But first things first.. how did I get face to face with a Rifter in the first place? I was ratting in 0.0 right outside Planet Risk. F9O-U9 to be exact. Together with Merinid, with our lovely Ravens. Then a fellow shows up in local and a Heretic in directional.

By now I’ve learned that you don’t get outside your POS unless you spam directional all the time. So far so good. Well the point is that you also have to remember to uncheck the “Use Active Overview Settings” in order to be able to spot the Scanner Probes that will be closing in on you…

Well today I didn’t and apparently Merinid didn’t either.

So a few mins later, we find ourselves inside a bubble and a few seconds later against an overwhelming force of some HACs, Recons… you name it… so a few seconds after that we find ourselves back in our HQ and cloning station.

This is the story of how I lost my first pod after 7 months (and a few days) of game time

But how did I end up against a Rifter you ask?

I thought I could easily blow some steam and go to the old time favorite Old Man Star. I jumped clone to my Villore station where I keep the clone with no implants and went on to buy a Crow with pretty decent Meta 4 gear and a Coreli 1MN MWD for a total of roughly 40M or so.

A few mins later I am roaming the belts of Old Man Star looking for trouble…feeling oh-so-powerful in my mighty T2 ship being the oh-so-experienced-newb that I am

And a Rifter shows up.. “Oh great! Let’s kick his ass..” I say to myself while the captain in the frig probably thinks to himself “Oh great! Fresh meat!” or something.. apparently he’s been doing that all day..

He didn’t fire back until I had him around 50% armor or so.. and I went down faster than you could say WTF-is-going-on-here-I-am-getting-pwnd… fortunately I got my pod out in time and saved myself from further humiliation..

Afterwards I talk with the guy and he tells me he has about 10M SPs dedicated to flying a Rifter.. and that I should never underestimate em..

Lesson learned I guess and got a free lesson in humility as well!

..never underestimate a Rifter. I know I won’t – ever again!