Lucky in Love, Unlucky in PVP

My mom always used to say, whenever I would lose at a family board game or card game, "Unlucky at cards, lucky at love". Which was supposed to comfort me or something. But I wanted to WIN, dammit!

I've been very lucky at love. I've been married to the same woman for 22 years, most of them have been wonderful. And I'm not too bad at card games and board games.

All my bad karma seems to be coming out in EVE pvp.

A couple weeks ago, my corp, SKYFORGER, put up a pos in or near enemy territory, in a bit of a freelance pvp move. Well, it got found, and put into reinforced mode. So we had a call-to-arms (CTA) to defend it and try to repair it when it came out of reinforced. We had a few friends of the corp, but when the time came, we didn't have enough. Our Fleet Commander (FC) Flaming Ogre said, "The POS is already gone, we're just hoping to get some kills". I brought a couple of Incursus, to tackle for the group.

We were early and camped a station in a nearby system for a while. I blew the first tackle because I was confused about which end of the station was the exit. Miraculously, the guy who got away came back, and we got him that time.



Then we went on to the POS. The timer expired and we started trying to repair stuff. A few reds were in the system, but there was no sign of the enemy around the POS. Once the shield of the pos is back up to 50 percent, it comes back online and operational, the POS can't be destroyed this cycle, but must be put into reinforced mode again. So naturally, they waited until it was at about 45 percent, then showed up with a fleet that outgunned us. Some of us fired back with POS guns or their battleships. I couldn't think of much to do. I was popped, and when the order came to scatter, I jumped to a celestial and logged out. Or so I thought.

When I logged back in later, I found that I had been podded, 15 minutes or so after my Incursus was exploded. I'm still not sure how that happened. Did they scan me that fast? As it happens, it was no big deal for me as I was using my PVP clone, it cost me the price of a clone upgrade, and gave me free transport back to my base in Deklein.

On to yesterday's fleet action in the war between NC and IT. One of my corpmates, Ginta had been showing me the very impressive killmails he'd been getting in on from fleet actions in and around X-70MU. Each of them had multiple capital kills, both dreadnaughts and carriers. And many other ships.

I've been wanting to be more involved, but I seem to have a time-zone problem. The larger part of the NC seems to be based in Europe (There are some Aussies and Kiwis in my alliance, but that isn't really any better), 8 hours ahead of me. So my play time is their sleep time. And their play time is my work time. Except for weekends.

Sunday was my shot. I got into a fleet with a newly tricked-out Brutix. I have four of them now, so I was willing to risk one. I learned two things in that fleet: I suck at this fleet game, and my luck isn't too great either.

My Brutix seems to have been fitted all wrong. I had short range guns, long range would have been better. I have a hard time looking at fleets in the finder and figuring out which one to be in. I'd like to feel useful after all. I was camping a gate while the battleships were pounding at a POS, a couple of reds came through, but I was still locking them when they exploded. So I'm not feeling useful.

Then at some point the FC decided to drop what we were doing and go on a mad race through several systems where we finally jumped through into a gate camp and got massacred. Or so it seemed to me. The FC loaded the grid first, called one target, then was popped. The next FC calling targets was popped before I managed to load the grid. The 3rd FC didn't have much left to work with. I couldn't find the targets, let alone lock them. I have an overview window that shows only enemy ships, but it kept wanting to reset to the top of the list whenever I'd scroll it down to look for a target. I think I can set it so that the closest ships are at the top, I'll do that next time.

Someone called for us to warp to him, I did so, or so I thought, and ended up at a planet alone. I warped back to someone, and was maybe 50km from the nearest anything. Except a drone, that shot at me. I killed it. Eventually, they turned their attention to me and popped me. I logged off.

I still have no idea why we rushed off to jump into a gate camp with well-positioned, and evidently superior forces. That's the unlucky part. But really, I suck at PVP.

The good news is that losing a ship is no longer a big emotional hit. It's really more of a "business as usual" thing now. I've got plenty of cash to make up the loss, and lessons learned. They are:

1. Fit long range guns unless told specifically otherwise.


2. Rearrange your pvp window to have CLOSEST ships at the top, not FURTHEST.