Risk aversion

Risk aversion. It have become somewhat of a bad word in w-space. Something that's representative for highsec dwellers and carebears, but not us w-space inhabitants.

Last night we had an incomming C5 that was full of plexes, and since we are a tad pressed for ISK at the moment, it was decided we would put a fleet together to do as many sites we could. We normally use rattlers for C4s, so we went with that. We had six Rattlesnakes form up, jump in and started to do the first site.

There was a POS in system, but we had eyes on it and figured it was little risk anyone would log on that could mess with our little pve-operation. Well, Bob wanted otherwise, because just 10 minutes into the first site, our POS scout reported that people started to log on. A Chimera and a Moros landed in the POS. Not that we where worried about the ships themselves, but we did not want them to warp both caps into our site and leave us with two guardian spawns. Our rattlers can handle a lot, but that would most likely be a bit too much.

Well, when we went back to the WH we came from, I got into convo with the guy in the Chimera. The mighty cap fleet that had scared us off turned out to be one slightly drunk dude tripple boxing (as usual when three ships come online at the same time).

We had immediately went into defensive mode, expecting the worst and acting accordingly. What we should have done was to see if we could get the inhabitant to join us plexing his system. He/they obviously did not need all of the sites since they had so many accumulated, possibly because they occasionally did the normal quad-escalation plexing.

In any case, we where in carebear mode, with plenty of dps on field, and he had the ability to escalate the sites making each one a bit better. He even flew the right kind of carrier to complement our rattler-RR (assuming it was decently fit). Things could not have been better setup for us to join forces and shoot some red crosses together.

So why didn't we? Trust and diplomacy is not the first things that come to mind when you get into contact with some other corp in w-space. It's a pity, because if you are goal focused (and the current goal not being to get into a fight), seeing locals as assets, getting their trust and striking deals with them is usually much more productive than assuming hostility.

But, they could easily have backstabbed you!!

True, but why would he risk making a real enemy for some rattler kills? And besides, is not that just risk aversion speaking? :)