Overconfidence and greed. A deadly combination that led to the death of my second Procurer in low sec last night. Instead of following the procedures I'd developed for staying alive, I started chasing after a possible hundreds of thousands of ISK and instead lost millions.
I went ice mining last night where I probably shouldn't. The ice site had spawned 1.2 AU from two star gates. To make matters worse, the ice site only had celestial objects on one side, making it virtually impossible to mine while aligned, so I didn't even try. And shortly after I started mining, a neutral Tengu came into system.
All of those, though, were just contributing factors. The real cause is that I popped four rats and, instead of destroying the wrecks, decided for some strange reason that collecting the loot was a good idea. In case anyone doesn't know, collecting the loot in a mining barge while mining in low sec is generally a bad idea. I normally just destroy the wrecks with my drones as soon as the combat is done.
When I'm mining the 12th unit of ice to fill my ore hold, I'm usually fully aligned to the station where I'm going to drop the ice off, bad site location or good. But because I got greedy, I was moving toward one of the wrecks. So instead of just clicking on the dock button and escaping, I was fumbling around to get a celestial to warp off too and was tackled. Needless to say, the Procurer died. I escaped with my pod, but I'm not sure if he was distracted by my Hound appearing or if he just decided not to take the sec hit, since his security status was 1.3. I think the latter was the case because I was really fumbling around with my mouse and keyboard.
I talked with Hamster Too, the pilot of the Tengu, about what happened during the fight, if you can call what we had a fight. I didn't even scratch his paint because I couldn't get my drones pointed in the right direction and my stealth bomber showed up late. He's a pretty cool dude and so we agreed that he'd scoop my drones and loot the wreck and after that he'd just run his site and I could continue mining. He didn't pick up everything, though. He left the mining crystals that dropped as well as the 12 units of ice that I'd gathered. So I got my ice after all!
I then mined another ore hold full of ice, and while my new Procurer was in the station a Tristan showed up in the ice site. I'm not about to lose 2 ships in one day, so I just refined the ice I had, said goodbye to local, and made a delivery of 12,000 units of liquid ozone to Bosena for sale. As of downtime, I'd already sold 1,000 units.
I had a little more of an adventure than I liked, but I can't say I was bored. But next time, I'll stick to the basics and not chase after every .01 ISK.
