form of investing in armor skills and purchasing their own armor ship (and hauling it around New Eden). Finally, HQs.

Keeping in line with the armor community that we took over, we decided to keep the skilling and upgrade requirements. Participating in a HQ fleet requires a pilot to join via a waitlist that tracks the hours spent flying in our fleets. At a certain points, the pilot is expected to be out of their starter ship and into better ships and continue upgrading.

At some point in the near future I’ll write more about this particular adventure. Promise!

Presenting at Eve Amsterdam

Eve Amsterdam happened the 14th to 16th of June. CCP showed up and I was slated to be a presenter on Saturday the 15th.

Friday was a pub quiz and this is where Eve Rookies lived up to our name. I think we got 4 of the 20ish questions. Then there was a whisky tasting. I think this is the first time in 3.5 years that anyone from Eve Online got to witness drunk Discording Kshal. It was all good. Apparently drunk Kshal is very giggly.

Then Saturday at noon I gave my presentation over Empowering Your Community. Hopefully this will be edited and put up on YouTube soon. Overall the presentation went smooth, besides being a tad hungover. It generated a number of conversations among the Eve Amsterdam attendees and hopefully brought in a few more potential partners!

After the presentations, there was an NPSI fleet where Sasha Panther and I went and tanked our security status in Low Sec. It was tons of fun and we’ve since recouped the security status (well, Sasha has…I immediately went and tanked it again solo hunting).

Sunday was a low key day. I think this is where I became an unofficial member of the 6th Empire and agreed to getting something shaved into the side of my head at FanFest 2024. I was also co-host in a workshop over helping new members. And this is where I announced the Eve Rookies Partnership Program. I’ll do a proper post on this later explaining everything. Promise!

Summing Up the 1st Half of 2024

Writing this all out, wow, it’s a lot. Eve Rookies is something I’m immensely proud of. This community has gone beyond just a bunch of players interested in Eve Online to a full blown community of players that care about each other.

Every day I get to witness the entire leadership team work to build each other up and celebrate one another’s successes. When someone is down, or hard on themselves, I see the team work to help that person out. I’m getting to watch players come out of their shells and become more social and interactive. I’m also witnessing new projects and communities springing up out of Eve Rookies.

I’ve also started seeing a little bit of attitude change among other communities we interact with. Both in just becoming a little bit kinder as well as not putting up with the worst of the toxicity. Or at least they’re getting better at putting it behind closed doors (still not great, but not exposing everyone to it).

So thank you to everyone who supports Eve Rookies and flies with us. Without you, none of this would be happening.

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