Alliance & Corporation Recruitment Center

*Looks up from his work*

There seems to be a line-up forming. We're going to need more giggling orderlies and drooling, ham-fisted triage nurses.

*Tosses a quivering, freshly amputated limb into the trash*

---

Doctor Steele
The first amputation is always free!

Recruitment is still open!
We are looking for some more badass pvpers.

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Doctor Steele
The first amputation is always free!

Ah. But what might I have to pay for the second amputation?

And, would it be only my first amputation for free? In other words, could I bring in other people to enjoy this offer? Me and my friends drink a lot. One or two of them might be passed out before we begin. Just saying....

Sigh. Now there's an doctor! And he doesn't charge you an arm and a leg.........

He's handy, dandy and heavily armed.

Hm. You know, I'm going to save it for your EVElopedia page.

To the Merchant Princes of EVE:

The wheels of industry can't ever stop turning.

From ore to sell order, you are the ones who keep the economy moving and thriving. You also play with it and bleed it ruthlessly. At the high end, you spend billions like the rest of us spend millions.

You're one of the players for whom 1/20th of a percentage point really means something. And you're happy to keep your mouth shut about what that decimal came to for you last month. You've heard it all about the fleets and the CTAs and the my ship is bigger than your ship boys and its all good. You'd give the lads twice as much gold piping on their uniforms as long as it was you selling it to them.

You understand that what you do is pvp, even if most of the military guys never notice. The ones that do, you can exchange the small nods with that none of the rest of them never even need see. When some big mouthed boot boy tries to lord it over you with a gun you sold him not six weeks ago, you keep a straight face and have your bodyguard put him to sleep only. He can buy your brand of painkillers in the local pharmacy when he wakes.

With any luck, you're the tip of the triangle they never notice. Your vast, vulnerable, bulky mining ships. Your freighters and haulers. Your research POS in lowsec. Your buy and sell orders posted by different alts so no other trader knows what you're up to, cargo moved by other players through courier contracts, new trade hub on the edge of Empire space...

Its a military-industrial complex. But some things are as simple as a razor thin margin. Yin or Yang, its a struggle to the death.

6/30/11

I sat on that smelly couch in my soon to be ex alliance's station and contemplated the words on the screen in front of me.

Over the past week I'd used emails to incite a certain state of mind in my soon to be ex corp mates as well as the alliance at large. The message in front of me was a very effective work of innuendo. My finger tapped the desk by the keyboard. Something nagged.

Suddenly I realized that I had only to send this email and then forward it to the leader of my soon to be ex alliance and my soon to be ex corp would almost certainly be run from the alliance at gunpoint. My blood ran cold. My friends had committed themselves to people who were this feckless. They'd not thanked me for telling them any part of this so far. They'd not welcome this bit of news either.

Everything we'd built--I'd built--for the last 15 months wasn't orbiting anything. It was all floating in dead space. On the sufferance of self important fools. Somehow, in the company of friends, and with all the best intentions, instead of an army we'd joined an idiocracy.

Well I know, I've always known what the price for membership in such clubs always is and I'll never pay it. I'd rather die alone.

I had to leave.

The most important thing to bear in mind is that in EVE losing your ship is a big deal. Its costs a lot in time and money and it goes in your permanent record AND the permanent record of your corp and/or alliance. Yep. Your performance is averaged into your corp's and your alliance's. Some take this very seriously and some don't. The exciting thing about this is that there's always something to lose. The difficulty with it is that you will spend a lot of time looking for the advantage, or running from opponents who have an advantage. Hurry up and wait is a feature of RL military life I'm told. It certainly is in EVE.

The EVE Marketplace is incredibly complicated and mind numbingly huge. But some things are fairly straightforward.

