Getting Podded for the First Time

From flickr user Ben Schumin

It had to happen eventually; my luck with always getting my capsule out of fights finally ran out and I got podded. It didn't feel like such a big deal, though and I got into the free noobship they gave me and headed back to our base.  I think I might have done some business, maybe even flown outside before realizing I had NOT upgraded my clone after getting podded!

Rule One...No, Rule Zero of Eve is to immediately upgrade your clone when you've been podded. The body you're now inhabiting is the previous clone you'd set up, so your new backup is a basic grade zero piece of crap clone with only 900K skill points.  If your new body got killed (not podded, just regular old "killed") you'd lose up to a maximum of 2M skill points, which could be very inconvenient. end up in a 900K skill point body and any skills you had over that limit would disappear...

The mechanics of Eve are quite generous in how they handle "death" (i.e when your capsule is blown up). You wake up in a new body with all your skills intact, though you lose any implants you had installed. You just need to remember to upgrade the new backup clone -- the game does NOT do that for you.

Counting myself lucky to have not gotten killed, I was dumb enough to DO IT AGAIN ON THE SAME DAY! Got podded, woke up in the new body with plenty of room for skill points, thought "glad I remembered to upgrade this clone!" and I left the station AND jumped into the next system before I realized "Oh shit, I didn't upgrade again!"

Fights

My record is now 8 kills and 14 losses and there were a couple of interesting kills this weekend.

Sentinel kill: I was jumping to a plex and this Sentinel had just got there before me. As I tried to enter the plex (I still run away from any ship since I'm flying a pretty small one myself) he locked and started shooting. I returned fire and waited for my corpmate to arrived. He got there after I had been blown up and I re-shipped and headed back out to the fight. My corpmate finished him off quickly. No biggie. Checking the kill mail later on though, look at that ship! Valued at 73 million, it took only 1500 points of damage to kill it! Why did he lock me and start shooting? He must have known his ship was delicate and not really built for combat.

The rest of the fights were pretty standard, though I felt more pangs of loss on one of them that I usually did. I had looted/salvaged about 4M ISK of stuff and was hoping to survive the night when we got attacked and blown up.  Generally speaking it is unlikely that I'm going to survive enough fights in an Atron to get salvage/loot back to base.  I noted that losing 4M ISK hurts a lot less now than it did when I was making ISK by trading and manufacturing. Making 1M ISK profit was a Big Big Deal for me then, but now it seems very easy to come by.

One other incident: while I was salvaging that stuff I didn't notice that the plex timer was running out. I went WAY outside the boundary to pick up some baubles and threw away thousands of Loyalty Points. This was Not Smart.

Being A Scout

I was asked to fly ahead of our small fleet and make sure a gate was clear. It felt great to be trusted to do this, and even better when there was actual incidents to report. The fleet waited as I handled the appearance and disappearance of two ships through the gate, and an odd incident where a Condor arrived at the gate, saw me, locked me, STARTED SHOOTING and promptly got taken out by the gate guns! Eventually there was a break in traffic and our fleet passed through without incidence.

Lessons Learned

• Watch the timer on the plex. Make sure you're inside the boundary (novice=10km, small=20km, medium=30km) when it hits zero.
• Atron is unlikely to survive a night's fighting. Think less about salvage/loot.
• Soloing plexes while cloaked is easier than fighting, but less intense.
• Gate guns are your friend. This may be a fun way to pick up loot/salvage! Locking someone is NOT an aggressive act, but may panic them into shooting back at you! Gate guns fire => Free Stuff!