This last week hasn’t gone great for me, Eve wise. Sure, I’ve managed to kill a few things (‘few’ being the operative word), but I also lost two ships. Expensive ones (for me, anyway).

First up, my Vagabond.
I had just logged on, and almost immediately I heard that there was a Tengu in system. I didn’t pay too much attention to it as I was sorting out my skill queue, but then I read in alliance chat that it had been tackled in a belt. It screamed ‘bait ship’, but I undocked and warped to it to help with DPS. There was about 5 of us, and when we had the Tengu down to 10% shields, he asked for a ransom in local of 500m. Here is where we made the first mistake – we delayed. Two counter-offers from us were also put in local, one of 600m, another of 1bn (at the same time, from two seperate pilots). While we were waiting for the Tengu pilots response – a good 10 seconds or so – a Falcon landed on grid, 70k off. Here is where I made the second mistake – I didn’t warp out immediately. Another 10 seconds later, 4 more ships enter grid. It’s at this point I tell everyone to gtfo, and start warping myself… but too late. Webbed and scrammed, I’m going nowhere. Then the rest of their gang comes in and jams me to high heaven. All I can do is sit and wait… and wait… and wait. Turns out I put a hell of a tank on that ship, so it takes a good 2 minutes to blow up. I manage to get my pod out and back to a station to reship.

A good number of lessons learned here, I think.
1) If a suspected bait ship offers to pay a ransom, take it. My guess is, he didn’t expect his shields to drop so fast, or the fleet was further away than first thought, so offered up a ransom to save his ship. If we had taken the initial offer, there’s a good chance we all would have been 100mil richer. There’s also a chance he was just stalling us, though.

2) Have one person designated to handle ransoms. With two people giving counter-offers, it only delayed us further.

3) When an E-war ship lands on grid, and it’s not friendly, run.

So, my GCC runs down, the trap guys have left system, so I undock in my Rokh, with a mind to do some station camping. About 20 minutes go by, and nothing is happening. I get word that a cruiser is about to come through a stargate, and it’s on autopilot. I start warping to the gate, and halfway there I hear that it’s been tackled. Good. I land, turn on my sensor boosters, and start shooting at it. It’s at this point, that we’re told that a fleet has just warped to the other side of this gate, and that we should run. Unfortunetly, a Rokh has the grace and finesse of an oil tanker, so it’s not long before I’m again tackled and killed… by the same people. This time they podded me, too. It was at this point I figured that two seperatre 100mil+ losses was enough, and logged for the night. Although there were some lessons to be learned here, too.

1) If you’ve just been caught in a trap, check the names of the people on the kill mail. If you see one of them again, avoid them.

2) If you’re in a ship that takes an age to warp off, always make sure you’re aligned.

Ultimately, losing those two ships was my fault, as it should be. Am I going to replace them? No, not yet. I’ve been relying on the big ships for ages now, and I need to get better in the smaller ones. I’ve got a handful of Rifters I can fly around in, as well as a Harpy. I still have a Drake in system too if I need to do some station camping, but for the most part, I’ll be trying to catch people in belts.