When you click on "sell item" to sell ore or salvage or, well, anything, you are selling to a buy order. A buy order is an order to buy so many items at a certain price. You automatically sell to the highest priced buy order in range of your system when you click "sell item" This is the most convenient way possible for you to empty your cargo hold and be on your merry way. It is also the least profitable. Buy orders are always set as far below the retail price you could get from selling those goods as the market will bear obviously. Your own buy order is your friend. Everyone else's is a wicked sinful trap smiling at you with lips painted like a whore. They wink at you. They leer.

They say, "C'mon big spender, what's a real man like you sweating it over a few ISK? C'mon just click me. One little click."

At SFSC we advise you to avoid the temptation of easy money. Why? Because usually easy money does not lead to big money. And selling to buy orders is the easiest of easy money and a habit that helps insure your dependancy on handouts for the life of your character.

So what do you do instead?

Consider learning a few of the trade skills and trying to buy and sell using your own buy and sell orders. This is overall the most profitable option to you, but also the option requiring the most work on your part. It really is worth trying and if you like Trade, you can wind up needing a planet sized accounting system just to keep track of the zeros in your bank accounts. EVE needs traders just like we need miners and planetologists after all.

Try selling your goods to your Corp. This is pretty easy. All you have to do is contract the stuff over and you get your ISK.

Try selling your goods to other corp members. If the corp doesn't want to buy what you are offering, or you can make a more mutually beneficial arrangement with other members, just make individual arrangements for the exchange of whatever goods and services. There are no hard and fast rules for the these arrangements except that bargaining in bad faith with other corp members is, well let's just say its frowned upon.

Donate the stuff to Smiling Friends Social Club. Even if we can't sell it, we can reprocess the stuff and get a few good high end minerals from the items. It will wind up donated to new players. Yeah in my opinion donating is better than selling to buy orders where all you get is a tiny fraction of the item's worth.

Give the stuff to me, Praxis. At least I'll be your very best friend for the ten minutes I remember you did me the favor. Yes. Even THAT would be better than selling to a buy order.

Find a sharp corner of a piece of your loot and stab yoursself in the eye with it. At Smiling Friends Social Club, we recommend that you sell to a buy order rather than take this course of action.

Excerpt from Chapter II of the Neurotechnicon

A lie is never a trivial thing. Every single one has to be watched carefully and remembered remembered remembered. They have a way of skipping out of your control and doing just the kind of mischef you don't want at the least opportune momments. A like is like a demon servant evoked by just the right combination of words. Like demons, lies always cheat on how much they are going to cost you. Every lie you tell requires your resources to maintain or it will do damage. Like any effective tool they can damage you as much as they can damage your targets if not more.

In this chapter we discuss how, using the methods you learned in chapter I to create your memory palace, you can build a deceptadrome of mnemonic devices to remember and organize your lies.

Memory Palace

A lie is simply never as powerful as a truth. The reason is simple. A truth, bearing the weight of and reflecting the effects from actual events, needs less attention from you in order to do its work. A lie, existing only in the words and minds of the speaker and hearer, has no momentum but what you and the hearer give it yourselves. To believe your lies at any time other than the moment you utter them is an error from which there is usually no escape. Your lies may not be as powerful as the truth but they can easily become more powerful than you.

Reading List:

Required (there will be a test to get into the Inner Circle)

The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis.

members.fortunecity.com/phantom1/books2/...crewtape_letters.htm

The Art of War by Sun Tzu

classics.mit.edu/Tzu/artwar.html

(OK. I'll fess up. My favorite translation is "The Art of Strategy" by R. L. Wing who was taught both Chinese and English from birth. That is a different book from the one you get from translators who start from english.)

Optional reading:

How to Win Friends and Influence People

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Win_Friends_and_Influence_People

48 laws of Power

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_48_Laws_of_Power

The Prince Niccolo Machiavelli

www.constitution.org/mac/prince00.htm

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prince

Any biography of Francis Marion

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Marion

www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/biography/fox.html

The Discourses Niccolo Maciavelli

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourses_on_Livy

Dune by Frank Herbert

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_%28novel%29

The Illuminatus Trilogy

www.rawilson.com/illuminatus.html