Crime & Punishment

Life as a criminal in Eve Online includes a ton of time spent trying to convince people of things. Often these things are entirely false or against their best interest. To that end, having a couple tools to use for these sorts of situations would not go amiss, so I'd like to offer you some information that has been of use to me.

Firstly, I'd like to talk to you about the steps of the selling process. If you've ever had a sales job where anybody gave a **** about your level of success then you've probably seen this before, but I'm willing to bet it wasn't framed in the context of internet spaceships.

1) Approach

Whether you're looking for a wormhole corp to steal from or a quick safari or starting a Ponzi scheme, you've got to find your mark and break the ice. The key pitfall here is approaching someone from an angle where they expect attack. If you convo someone from Jita local trying to sell a ship they'll smell a scam a mile away. If, however, you happen to start talking to someone in a system where you're both mining together wonder if a corpmate (even a corpmate in the NPC corp) would be willing to help you get rid of this ship or haul something in exchange for a small fee then you're much more likely to bypass that natural defense.

Once you've determined who you're going to mess with and what angle you're going to come in from, it becomes super to make the effort to make a bit of a connection. Some people are weird lizard-brain robots who don't care for pleasantries in the face of pursuing the almighty isk, but most people are put at ease by a friendly guy. I'm lucky in this respect in that I'm friendly and fairly confident, and I've long since learned that I can't give my confidence in social situations to other people, so I'll leave that bit to you.

There is one thing that I will say on the subject, though. Some people have trouble being friendly to people they intend to betray. The reason for this is that they immediately view that person as their enemy and that's the context under which they decide that it's okay to betray this person and have trouble being friendly to someone they view as an enemy. That view is somewhat incorrect. These people are not your enemy, merely your opponent. They are human beings, just like everyone else, and probably perfectly fine human beings on the surface (although I'm sure you'll find out how they are under stress shortly). Unless they are immediately and obviously abhorrent you can certainly be friendly and interested in their lives and crack some jokes with them or find out their opinion on something.

This causes the interesting conflict where the truly terrible human beings are the hardest to scam in my experience simply because I can't tolerate them long enough to complete the deal. I wish it weren't so, as those are the people I'd most like to scam.

2) Needs discovery

In sales the process of needs discovery would be to determine what someone is in the market for, what size of TV they were looking to buy, what their price range is, what they intend to do with the TV (video games vs. movies) and so on. When you're clearly in a selling position these sorts of questions can be fairly straightforward.

When sizing up a target, the end goal dictates how straightforward you can be with your questioning. If you're recruiting someone in order to kill them, asking what they're looking for in a corporation is well within the usual recruiting practice, but if you're looking to trade some overpriced deadspace modules they you need to find out what your target is interested in. If they're in the market for some bling for their mission-running legion then it's going to be nearly impossible to sell them shield tanking mods.

Needs discovery is something that you can go back to several times in this process if required. You may find that the target is ripe for something entirely divorced from the scam you set out to run. If you find yourself in this position it's helpful to have experience with a couple other scams or possibly be able to hand a target off to someone more suited to their... 'needs'. (Remember, if someone drops a prospect in your lap, they deserve a very healthy cut of the take.)

3) Presentation

The presentation is the part of the process in which you detail what you'd like to offer the target. As you've already done your needs discovery, you get to tailor this specifically to the target. In the real world you're limited by what products you have to sell and have to hope to match up the customer with the product and make it seem appealing, but for scamming in eve online your product is lies, which makes it especially easy to alter to suit.

There are three distinct parts of the presentation: the product itself, the features, and the benefits. They aren't typically presented separately, so it can be a little tough to distinguish the three parts of the presentation if you're not looking for it. The product itself is the thing you're trying to sell. That would be telling your target of the space-guild you'd like him to join or the investment fund he might consider. The features of the product are the properties it possesses. Your space-guild has regular Orca-supported mining ops, for instance, or your investment fund has a return of X% over Y period of time. It's important to present these, but you need to tie them in with the real meat of the presentation, which is the benefits these features carry.

A few manipulation techniques

1) Controlling the target's environment

This is typically one for longer and more complex scenarios, but there is something to be said for having some level of control over the information a target gets and who they interact with. This works best in a corp environment, where the people a target interacts with most often can be friends, alts, or people you've already influenced. This is something you see happening unintentionally in badly run pubbie corps throughout the game. They have created an environment where bad information gets perpetuated and questioning authority is strongly taboo.

This works best if the target does not realize his various forms of interaction are connected, so posing as a sympathetic but largely unrelated friend can go a long way.

2) Creating doubt

A targets worldview is typically a background upon which their other decisions are made. This serves as a stable platform for their rationale in any situation. Creating doubt in their assumptions opens holes in this worldview, leaving their ability to make more rational decisions less reliable. This can be done subtly or directly, and effective forms of doubt to sow include the idea that their friends or CEO have bad intentions for them or that they have been fed bad information about their best practices. Showing someone things to check for in applicant APIs that frequently result in false positives is a good way to have them start doubting these assumptions.

