Warfare & Tactics

So, I've been in Eve on and off for a few years now. I get in, have these wonderful plans and... never quite realize them. I want to solo pvp. I did the Agony classes, read a bunch of stuff, but the thing I'm missing is: WHERE?
I know no sane person is going to write: come to xx sector, plenty of newbs for you to kill. But still... what are the things to look for when trying to find a suitable sector for finding an easy kill. I simply want to roam somewhere a bit, know that I can lock and kill a target of opportunity if I find one, but every time I went out in my cloaked ship to charter unknown space, I found 0 prey. I scanned lowsec and some nullsec, but to no avail. So to summon up: how does a well-read but no practical experience pirate-ish capsuleer find a base from which to start learning the ropes of pirating?

Thank you all for the advice.

You won't be pirating much in small ships, these days people are (usually) quite smart and you won't find many inattentive targets in belts or in sites other than the odd noob, and most piracy tends to lean heavily towards gatecamping these days.



Great suggestion for you to take right there, if you want the small ship action, alternatively, you can try your hand at canflipping, or ask for 1v1s outside trade hubs like rens, hek, amarr, dodixie.

However, if you are dead set on -10, go look up some pirate corporations. Most of these pirate corporations are usually lowsec bearates who own mission hubs, or pure gatecampers, like the ones in Rancer. Bear in mind, you'll usually be flying battlecruiser hulls for this.

I can't comment much on FW but it is a good choice if you want to fly small and fast.

On the other hand, you sound like you might enjoy flying a recon ship like a Pilgrim. If thats the case I strongly urge you to start out with a pvp corp that does black ops. Its not recommended you attempt to fly solo right off the bat, because you can stand to learn alot, and for far cheaper, from a corp.

From my experiences in eve solo pvp is a rare thing. More often than not you will get picked off by a low sec gate camp before you actually find anyone to kill. My advice would be to join a pirate corporation and offer to be their bait ship. You will have the option to engage the solo ship and still have the luxury of having backup. You could also get a recon cruiser (like the arazu). If you get good at scanning, you should be able to catch some low sec missioners. Also wormholes are a good bet for finding solo people.

Well i am no pirate, but one thing i use to see if a system is "safe" or not when travelling in low sec is the eve map, you have a option to see how many people entered there in the last 30 minutes and even to see how many have died there. So get the low sec system with hight density of people and low kills (so it is not a war there, just peoplo passing by) and go kill someone ;)

Damn, thank you all for all the food for brain. I guess it depends on what kind of a player you are. I was in a corp for a while, it was pleasant, but I'm more of a lone wolf. Did a month or two in 0.0, had some pretty nice fleet fights (newb that I am, was flying tackle, of course). Then I got into smaller pvp corp, was supposed to learn the ropes of pirating but... I quit eve, because I had loads of studying to do.
Basically, every freking time I come back to Eve I have the same goal: learn the way of the lonely pvp. I don't mind that my stats aren't going to be full of bcs, bss, or for that matter anything big. I really enjoy just being in a cloaked ship and I watching... so no, I don't wanna go roaming/rampaging through sectors till my glorious death. Daneel Trevize I thing has the best idea of what I'm looking for and I'm sure to check up on the w-space.
I'm trying to find out how to spot a solid base camp system for all my I-wanna-be-a-spider-like-pirate thingy. The thing is I tried it before on my own and... I spent two days looking at a gate and the rate of travell was 1 person / 2 hours. So that was badly chosen... Thought about going pirate faction, do the epic for one of them and base out of 0.0 say Serpentis base. But that's a WHOLE lot of hassle for something that could go the way I explained above (lots of ideas but no people in system equals FAIL). So if any solo pvp-er who takes hours watching his prey from a cloaked ship only to kill a single frigate in a whole day is reading this: how do you do it?

But again, thank you all for the advices, I'll keep trying with this idea of mine, but if it doesn't work, I'm grateful for all the alternatives you've mentioned and I'll consider!

If you're sure w-space will be at least fun to try, then continue considering it. But spank's right that you can have a lot of fun roaming without a cloak, just think on a larger scale, that once you get into some nullbears' ratting backwaters that they're already succumbing to your sticky trap as they pay too little attention to local & intel while harvesting their rats/PI/hauling and think their 20 mates in local have their back rather than being afk in a station/pos/space
You can still use very similar mechanics of the 1minute jump invuln cloak coupled with system scan and dscan to work out if people are active in an anomoly and which one before they see your ship in system. You just have to deal with local and the warp time/distance, or the frustration of it letting people slip away. Not that they won't still try to give you a fight in hilarious (half-)pve fits that a full pvp fit with a skilled pilot has a good chance against.

If you want to take a covert cloakying ship to null, where you're far far more likely to run into a camp, the AB-fitted pilgrim especially has problems. It'll be far safer in wspace but do expect to lose it sooner than you think, the first ship you go for might be able to summon backup before you've neuted them out and nibbled them away with drones that have to be kept alive. Also if you're planning a stay of hours in someone's system you can't be doing something else more fun/making isk to buy the next ship. You'd get a fair number of hurricanes + fight opportunities for 1 recon.

When I was in a w-space corp, we lived in w-space with a static to the class of systems we wanted to hunt, and constantly cycled it to find people active/probably worth waiting on/for a quiet system to run anoms in for variety. We ensured our routine would be target-rich and as much on our terms as possible. We could be ganking something very shiny within a minute of having a connection, and cycling a new one within 5 of them logging off rather than giving a fight. Dipping into systems from k-space, most likely through other people's statics, carries far more chance of being spotted, baited, or camped in, or just no-one active for hours.
I'm sure there's still plenty of w-space corps that would be interested in someone who's not looking to pve all day, and is willing to scout down connections to find someone to pounce on. But it is a time-consuming activity with decreasing value of targets and increasing likelyhood that you'll be bumping into pimped out T3/recon fleets. There's a lot going for being your own man in k-space.
Or dualboxing anywhere.

Shoot me a mail in game if you are keen on solo/ small gang wormhole pvp.

Edit: fixed my phones fail.

Camp DED 2 plexes in lowsec...

I was just about to post a dotlan link. Though its not an end all, it shows pve and pvp activity in all of eve in a semi accurate fashion.