Situational Awareness

Whilst roaming with the alliance fleet, we arrived in system, and set up camp on the gates, as always I kept an eye both on my gate, and on local, after noticing that there was a pirate in system I kept scanning d scanning to check his location. Noticing a ishkur in a belt that was not in our fleet I quickly warped to the belt arriving some 80km away from him, seeing my ceptor closing at full burn the pirate sensibly attempted to flee the belt, unfortunately for him, he'd failed to notice the NPC danger in the belt, and was prompty warp disrupted by the belt rats, not missing the opportunity I overheated the MWD and was on him in a few seconds. The rest of the fleet quickly dropped in and assisted with putting him down.

The moral of this is simple, always be aware of the belt rats, most are relatively harmless, but on occasion those pesky guardian rats will web and scram you. What he was doing in the belt with an obvious camp in system in the first place I've no idea...  Linky

The next fight of the roam came after the main fleet had split up, with the fleet breaking down into smaller parts to get back home, myself and my corp mate Eltharo happened on a missioning Hyperion, whilst we were setting up the warp in, another pirate tried to get me to fight him on the gate, deciding that the hyperion kill was probably worth more, I left the pirate to do his thing, whilst waiting for the cue to jump and warp. At that point the hyp decided he'd had enough missioning, and warped out. Leaving me with an urge to kill and a tempting cyclone now warping off to a belt. Fine I thought, I'm not really set up for a BC kill but it would be rude not to oblige.... linky  now my ganky Brutix is no match for a cyclone, and ending up in 70% structure at the end of the fight kinda proved that theory, so what did he expect when the Pilgrim turned up a few seconds after I engaged? :) Guess he should have specified he'd wanted a 1v1 BEFORE he tried to engage.

Situational Awareness is key in EvE you should always try to be aware of whats going on. What and why two simple questions to ask yourself: What is your target doing? Why is he doing it?
In both of these fights the pirate lost the fight before it was started. The tusker either didn't know about guardian rats, or worse didn't have them on his overview. The second fight happened some time after he first tried to bump me from the gate... why didn't I engage on the gate (he had pirate standings and therefore sentry's wouldn't have been an issue), but then was quite happy to engage him later at a belt?
Situations are fluid in EvE but you can use them to your advantage, if you keep a level head, and think about it for just a few more seconds before you press that button.

the pirate saw me sitting on a gate, now maybe I was just camping the gate, but then I'd probably have engaged him on the gate if I'd wanted to fight him at that point. Think and try to find out what your target is doing before you engage, was he in a mission? was he camping a gate? does he have support? Considering the options before you fight give you a massive advantage over your opponent.

Why did Iges get popular with mission runners all of a sudden...

linky

"Going to California
Another feature in Dominion is our new batch of Gallente Storyline missions. There are two main mission types, "Mining Base Camp" and "Troop Buildup," each with variants based on difficulty and particular target. Each mission stems from the past year's Faction Warfare resultsHeth's resultant sale of key Gallente systems to the Caldari megacorps, and the Federation's reaction.
We're excited about these missions. We coordinated closely with CCP TonyG, CCP Ginger, and the rest of the EVE Storyline Board for specific PvE content. Also, these missions send players to specific solar systems rather than simply sending them some random number of jumps from the agent's location. This allows us to draw out themes for specific locales in the EVE universe."

That explains alot then...

"There are also obvious potential impacts on player traffic that we are eager to watch."

Yes, and here is your answer.
This months most violent system

Keep up the good work CCP!

Bring me more noobs!

OK, I really need to keep out of Iges, every time I'm there bad things happen to people innocently trying to gain some faction standings.

My security status is at an all time low of -3.9 and I'm having far too much fun to try and fix it :(

A poor excuse for an ebil piwate

[18:16:57] Anabaric > was it something i said?
[18:17:00] Anabaric > hunni?
[18:17:13] Miner Mistress > hunny punny i like ur bunty
[18:17:36] Anabaric > mwah, cya soon :p
[18:23:41] Anabaric > oh come on... .
[18:23:51] Anabaric > i've got station agro as well
[18:24:03] Miner Mistress > buuhuuuhuu
[18:24:34] Anabaric > seriously 1v1 no bullshit
[18:24:39] Anabaric > your loki, my Mrym
[18:24:47] Miner Mistress > :p
[18:24:52] Miner Mistress > go joke somewhere else
[18:25:13] Anabaric > what are you worried about?
[18:25:57] Miner Mistress > ur not bright are yea
[18:26:11] Anabaric > your the one that keeps running atm
[18:26:42] Anabaric > oh bye then.... ?

And with that she left local :(