Beginner solo piracy question

I am new, love the game, and am really drawn to the piracy aspect. My best luck has been stealing; I just go belt to belt, and steal from other people’s ratting wrecks in fast frigates. I get the timer thing but most of the time people don’t seem to mind at all. At least nobody has said anything, or I say I don’t speak english, which always works.

I have tried attacking players at gates in low sec, but my destroyers and frigs can’t handle the gate turrets. I have tried stealing from freshly downed gank wrecks in fast ships, but that is really frowned upon and the ganker people blew my capsule when I tried that in low sec.

I don’t do that well with others, I prefer my own company. Are there other ways for solo beginner players to do piracy? drag bubbles? I don’t care about zkill or anything. I would just sit docked in station and looked at the loot. That would be really nice.

My highest dps ship is t1 310 dps Catalyst.

Thank you

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Arrr welcome to Eve!

CCP has nerfed a lot of the mechanics conducive to piracy over the years, especially highsec piracy, such as wardecs and the crimewatch system, but as i’m sure others more learned than I are about tell you, there is still fun to be had.

A few suggestions:

  • Hunting Mobile Tractor Units

  • Solo catalyst/tornado ganking for tears. You can find many T1 industrials undocking from Amarr or Jita with hundreds of millions and the occasional ship with over a bil in cargo that can be deleted by a single volley from a meta fit Tornado costing like 90m.

  • Criminal/Suspect baiting mission runners and miners. When carebears fly big PVE ships they often make the mistake of thinking they can pop that annoying yellow flashy who’s looting their wrecks in a frigate. If you’re flying something like an ishkur or a taranis they often regret this decision.

  • Go to mission hubs and scan down mission runners. Many level 4’s have multiple pockets, often players will leave an MTU in each pocket and return later to collect them. Enter such a pocket, drop valuable loot, in a can, right beside their MTU, then cloak up and wait. The MTU won’t scoop your loot because you own the can but when the mission runner comes back to scoop the MTU he will most likely check your can, and if it contains something valuable he may consider going suspect for a few seconds in order to scoop the loot if he doesn’t see you on grid. Once he scoops it and goes suspect, uncloak and tackle. This one requires patience and doesn’t always work, but it has been successful for me in the past.

  • Dropping on miners and site runners in lowsec and offering ransom before killing them.

I’m sure there are lots more.

A long, long time ago there was a guy named feyd who wrote extensively about highsec fuckery, a lot of game mechanics have changed since then but many articles are still worth a read.

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Thanks a lot, didn’t know about those things, I will look into it more. I guess you can really scale thievery to whatever level you want in Eve. So wonderful.

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For gate camping, you’re looking at battlecruiser hulls or multiple accounts/friends to be able to tank gate guns anywhere from an appreciable amount of time up to indefinitely.

I don’t want to dissuade a young pirates dreams of gate camping, so I’ll share a different method. It’s a bit more advanced of a tactic, but I can recommend gate camping in lowsec trig victory systems. The places where Trigs spawn their own big NPC gatecamps.

You have to have positive standings with trigs though. Not hard to do: shoot some rogue drones in Pochven. „In and out 15 minute adventure“. Then you’re set for life.

Once you have the standings, their massive fleet and sentry gate turrets won’t shoot you. They will, however, shoot other capsuleers lacking those standings. All you have to do is chill with the trig NPC fleet and just point people with one or multiple disrupters who come in the gate. Either they die from being obliterated by the NPC fleet or you run away if you tackled something scary.

Loot the wreck, repeat.

The trigs are your hungry gatecamp DPS. Your frigate is a platter. Loot is served.

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as a newbie, you can look at attacking and looting miners in low sec space. you can do it a combat-fitted venture. you can travel system to system and check on your d-scan to see if there are any ventures or prospects visible. these are frigate-sized miners and usually very weak.

if you see one, then they are probably mining gas or ore. with a probe launcher + core scanner probes, you can find their gas site and hopefully kill them. probe the site down, warp to it, and microwarpdrive to the target ASAP, and scram them. some of them drop really nice loot, and low sec gas is worth quite a bit.

this cheap fit should work. just be warned that some venture pilots might fit a warp core stabilizer. combining this with the ship’s innate +2 warp core strength means that they have +4 warp core strength, so 2 warp scramblers won’t be enough to hold them. in my experience, though, most venture pilots don’t fit them.

