Patience pays off

One thing that a lot of people never seem to quite get when playing EVE is the value of patience.  When most people come across an enemy ship their first instinct is to shoot at it, whether its a frigate or faction battleship.  What they don't realize is that frigate they just shot could have been the forward scout for a juicy freighter or deadspace fit battleship.

As an example, when I was in Noir. we were hired against Narwhals Ate My Duck for a highsec dec contract.  Initially, we got a few easy ganks against careless targets while camping directly on the gate, but they wised up quickly and changed their tactics.  I then noticed them using neutral alts to scout, so I changed our tactics as well to keep our in-corp characters out of system so their scouts would report it as clear.

This worked, and once their neutral scout reported the system as clear, sure enough they would move one of their cloaky T3s in.  We tried a few times without success to catch them and then decided to not even bother to see if they would bring anything else through.

This worked too.  After their T3 came through and reported nothing in system, they began moving in their faction battleships, command ships, and HACs.  Several of which we were able to nab.

Now to their credit, this would have worked against most people in EVE, since most people in EVE go after every target they possibly can, everytime they can.  Most people wouldn't hesistate to kill a Drake running L4 missions while at war, rather than wait for them to get overconfident and frustrated enough at the lower isk/hr to feel comfortable enough to bring their Golem back out.

People often criticize us by calling us n00bs that only kill the idiots that fly without scouts and don't pay attention to local.  This may be true for most highsec dec organizations, but the truth is a lot of the ganks we get are far from "easy" and require quite a bit of setting up and preparation.  We might not be fighting outnumbered or using supercap blobs, but the fact remains, lots of the kills we get, most of the organizations in EVE wouldn't be able to pull off.

I'm not talking about the Machariel pilot that jumped into a gatecamp becuase he flew unscouted. Sure those kills are always enjoyable and take them as they come, but what is most enjoyable to me is killing the guy who did everything right, the guy who had a forward scout, the guy who had been watching the gate he was about to jump into with a Falcon for the past hour and felt safe.

Lots of people may disagree with how I play EVE.  Sure it may seem boring sometimes, there will be hours where you don't go for a single target and just sit waiting.  It can take a lot of discipline to learn to let those cloaky Tengus go through, but I dare you to take a weekend and sit on a gate cloaked and just watch the traffic.  You'll learn that more often than not, the shuttles and cloakies that you wouldn't have been able to catch anyways are scouting for something far more juicy and far more worthwhile.

EVE is different than most games and people forget this.  Its not a first person shooter that relies on twitch reflexes, nor is it a modern action game that relies on the ability to sit through CGI cutscenes.  EVE has a very strong human factor, how people fly in EVE is purely based on their own human instinct and becuase of this you should never show red unless you absolutely have to.  The safer people feel, the more complacent they get and the easier they make your job.

tldr: As an EVE pilot, its your job to determine the optimal stopping point and when you should engage.  Just like in real life, never give everything away on the first date.