3) Create strong emotional responses

It will come to no surprise that people do not make decisions as well when under the influence of strong emotional response. Most emotional responses are of use to us. Anger against an outside force can galvanize your relationship with a target and make him more likely to take action that you can take advantage of if it can be portrayed as against your common enemy. They're also more likely to trust you if you can place yourself on the same side of a us vs them relationship with your target.

Strong feelings of happiness, like the euphoria after a job well done can cause a target to be more generous, and feelings of belonging can make a person more compliant with the leader or prevailing wishes of a group. This is an idea exploited very well in patriotism.

Persuasive tools

Finally, winding this beast of an article to a close, I'd like to quickly mention some techniques you can use to convince someone of the validity of your position.

1) Establish credibility

In an ideal world, an argument would be completely divorced from its author. This is the reason that we view ad hominem attacks as a logical fallacy. They have nothing to do with the arguement in question. It's far more accepted to lean the other way, however. Were Stephen Hawking to tell you a controversial scientific theory you would be more likely to believe him than you would be likely to believe on of your jackass friends because science is Stephen Hawking's super power. By that same token, people accept my advice on criminal behaviour in eve online based largely on my track record as a criminal in eve online.

Aiden Mourn recently pulled this off masterfully when he set up a Ponzi scheme claiming to be an investor in real life, and you can read all about it over here. http://aidenmourn.wordpress.com/2013/04/04/the-australian-job-a-13-billion-isk-heist/

Remember, your knowledge or reputation doesn't have to be real, it just has to be good enough that your target doesn't know any better.

2) Use a positive and tactful tone

People tend to get heated when their assumptions are challenged and, unless that emotional reaction is part of your plan, that can be a huge setback. If your position is logically sound enough to stand up long enough then it's to your advantage to keep your target civil. Effective ways of descalating situations include using the target's name at the beginning of scentances (not all of them, it's weird if you do) and using 'we' language when trying to overcome an obstacle. Like instead of “You are you so mad.” try “What's the problem we need to solve here?” Try not to lay these on too thick, though, or you start to sound like a psychologist.

(Some of you reading this may notice that I put lots of names at the fronts of sentences in regular conversation. It's not on purpose. I spend a lot of time talking to furious players, so it's kinda leaked through.)

3) Make your presentation clear

This, again, is if your scheme stands up logically and does not require that the target be confused. But the simpler terms you can put your case in, the easier it is to digest and the easier it is to agree with. If a target starts asking himself what the hell is going on here, then your underlying arguement comes into question alongside the clarity of your arguement.

4) Appeal to their self interested

Humans are more or less selfish creatures. That breaks down a little bit when you start thinking of them as 'rational actors' and observe the ways in which they aren't, but as a rule of thumb, people are out to get theirs. There's some variation of this across cultures, with it being more prevalent in North America, slightly less so in Europe and significantly less so in Asia, as a very broad generalization.

What this means, though, is that you can expect players who aren't strongly in tune with their community or group to be willing to gain for themselves, even at the expense of others and especially if given a chance to do so without those people finding out. As an interesting aside, if they've engaged in this behaviour you can probably hold it against them in the future for blackmail, especially if they're still with the group they betrayed.

Goddamn I love this game.

I do use it to defeat my opponents, yes. If that hurts them as humans then perhaps they shouldn't have logged in that day. I have days when I know a loss would bother me, and on those days I go play my singleplayer minecraft world instead of a competitive game.

And I also put a great deal of work into helping my friends and peers, including doing things like writing these guides. In doing so, I have also helped newbros get into the life, which is a special joy of mine. And I've had spacefriendships that have lasted years so far and I expect to last more years yet, and my friends can and do trust me. As for if I'm cool or not, that's not really for me to judge. I do have a monocle, though.

Good read Monk, as usual.

Thanks to him (and his blog) I've entered in the awoxing life and it's FUN. (As a matter of fact, this guy came 24 jumps with a logi just to help me awoxing a corp... It didn't work out because I ****** things up while trying because of not knowing a lot about game mechanics since at the time I was 3 weeks old, but it was fun and I've learned a lot).

I only voted for you for CSM. You deserve the spot.

Keep the guides/blog entries coming.

I got to space-guild and realized... 1d10t error.

No. The closest I've had was to have someone join a corp I was reverse-safariing with with the intent to kill my mission boat. He showed up in a pvp fitting... Vegabond? I'm fairly certain it was a Vaga. He wasn't prepared to have several of us ready to kill him, though. There were no tears, he was fairly chill about it, and I later saw he joined Hydra Reloaded at a time when they were a thing. Seemed like a cool guy.

That's about the closest I've gotten.