[Venture, newbie miner hunter]

Type-D Restrained Overdrive Injector

5MN Quad LiF Restrained Microwarpdrive
Faint Epsilon Scoped Warp Scrambler
Faint Epsilon Scoped Warp Scrambler

200mm Light Carbine Repeating Cannon I, Republic Fleet EMP S
200mm Light Carbine Repeating Cannon I, Republic Fleet EMP S
Core Probe Launcher I, Sisters Core Scanner Probe

Small Gravity Capacitor Upgrade I
Small Gravity Capacitor Upgrade I
[Empty Rig slot]

Acolyte I x2

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Thanks Io. If I think what you’re saying is that once I have standing with the Trigs, I can sit at their gates in Pochven in a dirt cheap catalyst, wait for people to come through without standing, and the Trigs will, in a sense, act as my extra dps, and help me shoot the guy?

If that works in that order, it would be great. I am trying this, this weekend.

Thank you

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You blew my mind a bit with that combat fitted Venture thing. This will open up whole new avenues for me. Most times, if I warp to an asteroid field in the catalyst, everyone mining instantly leaves. This combat Venture thing is really cool idea.

thanks

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Not in Pochven. In lowsec empire space.

Trigs have sovereignty in Pochven. That’s where you gain your standings. All that’s needed is 0.01. I’m pretty sure there’s lots of guides out there on how to easily obtain that with shooting drones in the Pochven region.

Once you have that standing, you don’t need to go back to Pochven. There’s certain empire systems that are “EDENCOM” or “Triglavian” aligned in space. You’re looking for “Triglavian Minor Victory” lowsec systems in this list: https://kybernaut.space/invasions

Those “Triglavian Minor Victory” lowsec systems sometimes spawn huge Triglavian NPC fleets on gates, and the sentry guns have been replaced with their own turrets.

It is confusing if you weren’t around for the Triglavian stuff (I wasn’t), hence why it’s more of an advanced piracy tactic that leverages NPCs and gambles on other capsuleers’ lack of standings.

Edit: The trig fleet also has to be there, and it isn’t always, so that’s also a hit-or-miss.

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Hunting explorers in low/null/wh can be a very profitable business. Ideally done with an astero, but those can be a bit pricy to lose if you’re new, scanning+rocket fit stealth bombers work too.

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I can’t fly either of those ships yet. Not sure if I would right now either, way to little experience, I would suffer some heavy losses and nobody makes isk with that. I equipped my Thrasher with long range turrets and I equipped a probe launcher. I was hoping to try that out this weekend and see if I run into people mining gas who might need my aid.

the best gas is currently found in gallente and caldari space :slight_smile:

Thanks so much everyone for the great advice about stealing. This has become just a burner toon, I am making my first real main character. I realized posting on the Eve forums about stealing from people and using your real in-game name, is no good. I can’t have people announce in local chat “you here to steal Milk??”. It def makes piracy harder. Stealing is quite fun when you are low skillpoints and training into decent ships.

I sort of changed tactics a bit though. I have now become an assassin. I picked someone who is really famous in Eve Online, and I am tracking them down using zkill and word of mouth from the locals. If you don’t act nice, people are very willing to talk, for zero isk. I realized I could actually impact this powerful person’s game-play by trying to prevent them from leaving system in small crafts. This person, prefers shuttles, and even I can destroy shuttles at gates if I don;t mind getting popped by concord or gate turrets. I can’t believe how Eve can really approximate this pirate lifestyle. I have never seen this in any other games.

I am kind of struggling a bit with moral choices though. I found a player who spends insane amounts of money on ships. He showboats around in Vargurs, actually has lost 3 and is now on Vargur number 4. He has lost many Mastodons. All this is hi sec btw, I think the guy rubs himself in blood so gankers smell him better. He uses Mastodons to move 10 mil in goods and stuff…anyways, I easily got into his one man 4 alt corp using my main, and he is offering me tons of expensive stuff. I could easily convince this person to jump the Vargur into Otou and have him ganked. Or create a high collateral contract and have him ganked…

Is this wrong? I feel its one thing to pvp, but am I crossing the line infiltrating a lonely guy’s corp and taking his plex ships ?? I am really struggling; I know psychological combat is okay in Eve, but I don’t think I should play on people’s feelings? Right?

