EVE General Discussion

Final Report on Smiling Friends Social Club

Since its inception in July 2011, SFSC was fully active for about 15 months. It has been about a year and a half since SFSC has been active in any meaningful sense aside from contact with the occasional player who wants some conversation. I've had a lot of fun documenting what happened for you guys over the years and it seemed fitting to share the final wrap up for the inhabitants of New Eden.

SFSC was a failure in some ways and a success in others.

I was, for example, utterly unable to organize a spy network around a cult of personality despite the very best of intentions to be the Old Man on the Mountain of New Eden.

In more ways than not, SFSC was meant as a caution and curative to the many players who would prefer that the spy stuff just doesn't happen and play EVE pretending that it doesn't. No way to measure this but its reasonable to assume that some players who read my stuff were made more aware because of it.

As a place for training and even solace for the gamers exploring their capacity for treachery, there's no way to measure but we did provide the social network for it and some of the folks were social.

We trained anyone, especially if we thought they were spying on us for another EVE organization, in the hopes that they'd send in more spies so we could train those guys too. It didn't matter to us.

(What was the SFSC training system? I could go on for pages and have in other places. At its simplest it broke down to the following five steps.

1. Began with questionaire students had to send Praxis.
2. Interview with Praxis or SFSC "Director."
3. Reading The Technocrat and Neurotechnicon.
4. Beginning the first mental recalibration: Golden Rule Exercise.
5. Learn by doing: An assignment suitable to the student's stated goals. Ex: Recruitment/security officer , diplomat, scouting, assassination, researching possible targets for infiltration.)

I had a LOT of fascinating conversations with the people who claimed to be students. I steered a lot of new players into much more interesting EVE careers than they were bargaining for. SFSC as a work of art and entertainment was a success.
In the end, there is no measure of the success of the organization aside from the hits on the website, and the emails from and conversations with the people who told me the training and/or reading my stuff was useful to them.

SFSC was a failure from the standpoint of profit, despite my best intentions. I had all the ISK I needed from other stuff I was doing and just didn't want to bother with customers and all these people who would have had their own ideas about what to do with our agents. In retrospect, the whole thing probably would have worked much better if I'd brought that dimension into it. It just doesn't help your image as a cult of flesh eating assassins that you have non profit educational corporate status.
At its height I had 78 agents who'd agreed to various missions on "my" behalf. Almost all of these characters became inactive a month or two after going as far as infiltrating an organization. Of the few who remained, most of those sent word at some point that they were just going to hang out where they were and goodbye. Of the remaining, all but a handful went off on their own without another word.

During the year of its most intense activity I was voice interviewing between 5-10 applicants a week. Somewhere in the area of 600. The total number of applicants who never even made it to an interview but who only sent in a questionaire was about six times that. If one in five applicants made it as far as a voice interview, that is a generous estimate. Interviews were from 5 min to an hour long depending on how interesting I found the guy. (And with only two exceptions all applicants were guys or faking it so well they convinced us in Teamspeak.)

CONTINUED BELOW

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Moo!

Does this mean perhaps the OP's things are no longer useful to them?

I can offer a very successful way to expetite their liquidation..

Not reading that rediculous crap. What the hell is the matter with players that they want to tell everyone about meaningless drivel...

Is this the start of some new blog? There are better ways to blog than the Eve forums, try shopping around

What's that supposed to mean?

May I borrow from my English friends? What a load of bollux. I couldn't believe as I read along; sentence after sentence that said nothing. It had me thinking halfway through, doesn't this person realize there is no content in these constructs? Then, it hit me. It's about a failure. Why the failure? I was staring right at it.

My guess is, the OP-er could make watching cabbage grow an interesting enterprise. One would have to ask his wife first...if he has one...and after rousing her from the coma he put her in whilst relating his life's story.

This OP would earn one Yawn, but for the fact it's so horrifying in its implications just by existing.