Confidence, Estimations and Risk

Confidence, Estimations and Risk

Risk is an inherent and key part of all aspects of EVE.  Each time you undock a ship you are taking the risk that there exists someone with the means and willpower to blow it up.  People who survive in EVE learn through experience and knowledge what risks are worth taking, when to take them and how to avoid them.
EVE is one of the only games where you can very easily lose everything you have with no way of getting it back and it is this real risk that makes EVE what it is.
One of the first rules all capsuleers will hear and need to learn is 'do not fly what you cannot afford to lose' yet how people go about defining and maintaining this rule varies wildly across the reaches of space.

I find EVE requires developing a balance in your risk taking.  These days, especially in wormholes, it is not hard to replace ships, even pimped out T3s and capitals, since ISK is not hard to make but I still do not go and blindly throw my Proteus into every fight I can, even if I can replace it at will.
I don't consider myself to be risk averse but no one is expected to whelp multibillion ISK ships into no win scenarios if the scenario can be avoided or if lesser or more suitable ships will do the same job or even better.

So how do you know when to fight?  There are a lot of people who make the call to always fight and while I certainly appreciate this approach, and tend to take it myself, you need to at least know what you're getting yourself into and what tool to bring for the job.

When deciding if to fight, you can make two mistakes. A) You can under estimate your opponent, or B) you can over estimate them.
Underestimating the enemy is an obvious mistake and tends to lead to you waking up in a station going 'what happened?'.  You can avoid underestimating your opponent by scouting properly and assuming they know what they are doing with the ships they have.
As a general rule, I find if you assume people are at least 80% competent in the use of their space ships, you will almost never overestimate them since in realty, most people are far worse than 80% efficient at piloting their ships.
Unfortunately, assuming people know what they are doing is what leads us to overestimating people, since a lot of them do not.
Overestimating is a different kind of mistake, but it is a mistake none the less.  It doesn’t lead to your death but what it does lead to is missing fights; not engaging and generally scaring away people by bringing way too many ships to the point where people won't engage you. 
I find I fall into this trap a lot.
As I mentioned before, I like to assume people are able to fly their ships to 80% efficiency.  I also know the ships I fly quite well and tend to know what they can and what they can't handle so if I'm facing odds that I know I can't handle at 80% enemy competency, I tend to be more careful than I should be and it generally ends with me sitting in space wondering why they won't engage me or why they ran away, since in reality, the 4 BCs that I brought 3 guys in T3s to blow up instead of just my Proteus were T1 fit and being flown by 4 month old toons that could in no way fly them at 80% efficiency.  Oh well.

So how can you make accurate estimations on the enemy's abilities so that you can get good fights out of them?  Well, the most important one is to know who your enemy is.  Are they a 3 year old, large wormhole entity full of bittervets in T3s with 100mil SP? Yeah, they might know what they are doing.  Are they EVE Uni or Brave Newbies in assorted T1 junkers?  Well, these corps are designed for rookie pilots, they don't have maxed skills and 90% of them will have T1 guns, T1 tank and poorly fit ships.  This kind of context matters a lot. 

In SUSU we found this out a few times with Brave Newbies.  The first couple of times we tried fighting them we brought guardians, tech 3s, ewar support, the entire wormhole PVP package in what we considered to be suitable numbers for fighting a force of T1 cruisers, BCs and BSs outnumbering us about 2-1. 
At the time we were annoyed that they wouldn't fight us but in hind sight, the call not to engage us at that time was spot on.  As their CEO put it in local 'There's no way we can break 4 Guardians'.
Eventually we figured it out and went in to pick a fight in T1 cruisers with minimal (ie 2) T1 logi support and they gave us a great fight.

In this day and age everyone and their mother flies T3s in wormholes but not all of those people are willing to really risk them in combat. 
I hear large WH entities complain a lot about people not fighting them but they all do exactly the same thing.  They roll out their 25 T3s and 5 Guardians and start kicking in doors.  Well think about it, what kind of fights is such a fleet actually going to find in w-space?
The answer is very few.
You'll get to gank the odd site running group and you'll get to have big fights against other large groups just like you with the exact same fleet comp on the rare occasion you're both kicking in doors at the same time but as for the randoms you run into? Yeah, not going to happen.
It's plainly obvious to everyone except for the groups who do this why people won't fight them but with very few exceptions, these groups will never ship down or actually offer reasonable fights.
Take what KILL did a while ago to REPO as a typical example.  They got mad that REPO wouldn't fight them, placed an eviction fleet into their system and then demanded REPO fight them or get evicted.
Now, REPO are no scrubs and they did go and fight but given they were severely outnumbered, the result was about the same as if they'd sat in their POS and self-destructed.

At the end of the day, most people do actually want to fight but they do not want to fight with zero chance of winning.  Can you really blame them for that?
I find it extremely useful to have some way to interact with forces you can't fight head on.  Personally I use a 100mn Tengu for this role as it's a ship that I will willingly throw into virtually any and all situations, even blindly, since it has a very high survival rate if I find myself in too deep.  You can throw it solo against 20+ ships quite safely and while it does require paying attention and some pilot skill, it lets you mess around with forces you can't brawl with and at least interact on some level.
It doesn’t have to be a Tengu either, any decent kiting or sniping ship will do for giving your larger neighbors something to chase.
Obviously no ship is unkillable and I have lost 5-6 Tengus in PVP but in the end it always comes down to flying what you can afford to lose.

The key to finding good fights has three main components. 
Firstly, you need to have confidence in the ship you are flying and you need to know what it can handle.  This is something you will need to learn from experience.
Secondly, you need to be able to make estimate regarding your enemy and what they can handle.  Will they run away if you bring logistics? Do they have backup? Can you deal with their Guardians?  This also takes practice but being able to anticipate how your enemy will deal with a situation is very valuable.
Thirdly, you need to take risks.  PVP without risk is not really PVP.  Killing a lone Drake with 5 Proteus with 3 Guardians for support has no risk and hence is not exciting and barely counts as PVP at all.  On the other hand, slugging it out against an equal force is always going to be more satisfying, win or lose.

Bottom line is this:  When in doubt, shoot it.  Is it bait?  Shoot it, see what happens. 
The amount of things you shoot should not change.  What should change is what ships you bring to each situation.
Enemy has us out numbered in brawlers and we have no logistics? Kiting time.  Enemy is in T1 ships with no support? Better leave the tech 3s in the hanger.  Time to go shoot a bait Gnosis? Where’s my 100mn Tengu.
In the end, situational awareness and knowing when to ship down makes better fights for everyone.
Sadly, shipping down is a concept most people in wormholes have forgotten.

As always, don't fly what you can't afford to lose.