Your Doing It Wrong!

In recent times I have been contemplating my ISK situation. I'm supposed to be a pirate. If this is true, then why am I so poor? I thought the point of pirating was to get an income from other peoples items and ISK. Being a relatively new pirate, I have been more for the PVP side instead of the get rich from others part.

In my mad dash for the top 10k on the Battleclinic killboard, I think I may have lost sight of this. "This" being getting paid for what I do. I have been whining a bit in corp about losing expensive ships and not being able to afford battleships and the likes. But why is this?

Well it appears that I go for the killmail too often. People don't like getting their ships shot out from under them then ransoming their pod for obvious reasons. A very wise corpmate Yahrr is the one who pointed out my error. Mining, Missioning and Exploration are all very different, however the end result is the same. These career options all generate ISK for the player. This is where I messed up, I thought pirating was more of a "kill everybody ransom later" type thing. This is wrong. I took Yahrr's advice and started ransoming ships more often than not. There are situations where killing is better than trying to ransom. Such as frigate fights, where the time needed to ransom is too great considering that if either party stops shooting they will likely die. Larger prey is easier to ransom because of the time it takes to kill him.

Recently I put this into practice. I found a newbie mission runner flying a Tengu (!!!). He was setup to be unprobable but he either lacked the proper skills for this, or was not setup properly. After some hardcore probing on my alt, I warped my Enyo into his mission. 3 gates later I landed right on top of him and started working on his pretty tech 3 cruiser.

The unusual thing about this was I was actually breaking his tank. He apparently thought I couldn't kill him, until he was into armor that is. I demanded 300 million ISK from the start. He kept saying he didn't have that much left, only 200mil or so after his tengu purchase. I believed him because he was going to die unless he paid me. When he was hitting armor he was begging, saying he only had 200mil. I ended up accepting the 200million and let him go.

An Enyo killing a tengu would have made such a badass killmail I can't even imagine how awesome it would have been. But what purpose would it serve? The killmail won't buy me any new ships or give me more game time. Before speaking with Yahrr I would have killed him for sure, but his insight helped me overcome my blood-lust and fattened up my wallet considerably.

For this I am grateful. Thank you Yahrr for your wise words.