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Thursday, May 15, 2014

Greed Is Bad

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.

8 comments:

  1. You can mine aligned without a celestial: get a microwarpdriving frig and fly 200km off. Make a bookmark and give it to the miner. Then you can align the bookmark and warp to it if anyone arrives.

    Also, you could have ECM drones in the 50m3 drone bay of a procurer.

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    1. The first might work. As for the second ... the 50m3 drone bay for the Procurer is a Kronos buff that hasn't hit TQ yet.

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    2. That's a pretty good solution, since whoever is chasing you won't have access to the bookmark. That would allow even a slow aligning barge like a retriever time to turn around and warp again. Of course, I'm not taking a retriever into low. I love my Procurer.

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  2. Yep, the bookmark is a good idea but you'll probably want it further out or off-grid and so they would have to scan you down before they could get to you, an interceptor can cover 200km very quickly

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  3. Bro, we should lowsec mine together sometime. I'm told it's more fun with friends.

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  4. Especially if you use it as a bait fleet :-)

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  5. One more idea: instead of being aligned, drop a depot and stand next to it. Fit for yield in lows. If anyone attacks you, just fit 3 warp stabs (4 after Kronos) and warp away.

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  6. I had to stop reading after you said you were "chasing after a possible hundreds of thousands of ISK". When I'm in ISK-earning mode I don't even undock unless I'm planning on a making a minimum of 50 mil an hour. Who takes excessive risk for less than a million? Really?

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