The game is an incredible experience

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Social engineering is certainly part of the game, but it’s also blending into real life, as the counterpart is a real person. I think it’s a large grey zone, from simple lies to trick somebody into a risk on the spot (“all good, it’s safe, I won’t kill you”) to elaborated schemes were people simulate friendship for months to get into a position to take it all.

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Surprisingly few people actually read the forums, and the ones who do may not find your post.

This is my main, I shoot explorers, ratters, miners, and a whole bunch of other folks. I’m quite open about it on forums and other channels, and in the ten years I’ve been doing this I’ve been recognised only a handful of times.

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Thank you. I guess I needed to hear from other people its okay to do this stuff in-game. I don’t see this as scamming. It is much harder to convince someone to do something, than it is undocking a Loki and go shoot frigates. I have heard stories of people talking other players into contracting them expensive stuff, and I always assumed it was b.s. I figured; nobody is that dumb. I think I was wrong. I am often wrong.

You learn so much lurking in local, in the different trade hubs in hi sec. With so much hubris, flattery becomes the deadliest weapon.

Thanks!

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You may already be aware, but there are also locator agents, though those cost ISK to use.

Very few people come to the forums as opposed to being on r/eve on Reddit or in the Eve Official Discord group. Posting often with your main here won’t get you much recognition.

Eve’s history is littered with this kind of psychological warfare. Even examining the past 6 months on the forums there are people with alts that do coordinated replies and likes to create false narratives and impressions to psychologically influence and manipulate people here.

None of that makes things “morally right”, that’s only answerable on your conscience only. But since you asked you’ll still get plenty of people telling you what your morals should be.

EDIT: I can even think of a recent example of The Exanondus which is a six part series (2, 3, 4, 5, 6) which is a similar psychological-warfare story of ganking someone then dangling a promise of a free replacement ship, and their reactions.

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Well, was about to answer but Io Koval nailed it, so I cite:

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I am not trying to create some grand scheme or anything. It is just crazy to me how people flaunt stuff around in Eve. Especially since its a game where anything can be taken from you, anywhere. If someone is determined enough.

Who buys 3 Vargurs. Fits them with 2B in gear. And the ship will NEVER see combat. Just float around in hi sec…showboating…This is fine. But to lose 3 Vargurs to gankers in hi sec, and say “ill buy another, see how that goes”…I never thought this could happen. The only time the Vargur will see combat is during the gank I guess.

EDIT: the more I think about it; I feel totally fine manipulating this person. He is insane.

Final edit; Sad thing is, the ultimate victims are the miners. This guy accidentally takes the wrong gate, while showboating Vargur #3, gets shot to hell, and a whole bunch of poor miners have to blast rocks for 200 hours to build him #4 (I really have no idea the mats for a Vargur…I assume its a lot)

Thanks a ton, I will try to get to level 2 at least, with locator agents. I guess that gives me Region coverage. That is incredibly awesome. I assume every region has a level 2 or higher locator agent.

This is my main suicide boat for attacking high level player targets that travel in shuttles because of low sec status. I kind of hope I can get kill reports of me ganking some big shots in shuttles. That’d be so fun. I am not some paid deadly assassin, just a goof who doesn’t want to Venture mine as my “new player experience”

This is my death-boat for suicide attacks on shuttles at gates. Could I make it better for that purpose?

I get 120 dps. I put all my free 1 mil sp into the suicide gank stuff. I use the 3 stabs to be able to clear any low sec gate before lock. Don’t see that many smart bombs I guess. I haven’t. I think the F-90 with the scan scipt speeds up my lock time? but not entirely sure.

I even put some tier 2 into it.

[Incursus, Smile! ]
Damage Control II
Inertial Stabilizers II
Type-D Restrained Inertial Stabilizers
Inertial Stabilizers II

5MN Y-T8 Compact Microwarpdrive
Initiated Compact Warp Disruptor
F-90 Compact Sensor Booster

Light Neutron Blaster I
Light Neutron Blaster I
Light Neutron Blaster I

Small Hybrid Collision Accelerator I
Small Low Friction Nozzle Joints I
Small Hyperspatial Velocity Optimizer I

Acolyte I x1

Caldari Navy Antimatter Charge S x100
Scan Resolution Script x1

Edit: logging in now. Going to practice on non-target shuttles, so I will be ready when I find my target.

You only will be able to catch shuttles/pods when they autopilot, then on the in-gate. Shuttles are instawarp, so you can’t stop them from warping out. The only reasonable way to stop shuttles are smartbombs at the correct angle.

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