Don't worry, while it is an interesting post for a pilot that had spent the majority of his time in zero space up to the writing of it, it simply manages to be the springboard for today's post.
Towards the end of last year things started to unravel in Eve for me and the idea of restarting my own personal efforts towards being a better PvP pilot were born. This was a personal journey that I had been on since day one, when at two weeks old I flew into Providence to live. And while being a part of fleets, gate camps, wars, POS bashes and long-distance roams was fun - it is more of a group effort. Before that time last year the majority of my kills were in gangs/fleets of 5 or more pilots.
Since then however, the majority of my kills have been in gangs of less than five pilots. Small gang PvP continues to be my favorite and probably always will. While flying solo is awesome, nothing beats a few pilots working together.
But back to that personal journey thing. One result of all this history is that I suck at flying solo. I'm good at large gangs and small gangs, but when it comes to solo, I suck. The other day Swearte came down to fight me in his Taranis, I was flying my Malediction. He was blaster fit and I was Rocket fit, given my speed advantage I should have won. But I bumped my prop mod during the initial dance and it de-activated, allowing him to close range on me. Stupid mistake and I paid the price. It was an excellent fight and he deserved to win, no sour grapes here. Just sayin'. That kind of thing happens to me all the time.
Not that I'm horrible or anything. Since November I've been in (not counting pods) 138 solo fights, of which I have won 108. So I've been winning 78% of the solo fights I get into, which isn't that bad. Of those 108 kills there are about a dozen that are really good fights, so my odds on the good fights hasn't been as stellar as I would like. More like 40/60 would be my guess.
I want to get better. For personal satisfaction alone really, I need to continue to get better.
For some reason I get sloppy when it comes down to one versus one and I don't know why. I'm not sloppy when I'm flying in a small gang, or FC'ing a group of pilots, or doing anything else in Eve. There is a mental block inside my head that only I can overcome.
And the only way to do that is to get back on the horse, as often as possible. Work thru it and get past it. And maybe I won't, maybe, just maybe I'm not meant to be a great solo pilot. That is certainly possible. But I will continue to try until that becomes apparent. So far, I don't believe that to be the case.
Onward and upward.