A choice is made

Having considered my options and consulted the forums, I've decided my best bet for starting out in PVP is to get into Red vs Blue. For those who haven't heard of it, this is essentially two corporations eternally at war for the sake of eternally being at war. There are some minimal rules, but the idea is basically just to skip the tricky parts and get straight into shooting at one another.

This may not be much of an end goal for me if I decide I like the tricky bits involved in finding targets otherwise, but as a way to get into things it seems perfect. Plus, there's no commitment whatsoever, one merely applies, is accepted, and fights. Simple. It doesn't even necessitate roaming in gangs, so I can experience solo fighting with ease against other solo pilots and gangs alike. If I want to move on, I can. If I want to come back, I can. There should in theory be a notable lack of fuss.

The one thing I'm unsure of is making money. Ideally I would loot and salvage from successful kills, but in highsec I imagine the wrecks would be picked clean long before I could fetch a salvage ship. Whether or not it's feasible to loot profitably I'm not sure; RvB isn't exactly a place people field the most expensive things ever made. It happens, but it's not the rule.

To that end, I've looked through my old stuff that was scattered around the universe and found the ship pictured above: an Arbitrator. With a bit of tweaking to its fit, and replacing my Heron (I sold it rather than leave it there so that I could clear my assets list a bit) I would be able to use this ship to run a few different plexes for ISK. It's also relatively inexpensive and not terribly involved (it uses drones to deal most of its damage) so if I lose it to RvB players it won't matter, and if I misjudge the difficulty of a plex it has a decent chance to escape alive.

On another note, I've been thinking of the best way to learn from my experiences in future fights. Obviously writing it down here will help to some extent so that I have a place to analyse what I did and look back over it later, but the way I go into battle is important too. A lot of people seem to favour the idea of buying 20 ships and just losing each of them in combat as a way of learning. This does seem like a good start, although I'm not sure on the number. I think most of them go with 20 because someone has already done it with Punishers (I don't have the link on me, but a search for “eve punisher plan” would probably find it and/or some weird exercise routines).

While 20 doesn't seem like a bad number, I'd be happier committing to something smaller. Not because I think I'll learn any faster than most people, but because after getting through something like 10 Merlins, I may well decide that Merlins just don't have the play style I'm looking for, and want to switch to something else (I did after all choose them because they look funny and remind me of watching Excalibur as a child). I believe the person who used 20 Punishers was using a new character with skills in Amarr and... Amarr. One problem I don't suffer from is lack of options in other races' ships, so for me the ability to swap makes sense.

With that in mind, I'll probably be getting a few of the relevant ships soon. I'm also leaving my old 2 person corp, Smoke Jaguars. Arvakr's inactive account will keep it alive should we ever want to revive it for the name and ticker (MIOW), so I'll be free to wander off into RvB as soon as I feel my skills (I had no Thermodynamics before now, which is vital in frigate fights and PvP in general) are sufficient.