The first blow

Intro: My adventures in EVE are primarily dealing with losing ships as I'm still quite a new player with a little less than a year of experience playing this wonderful scifi game. When reading all of the amazing adventures other players had I started to think of my own memorable moments and I noticed that the ones that popped into my mind dealt with mainly losing ships in the most stupid and idiotic way. I think they are pretty funny now, although at the time I was pretty devastated, even if it was my own dumb fault. I do not think my adventures are special in any way, still I wanted to show to mostly the new players, that you can have exciting moments in Eve without being at huge battles like the one in asakai or having skills that would take a newb ages to train for, just losing a ship can be an awesome experience too!

One of my earliest memories in the game, goes back to my first months of playing EVE. I joined a small mining corp and mined for days on end with my newly acquired friends. Everything went quite ok without any bumps in the road. I never experienced any can flippers, griefers or any other evil I was so heavily warned about so after a while I got the mindset that all the stories i read and heard were exaggerated in a way - in other words, I started to get cocky. I joined up with my friends doing my first lvl 4 missions in a hurricane with just enough skills to fly it and barely enough knowledge to survive. I managed to almost destroy my newly acquired vessel on it's first run when i charged head first into quite a big group of npc's like some space terminator leaving my more experienced friends behind me. Of course all the npcs started to focus fire on me and soon enough I was being targeted by about 30 rats at the same time. I managed to warp out with my hull at 50%, my heart beating like a pneumatic drill and sweating like I just ran a marathon. The hurricane with fittings was a present from my CEO and I managed to almost blow it up in the first few minutes on its first run. I never quite experienced this kind of feeling while playing a game. The experience reminded me about the excitement I had many years ago when I played my first fps games over a LAN-network.

Realizing I needed more experience doing PVE and fighting in general, I started going for the Sisters of Eve epic Arc missions which were quite a difference from the lvl4's I experienced earlier. Everything seemed to be way easier and I felt I was overpowered in my trusty cane. I started to get bored and didn't even read the mission briefings. After all, you just had to warp to the deadspace area, stop your engines and start shooting everything you encountered right? This wasn't quite the case as I was about to learn the hard way soon after.

So another boring mission came along and cocky as I still was, I didn't read the mission log and jumped right in a new deadspace area. This time there were a lot of npcs on my overview at about 100k distance, but I was sure my cane could take on these easy noob missions so I turned on my mwd and charged them. I also remember to wonder why some of the red icons in my overview were bigger that the others but thought "meh I'll just kill them all". As I started to get into range it dawned on me that something was wrong. The first enemy volleys started to hit and I was staring at my pod in just a few seconds of battle.

I felt like I was nailed to the floor or better, sinking in my chair. Because of my arrogance I lost an approx. 60mil isk present in a record time of just two days. Turns out I charged into a massive npc fleet which I just had to scout and report back because I had no chance of winning. That would've been obvious if I just read the mission log prior but as you all know by now that didn't happen.

My pride got dented severely as I had my first ship lost and not even to a real player! After that I made the promise to myself to think before I acted, as this wasn't a game where you can make mistakes and not get punished.
But of course there were still many hard lessons to come...