Tonight I warped back to a mission bookmark that I had salvaged/looted at a while earlier. It had been closed and cleared, but just as I arrived in my Dramiel, the MR, Soban Vuex, landed in a Vexor and locked me. He didn't have any aggro on me by this point, so he dropped a can for me to take from. Of course, I wasn't going to risk my 100M+ ISK Dramiel, but I did want to have some fun. I warped my Orca in, swapped to JerkTengu, took the can, and orbited the Vexor. No longer needed, I warped my Orca away.

This was shameless e-peen waving. I completely dismissed the danger posed by my enemy, and I was about to pay for it.

The Vexor fired. In my hubris, I figured that he was just throwing away a cruiser for laughs, or maybe that he thought I was still in the Dramiel. I locked him and started firing. Out of habit I hit my D-scan, and saw a Guardian RR ship approaching.

This, as they say, was Bad News Bears. Still, in my arrogance, my first thought was "Sweet! A Logistics Cruiser kill!"

The Guardian landed and started repairing and replenishing the Vexor, which was tanking me handily and neuting me to nothing while the Ogre II drones ripped through my shields, then my armor.

I tried to warp the Orca back for a lame-but-workable hotswap to a cheap frigate. The Orca landed, I opened the ship bay, I clicked to board a frigate...

I almost made it. In fact, the Orca ejected the frigate, but before my client could board it, my Tengu exploded.

Soban pulled off an awesome kill against a complacent opponent, using superior tactics to trap and destroy what should have been a vastly superior ship. I would have been proud to pull off a stunt like that. Soban Vuex, my friend, I salute you for excellent work and a lesson well learned!

That lesson, for the benefit of Bait-and-Gank griefers, is this: Never fight any battle against an enemy who knows you're coming. Never, ever, wait for an enemy to come to you. If you're in a fair fight, you've done something wrong. As a ganker, your primary advantages are your superior equipment (picked to exploit holes in MR defenses) and complete surprise of an unsuspecting enemy. When you allow your opponent to dictate the terms of the fight, you negate your advantages and open yourself up to clever traps.

I've already bought and fitted another JerkTengu, and I only lost 15 hours of training time from the loss. It's not a huge loss, but it's big enough that I'll remember my hubris and what it cost. Hopefully, you'll remember too.

Now get out there and gank some carebears!