EVE General Discussion

Only one lasting, immortal and eternal truth stands above us and the welter of our philosophies like the Colossus of Rhodes over the white waves: God is irrelevant. My task is identical if there be a God or not. I must live as a moral human being. Only a child would believe that killing the creator of the universe would free them from that responsibility. If the world is indeed merely a random fleeting flaw in the Nothing. If everything we are and everyone we love will slip into death's dateless night beyond the bleeding hands of love or memory or myth. If above the ecstatic lights and agonies within me there is only nothing. Nothing nothing nothing nothing at all. It is all the more essential to remain myself. And what I am is a human being. And if I let go of that I lose the only thing I have in the face of the nothing and I become part of the nothing myself.

When I am killing your Tengu, it's just a game.

When I read local, that s**t is for real.

Uh oh. Rant coming on. OK. I'm going to say this once and only once and then get back to being "reasonable."

I don't want to hear it because this is EVE. I know you've played other MMOs. I've played those too. And they were great. But they were made for kids. EVE is made for grownups. You play it the way a grown up plays. With patience. For the long term. And you have the option to play EVE almost entirely for the metagame, and that puts it in a class by itself. It takes a lot of real life skills to play EVE well. Kids don't have a lot of real life skills so they don't like EVE. They need ingame skills. They need to be a 500 Level cybermage and they need it in 3 weeks. They can tell you a lot about how their Sword of the Biggest Male Member works but they haven't got a plan further away than the next 2 hour adventure because in their MMO they don't need one and that's great.

I am ... THE ONE

Most of the people who never make it past their trial accounts are people who don't want to play EVE. What I am concerned with is that smaller but critical group of people who just need to hear a friendly voice to explain to them, "There's not much you can do right now in the game." This how a trainer in the first corp I was a member of with my first character in my first month put it to me when I asked him why I kept getting killed whenever I tried anything but mission running. Suddenly the light bulb lit. It was my expectations, my timeline that was off. Not my playing ability. So I asked if I could do any volunteer work to help run the corp. I was told that there was nothing someone with my skill points could do to help run the corp. Now, as someone who had spent much of his adult life running volunteer organizations in the real world, I immediately understood that this was just not true.

All Players

You will be part of a team where everyone is respected for the game they play. Lack of alliance infrastructure means we all keep our ISK to buy our own ships and play the game of our choice. We will have to respect you. If we are not running things to your satisfaction and you can't make the Alliance change however it is it would have to change in order to accommodate you, your corp can just leave. You are still in NPC nullsec or hi sec or wherever and you have as good a claim to the place as we, your former alliance. Nobody has to take bad treatment from some feckless geek at his computer keyboard with delusions of adequacy because he can kick their entire corp out of "his" alliance and strand all their stuff in now hostile space. Gentlemen, I say to you with all due lack of decorum: screw that. There is absolutely no reason you have to put up with that sort of thing in your computer game and we won't ever again if we can make this work. And we'll have made something that will demand better EVE play from all of us, right through to the top. Now that's saying something.

Step 2: Recruiters and recruits.

Get your recruiters into the newbie systems. You can do this with alts quite effectively. You drop and drag links to your corp into local chat and start bantering. Invite everyone in local to your public channel. for an example of a public channel see our Vomitorium Emporium. Your public channel should be stocked with all your members possible and make it mandatory for recruiters and officers. Do yourself the favor of having only one public channel. You public channel should have all the necessary links, Skillpoint and other requirements, names of recruiters, voice comm info, etc.

By inviting people into your public channel you are pre selecting for an audience receptive to meeting new people. This is so important its easy to overlook. The people who do not want to chat with new people who are not interested either do not accept the invite or they leave. The people are left are a "captive audience" who have given you the first go ahead to interact without which any efforts are almost certainly waste. Let your members know before you are inviting new people for them to have fun bantering with and they will help you just by being their usual wiseass selves.

You job is to move them from local to the public channel, to your corp, to voice comms, and finally to your roster of people who have assignments or at least are showing up on a semi regular basis to stuff.

but they are best observations .....


and usually lost on everyone else.

As an industrial player in nullsec you are going to have to be thick skinned. And have your escape route, one that does NOT depend on any alliance based jump bridges well planned. Make safe spots all along the way. Keep them private. Make them corp safe spots only at the very last minute.

To any alliance executor reading this if you think allowing this kind of thing to go on makes you look like a leader or is helping you build a better alliance all I can say is you obviously know your members better than I do so keep up the good work.

This!