The Ups and Downs of a Newb Pirate.

Well I have been playing eve for about 3 months now and have been reading Eve-Pirate for just as long. Over the last month and a bit I had done a little bit of low sec belt piracy but to be honest due to lack of funds and skills I had only been picking fights with people that couldn’t fight back (i.e. miners). While this isn’t exactly the most exciting or honourable pursuit it did net me a few ISK and got me set up with a couple of nicely kitted out Rifters. It also kept me occupied while I trained up some of my key skills a little higher.

Currently I’m in a Corp with a couple of friends and there are only really 2 of us that are active. The other guy has been playing for quite awhile but was mainly mining and NPC’ing and hadn’t done any PvP at all. As he has recently trained up to use a Claw he was very keen to join me for some real PvP and so we set out to find some fairly quiet low sec space.

My partner in crime was flying his Claw with the typical plate/rep build and I was in a cheap tackling Rifter with my new T2 Ac’s.

We found ourselves in a small cluster of 0.2-0.4 systems which while they where not very busy had enough traffic to give us some targets. I had travelled through the area in the past and had a number of SS and insta’s pre-made so after landing in our first SS I started scanning the belts to see what was around.

Our first target was a Thorax that looked like it had just finished off some NPC’s in a belt. We warped in but landed 80Km. This is where I made 2 mistakes. One I didn’t take a bookmark off a ‘roid and warp us out and in again a bit closer. Mistake number two was that I had my MWD set on manual. Needless to say the guy got away before we got in range and we didn’t see him again all night. Lesson learnt though and the NPC’s had dropped some nice loot (1 module worth about 1.5mill).

Our next target was a Caracal that again looked like he was ratting in the belts. This time we warped in just about 20Km out and was within scram range within a few seconds. Strangely he didn’t seem to be fighting back and I started to worry that maybe I was lagging and that any minute I would resync to find one of us had been blown to bits. As we got him down to armor all of a sudden he starts firing back and we realise the guy had been afk, in a belt, in 0.4 space.

We quickly rip through the guys armor and I ask for a 15mill ransom which the he is willing to pay. This is where the second mistake of the night is made, my friend in the claw got so caught up in the moment he forgot to turn his guns off and the guy explodes into an orange ball of fire just a fraction of a second after agreeing to the ransom. I apologise to him and checked he hadn’t paid already (I would have refunded his money). For some reason he hangs around for awhile in his pod which we actually leave alone.

I chat with him for a little while afterwards and he seems like a nice guy and doesn’t seem quite so upset afterwards. Turns out his dog had run out the door when he let someone in and he was running up the street after it when we started attacking! He also apparently didn’t have any insurance on his ship and was in the middle of scouting mining areas for his corp. Feeling sorry for the guy I left most of his mods (IE the ones that where not worth selling) in the can and told him when we left the system so he could go and collect them.

The 3rd and last fight of the night was another Caracal. This one actually fought back but didn’t make a scratch in the claws armor tank. He went down very quickly and refused to pay the ransom (we both remembered to turn our guns off this time). He didn’t take it as well as the last guy and his parting words where “You have messed with the wrong guy mother fucker” seeing as the mods on his ship wouldn’t even make enough ISK to buy me a new AC we didn’t get overly worried about it.

After this things where fairly quiet. We did run into the AFK Cara pilot again with a few of his friends but didn’t manage to track them down to try for a 3 vs 2.

So that’s my first REAL piracy experience. All in all it was a lot of fun and I learnt a lot. We only made about 4 mill from the modules we got but we did learn a lot in the process. At the moment I still won’t be becoming a full time pirate (I haven’t got the resources or support to live with a low sec rating) but it is nice having something fun to do when mission running gets too much to take.

Cleared for publication by: Ander