Can flipping.

I've been doing a great deal of can flipping recently. It's not because can flipping is my favorite kind of pvp, but it is quite easy to fit into a short play session. If I have 30 minutes before dinner, and then an hour after dinner, then just heading out and flipping some cans is one of the quickest and easiest ways to find a fight.

This is especially true if there is risk of something (or some one) pulling me away from the computer unexpectedly. In high sec, that's fine. In low sec, that's a trip to your clone vat.

Now, my preference has been to flip cans that want to be flipped. Some of my earlier fights were of this nature. But I recently decided that I should overcome my trepidation and try to pick some fights with large mining vessels.

If that last sentence was confusing, it's because I was confused. You see, I assumed that mining vessels would be on par with cruisers and battleships, but with mining rather than combat bonuses. So I was actually quite intimidated when I flipped my first can on a hulk. I was fully expecting that this 3 year old character would stomp my little frigate into the ground with his big, bad super-ship.

Of course, that's not what happened. In fact, nothing happened. Miners, it seems, are very, very loath to enter into combat with any one, even a T1 frigate noob like me. Over the course of the last few days I have stolen millions of ISK in ore. I don't need the money - I have not even bothered to sell any of it - but I did not get a single fight out of that.

Part of that is my fault. I would shift all the ore into my can and wait for them to try and steal it back. However, I never got any indication that I had the right to attack them, even after they took the ore and warped out.

It seems that when I added their corp to my contacts (to check for corp mates) it overrode the little skull that comes up when someone is an outlaw. I only realised this after yet another hulk warped out on me and I removed his corp from my contacts. As his orange marker disappeared, it was replaced by the red skull we all love to see.

I suppose that the lesson here is that while miners are unwilling to engage, they are sometimes foolish enough to try and steal back ore, which amounts to the same thing, when I'm not being an idiot.

Perhaps I will get some fights out of this.