Day 3

Skills

Or in my case, the distinct lack of skills. I'm not talking about player skill here, i'm talking about in game character skill.
To be able to fly bigger ships or fit any ships out better, you need to learn how to do these things via skill training. This is all explained to me in the tutorials but it does kinda hold you back, especially new players like me who just want to blow stuff up. It totally understandable of course, and i suppose it adds a bit of extra accoumplishment when i do finally kill someone, to know that i did it because i trained for that particular ship modification or gun ect.

Now these skills train up in real time, which kind of sets the pace at which you can progress in game which is no bad thing i suppose, CCP do need to make money from you long term after all ;)

Amamake

So i find myself back in my hangar in a pod. I buy myself another Thrasher which is a destroyer class ship, i fit it out best my skills will allow and ask in the local channel where a good place to find 1 VS 1 fights. I'm told amamake is a good place so set my waypoints and head off into low sec space.

Once i cross the border into low sec, i'm relieved to find it free of gate camps - these sound the most boring style of PVP i can imagine and would pefer pulling my own teeth with no anasthetic. They basically boil down to orbiting a gate with a few friends and waiting for somebody like me to jump into the system, then to beat the shit of of them before they can escape of burn back to the gate and escape.
To me, thats being a no skill pussy who cant find a real fight with somebody looking for a fight also, and instead relies on suprise and hopefully the victim not being fitted for PVP and being massively out numbered. Seriously gate camper dudes, grow some balls.

Anyway, once in Amamake i go about making some safe spots which i learned from the aformentioned Eve Wiki. I open my D-Scanner and scan for other ships, speciafically ships my size and not ships that will wtfbbq my ass on contact. I narrow one ship in particular down to the systems sun, a frigate class ship.

Off i warp and immediately engage on contact. My guns blazing and not so much as scratching this other frigate. Not so for my opponent. A few shots and i'm sat in my pod again warping back to my safe spot wondering what the fuck went wrong.
I see 'gf' appear in local from the person i just got spanked by, so proceed to spark up a convo with them, and others within the system about what went wrong, what i should do next time and generally what to do differently next time.

Lessons learned


No.1 - Always check out the pilots info you intend to engage. A 3 day old player such as myself trying to fight a 4 years old player is never going to end well.

No.2 - Check out the ship class and type. It was a frigate class ship that i fought, but it turned out to be a T2 class frigate ( Harpy ), basically a double hard version of the T1 frigate, coupled with the pilots estimated skills and it was a loss waiting to happen.


So, another loss, but another lesson or two learned, plus i got to know 2 or 3 decent players chatting in the local channel. I came away one Thrasher down, but 20 million isks up as the player that killed me gave me some cash, and another random player in local did the same. Was it through pity? I dont know, maybe,  but maybe it was down to a couple of them saying they admired my man parts for coming to low sec at 3 days old and having the right attitude to losing my ship.

Either way i had fun and leave happy, ready to fight another day. Probably tomorrow.