Day -1: A bit of background (or how not to PvP)

“Success is not final. Failure is not fatal. It’s the courage to continue that counts”
- Winston Churchill

The aim of the character is unashamedly kill marks. To put this in context, I have played EVE for ~15 months in three separate blocks over seventeen years(!) and have achieved the glorious total of zero kill marks on all of my ships - including those long-since sold or vapourised. My one and only kill mail is from an abandoned corvette that was inconsiderately cluttering up my d-scan one evening. It doesn't count. Doubly so as neither empty ships nor corvettes give kill marks.

I'm not entirely a stranger to PvP, but the overriding majority of my experience of it is on the receiving end. I accept, however, that every single loss was completely my own stupid fault. Highlights have included:

• Losing my first Punisher on a low sec belt. I had done everything right. Set up safes. Watched d-scan and seen him coming. But as I was a long way off the warp-in I thought I had time to finish off the battleship rat. Cue first journey home in a pod.
• Losing a Thasher to a gate camp. It hadn't been there ten minutes earlier on my warp to high sec. I didn't recheck before going back in. Dang!
• Losing a Coercer on a belt in an 'empty' system, because I hadn't noticed the notification to tell me the chat server was down. Seriously!
• Losing an Algos in a low-sec system I'd regularly visited, because the only other local was from a corp I knew didn't engage in PvP (!). Repeat after me: there is no such thing as a non-PvP corp.
• Losing a Stabber because I warped back to an escalation where I had been combat-scanned earlier. I possibly could have escaped this if I had remembered to overheat my afterburner. I probably could have avoided this by not warping to zero. I definitely could have prevented this by NOT GOING BACK. Oh the glories of hindsight.

All counted, including some frigates in FW Plexes, a total of eight loss-mails across three alts. On the only occasion when I had managed to get it together enough to slide my Thrasher neatly under my assailant's guns, the cowardly cruiser called in a corp mate to finish me off before I even got into his armour. How unreasonable...

Hardly an auspicious lineage for a wannabe pirate, - but this time I promised myself it was going to be a different story...

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