EVE General Discussion

There are times when I go into battle with no intention of taking the slow way back.

Nothing is more confusing than after losing your ship, attempting to bump the ship that killed you with your pod. The WTF? factor alone makes it worth it. For all you Monty Python and the Holy Grail fans out there, you know why I do that.

Your glasses are a bit steamed up.

My first ship loss was at a null gate before warp to zero and I was transporting garbage on a profitable trade run.

It hurt a lot. Fast forward a few years after corps assets bpo collections and friends and I realise starting fresh with prior knowledge isnt a bad thing if you don't make the same mistakes.

Generally I dont mind very much unless i seriously messed something up that lead to my death. And yeah i too have used the old pod express to get places before.

Hah. I remember my first death... it was to Sorn Nordvind, in a lowsec system. I was curious about what lay beyond the bounds of highsec, especially as I had accidentally bumped into gates before that warned me about the systems on the other side, so I decided to take a rookie ship out and go exploring.

After about 30 minutes of finding nothing, I decided to try mining a bit (with the single civie miner), just because I had never seen some of those ores before, and as I approached a rock, out pops Sorn Nordvind from warp.

I am quickly tackled, and I think he thought that I was a vet's alt trying to secretly transport something valuable, because he offered to ransom me. I laughed, said I was a noob with nothing of interest, and turned on my self destruct. He popped my Velator, and because I didn't have any clue about how to quickly warp out (I didn't have a pod-saver tab until a few days after this event), and because my hands were shaking too much, I couldn't reliably right-click through the menus to find a planet or other place to warp to (didn't have them on my current, and only, overview tab), my pod got locked.

He again offered a ransom, of a million ISK, and I laughed again before setting my self destruct on my pod. He tried lowering the ransom, but eventually popped me after about 30 seconds of this.

I sent him a cheeky little mail after saying I hoped that the salvage he could get from my ship would cover his ammo costs, not realizing at the time that rookie ships were not salvageable, and said that if he had waited a few more minutes, I would have had a hold-full of valuable (to a noob) ore (hey, 150k worth of ore is a LOT when you're not even a week old, and have never played before).

I got a response along the lines of "You've got an attitude. I like that." (I don't remember exactly what, and can't log in right now to check the mail), and it was, and remains, one of the most memorable moments in my entire 20-some-odd-year gaming career.





As for what to do about dying? Enjoy it! Fly cheap until you can afford to fly not cheap. Laugh at the ones who kill you, chat with them, have fun and, if you know you cost them more ISK in ammo than they could recover from your kill (even by a tiny amount), rub that it!

If you find it difficult to simply jump in and laugh at your losses, remember that as a noob, your clones are free, and you probably don't have any implants in your head. Take rookie ships out with the free civie fits you get (repackage and assemble to get a free second civie fit, and refit that miner with the civie weapon), then go out and find some lowsec or nulsec areas, and start shooting people at random.

Chat with them, have fun, and realize that you're probably going to make more friends (or frienemies, at the last) that way than any other way in this game. If any of them ask WTF you are doing, just say that you are new to the game, and already find highsec dull (most lowsec and nulsec people will bite this bait like a redneck at a catfish BBQ), and keep chatting.

You'll get over the losses of the freebies soon enough, at which point you start scaling up a little bit: start fitting normal weapons and ammo to the rookie ship, then other real mods, then move up to a cheap frig with throwaway weapons and, before long, you'll find that the 25m ISK cruiser hull and mods you are losing don't even faze you.

Basically, get out there and have fun, and don't worry about losses. Don't think of your ship as a player, where you lose the game if you die (not even your avatar takes this position in EvE), think of your ships as a bullet: a bullet that shoots smaller bullets, while your pod is the gun. YOU, the player, are the character pulling the trigger. You may get disarmed (your capsuleer may die), but you only need to go back to station to grab another gun and get out there to start shooting again.

If what it takes to get a kill is for you to ram your burning hull into an enemy ship, preventing it from escaping, letting your fleetmates get the kill, DO IT! Your ship is replaceable. The fun is not.

You never know who will bring it. Or what flavor you'll get.

Death is like the summit of K2.

Usually when it happens I just shut off the game, dim the lights, and listen to Sarah McLachlan's I Will Remember You while crying. Then I watch a few videos of cats mating and boot up the game again, ready to face New Eden anew.

Well see, that makes perfect sense to me.

I still have a pair of her panties; wonderful woman.

So do I.

I get a slight headache

SInce I no longer use implants, pod death is either a bonus or an inconvenience, depending on where my medclone is in relation to where I want to be.

For ship loss, anything smaller than a BC is just "damn, now I have to fly X jumps to go back and reship". First two Domis I lost were quite the sting though.