New to Eve? Here's some advice...

I recently popped out of the station in Auner looking for trouble and noticed a destroyer on scan with the pilot’s name still associated with it.  I checked and the pilot was less than a month old.

After scanning the FW sites and not finding the destroyer I thought maybe he was ratting in one of the asteroid belts.  My first scan found him.

I headed his way (warping to zero) – turning everything up to only 10 (a one month old character shouldn’t be a challenge for my slasher, even if he is flying a destroyer - so no need to go to 11).  I landed just 3k away from him and scrambled his warp engines.  The battle was short and I’m not sure that I took any damage.

Afterwards the pilot asked for a conversation and we chatted.  He started off with, “What could I have done better – I’m new.”  An excellent opening line for all of you noob PvPers out there – if you want to learn, feel free to ask whoever destroyed you.  Most of the time we’d be happy to help.

I told him that there really wasn’t anything he could have done once I landed on top of him like that.  He was doomed.  But we talked a bit about what he could have done prior to me landing on him, and I’ll mention that here (along with a couple other things I’ve thought of since then…).

1. Change the name of your ship to something other than, in my case, “Jack Dancer’s Rifter”.  “Titanic” might be a suitable name…  No reason to give people total insight on who they are attacking.
    
2. If you have a choice of asteroid belts to rat in, choose some with a bunch of other belts nearby.  For instance, instead of going to Planet II’s single belt, go to one of the 6 belts that are near to Planet VIII.  That will give an evil person a tougher time sorting out which one you might be in and maybe give you enough time to escape when he lands at the right planet, but at the wrong belt.
    
3. Don’t rat at zero.  If you land at a belt, burn away from the rats and get some distance between you and where Bad People™ like me might land.  The rats will follow you.
    
4. Use local – when you arrive at a system, check out everyone that’s in local.  If you see someone named “Jack Dancer” (THE Jack Dancer!) and he’s a member of a scuzzy bunch like the “Black Rebel Rifter Club” and he has a minus 6.5 security rating – you should be very, very careful.  A trick that I learned at the Agony Basic PvP class (I highly recommend that class!) is to click on someone’s name in local and then hit <ctrl>-A (on a Windows™ PC) to highlight everyone in local.  When someone new comes into the system, you don’t need to figure out who it is – their name will be the only one not highlighted.  You can look at their info and then highlight everyone again.
    
5. Use dscan – if you see a rifter or slasher or merlin or ? on dscan right after some low life with a very negative security status has arrived, it might be a good time to head for a safe spot.
    
6. Learn how to use dscan to your advantage by lowering the scan distance.  Change the 2 at the start of the distance (2,147,483,647 ) to a 1 (1,147,483,647) – it will cut the dscan range in half (to about 7au) and you’ll know when people are getting close.  Or take the 2 off entirely (147,483,647) and it’ll cut the range to about 1au so you’ll know when people are breathing down your neck and will arrive in a matter of seconds.
    
7. Of course, for any of these dscan tricks to work – you need to constantly be hitting the dscan button.  Every 5 or 10 seconds when you think danger might be lurking nearby.  Every 30 seconds even if you think you’re totally safe.

That’s it for now.  Anyone else have any advice for noobs to avoid Death by Pirate?