Hey guys, A friend & I have been debating going Pirate for a while now once we get good enough(we haven't been playing long).

Our question to you is What are the Pros/Cons to going Pirate? We would preferably like to know ones other than the obvious like not being able to go into high-sec, or being able to attack in low-sec.

Some things to consider:

Income?
Challenge?
Difficulty?
Expenses?
Anything else you know of.

Thanks in advance for all posters!

PS: If you have a really good reason for either way but you don't want your personal experience/Choice(s) to be public knowledge then I would love to have you PM them to me. I would think no worse or better of you for it & would not consider it in any trades we may have in the future. As such, I will NOT be posting my choice publicly but if someone on here offers me a position in a corp. for either situation I may or may not PM them regarding my decision & to inquire about the position.

Edit: Please do not turn this into a flamefest. Keep it Opinionated & Informative but NOT Hostile!

This post was edited by ImmortalRevenge on Jan 3 2010 03:44am

I have played Eve-Online for many years now, on and off, and I have always been a carebear. Meaning I have only done missions, complexes, mining and rats in belts and that sort of thing, but recently some of my friends have turned a bit pirate-ish, and I am planning on doing so too. I got very bored being a carebear so I really look forward to doing some pirating, but there are some issues with piracy that isnt very positive. For one, your income will be really bad compared to a carebear's income. If you have multiple accounts or have a corp to pirate with, you can go after carebears doing missions in highsec with their multi-billion ravens, but this is tricky and having 1 account normally isnt enough. PvP is also much harder than PvE and you WILL die a lot and thus ruining your economy if you don't have a steady income from something else other than piracy. And if you succeed being a pirate I guess you will be fairly hated eventually. Not only by those you kill, but maybe also by their friends, their corp mates and so on. Maybe they will locate you, camp you, try to kill you and so on and you might have a hard time doing anything. This isn't something I know though, since I have never been a pirate, but I think it seems logical that this might happen.. oh well, I have written more than I should I wish you good luck.

Yes. How well you do depends on how smart you are about it. There are fail pirates, and then there are successful ones. However, if you're afraid of losing your security status and being globally criminally flagged, don't do it. for it would take you a while to get it back up again. And grinding missions is boring.

This post was edited by Mirai on Jan 3 2010 11:10am

Im one of those friends crazylike talks about that resently started pirating, and i wanna say a few things:

- Practice diffrent senarios / how big ships u can handle with diffrent setups etc
- Dont roam alone unless u can afford beeing popped
- Use a decent scout (cloaked warp etc)
- Be prepared to fail ! (clones updated, ships and modules gathered for a new ship)


We started out "learning" as we went alone doe to the high ISK stack we started out with (beeing mission runners for several years)
So loosing 10-15 ships aint that big of a problem for us.
But if u gonna learn this way, its gonna cost you alot, but again me and another dude had buckets of fun figuring out stealthbombers, cost us around 300 mill in testing etc before we got the hang of it, and we did damage for around 500 mill to our targets
Now we gonna step up to bigger ships and try break down some billion isk targets to actually make great profit from pirating, but then again we got alot skills and the money to do so, wich i doubt u have since u said ur fresh.

Missionrunning can be good for making cash, but u wont make much cash from missions before u got quite good skills / ships to do so.
Small gang pvp can be loads of fun, so i wish u all the luck and hope a few of my tips/pointers can help you and ur friends on the way

Thanks for all the info so-far & keep it coming if there's anyone else out there. Speak up!

That head rush when you have a heavy indictor bub on a pod is crazy. Open the convo.... See if he pays, then KABOOM!!!! (or not if you're a good pirate)

Any other opinions?

I got respect for some pirates, but most of them just camp stations and gank people who undock which is kinda sad... Good pirates kill miners, missioners and more miners if you want to gank people at a station join an alliance and go to 0.0...

I made about 3 billion pirating, most of it was for killing a rattlesnake togather with a friend he dropped 3b in modules but we did 50/50 also a macheriel who dropped 1b in modules and i solo killed him with my abaddon.

forgot about us anti pirates. Hunting the hunters is better then chasing down barges