It was way back in time. I was still relatively low on ISK, flying a caracal in level 2 missions with my “nice girl” alt and flying as a tackler for my good friend Tolin Dorden when out to do PVP. We were in the good corp Hmm UK back them and always had lots of fun in the ingame channel Hmmsters.
I often picked up newish players who chatted in local and on one of my trips to Jita, I ran into a young wannabe pirate named Exitium. He kept shouting in local for people to play 1-vs-1 and I invited him into our public channel. And for a while, it was all good. He got to know us, we got to know him.
He still wanted to do 1-vs-1 more than anything. He was already flying battleships, while I was still in cruisers, so I knew that it would be a mockery of a duel. But, since my ego wasn’t as big as his, I figured I would do a duel with him – after all, it was supposed to be friendly, with all aggression ending when the ships had taken 2/3 of armor damage.
So we met in Amoderia, a 0.4 system near my Sinq Laison base. And the duel began. Only, Exitium really wanted to WIN! As if being in a battleship vs. a noob in a caracal wasn’t enough – he started using drones. This was back in a time, where drones were kind of hard to control and could not always be reliably recalled… so I ended up having to warp out with my ship dipping into structure damage.
After this, I realized that I don’t like duelling. It is not anything like real PVP at all, does not even show a true measure of strength and isn’t really fun. It just serves to boost the ego of small boys who cannot handle real PVP…
Yeah, talk about overkill! Guess he wasn’t smart enough to fit a point–was this his first such encounter? He was probably shitting his pants, because a well skilled cruiser *can* kill a noob battlesthip solo.
My policy for any “friendly duels” with non-corpmates is now to the kill or I don’t agree to it. This is just an easier way to deal with it. I don’t like to feel as if I need to hold back so as not to “accidentally” kill someone’s ship. The most I’ll agree to now is “no pods” … that being easy enough to NOT do by mistake. Unless I’ve had way too much wine.
The really sad and pathetic thing was that it was so far back in my Eve history that the loss of that caracal would have really been a setback to me
To me, duelling is a waste of time. Does not give you a real feel for what the opponent can or cannot do, as you are fitting for a fight where both have agreed to not warp out.
We did some corp frig fights a while back. One of our noobs thought he was king of the kill (or hill) since he was winning. But… he won because he had fittet a shield tank. In real PVP, he would be unable to win, since his opponent would warp out and there would be nothing he could do to change that, fancy shield tank or not.