Alliance & Corporation Recruitment Center

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.

There was a time when I thought that hi sec pvp was like basic training for nullsec pvp and to a certain extent it is. I said that to some nullsec PvP heavies, guys who actually knew their stuff. They (very kindly) informed me how wrong I was. I was told that hisec pvp will more than anything teach you habits you will have to unlearn most of in nullsec. So my advice is their advice. For you military guys, nullsec pvp is where the most hardcore pvp in the game happens. (I mean, c'mon, just look at the weapons you can't even use in hi sec. (Bombs. Capitol ships. Cynosural fields. Warp disruptor bubbles.) so get out there as soon as you can find someone who will take you.

Excerpt from Chapter XIV of the Neurotechnicon

Your wickedness is exactly like your goodness in that its actual worth is what you are actually willing to pay for it. One thing we can count on from most of our targets is that no matter what their putative "virtures" they will not be willing to pay as much for them as you are willing to pay for yours.

Q: So what's this Neurotechnicon.

A: Its a manual on destroying EVE organizations from within. Assassination. Sabotage. War in the information age. The metagame of EVE. And the meta-meta game of playing EVE "against" yourself.

Q: So Praxis where do your loyalties lie? (Our first member asked me that.)

A: With a group of players with whom I play the game. I will have none but free men in my secret society/circus/acting troupe. The loyalty granted by those who have to offer it because they can't escape from their need for a group is one thing. The loyalty offered by those who offer it purely of their own free Will is another thing entirely.

Q: This is ridiculous. You can't expect people to go to all this trouble to be part of your little crew.

A: How many people do you think I really need at the upper levels of this to get the stuff I want to get done? Five? Ten? Twenty at the very most. And I'm playing for the long term. It took me a year and a half to lay the foundations to get this far.

Q: How can you take so much time over each player?

A: Because H&M is all about quality over quantity. Even if they "joined" to betray SFSC, I'd hope they leave better able to play spy vs spy.

Q: These forums go on forever. Why should I read all this junk?

A: There are some questions that, just by asking them, you tell me it would be pointless to try to answer.

Q: So, what you are gonna use me in your evil plot to rule the Galazy?

A: Sometimes, sure. I mean, we do want to have a project to work on in common right? But most of the time, I'm going to be happy to work on creating an environment in which you have as many options to do what you'd like to do in the game. After all, this is the only way I'll get to see what you will actually do. I'm not looking to rule New Eden. The very most I'd ever want to do with it, even if CCP offered it to me, is play with it.

Q: C'mon. Trust Praxis? Gimmme a break. How stupid do you think I am?

A: Not sure yet. But I'll tell you how stupid I'm not. I'm not stupid enough to lose track of the reality that this is a game and someone has to stand in for the player and communicate with the other players. Someone, somewhere in the organization has to be able to make trustworthy agreements on behalf of that organization. That's Praxis. I have other characters who are lying traitorous vipers, not even necessarily associated with SFSC.

Q: I'm a much more experienced player than you. Why should I join your pitiful little band?

A: Because I'm very good at what I do, which is build small groups of weird and intense people who want meet each other and work on fascinating scary stuff that few other people care about. Like performance art. Or Psychological warfare.

People walk up to me in the street.

They say, "Hey Praxis. How ya doin'? So what about you stop being coy and just tell us what the frackin' Secret Evil Plan is? And if you don't then eat slaver hound turds!"

Well I don't want to eat the turds of even fictional creatures so I've decided to give in. But only here on the website. Yep. People are actually going to have to go through the trouble of clicking on a link to our site to see the SEP we've been talking about for the last two years.

So here goes.

The Secret Evil Plan is neither Secret or Evil. I've already conceded the point about the secrecy. I haven't shut up about the thing since I started as a Director.

Now I'm going to have to fess up to my many critics as well as admirers that the plan isn't even actually Evil.

With the Neutotechnicon, I've written what will hopefully be only the first guide on EVE spy vs spy playing. A member of SFSC had read the Neurotechnicon and asked me why, given what was in the thing, I publish it and make it available to even our enemies. I found this to be a more than reasonable question. The answer is that we are also an educational organization. And we love EVE because its a game that allows and encourages this dimension of MMO gaming. And who ever said I put everything I knew into the Neurotechnicon anyway?

With The Technocrat I've provided a service to all the manager players in the game. There's a year and a half of intensive research on EVE organization management in that sucker. Its going to enable our evil scheming politicians to do their evil scheming and power mongering much much more efficiently. I'd like it if EVE got a rep for really badass "guilds." Let's get those power mongers out there playing those games where they don't get nearly as many toys to play as they do here interested in EVE.

With the New Players Very First Steps Guide I've hopefully done something to help even more twisted obsessive gamer types through that horrible first two weeks to a month where the sheer size of the thing just exhausts you. We get a few more interesting minds though the door everybody wins.

The irony is that 95% of the people in my organization could care less about spying. They just want to learn EVE at all. Only the tiniest few actually get as far as infiltrating and doing dastardly things of that kind. Even among the few who come to me saying that they want to go undercover right from the start.

Who knew there would be such unsuspected reserves of, well, virtue among EVE players? Most of us actually want to be Good Guys, even in our fantasy lives. (And I know: all you pvp guys are bloodthirsty! Raaaaaaaahhh! Snarl! Yes but even then there's a difference between being a tough guy and a bad guy.) In this I may have done my members a disservice. We should have been a well publicized organization known for anything but spying, and secretly had a ring of agents rather than be widely known for spying and not do enough of it to make it worth the reputation. On the other hand, I've got the people in my organization who want to, among other things, educate and train new players. We tried to farm this function out among other corporations but it didn't work.

More about this soon. Or I'm going to delete the thing.

Moons or plexes aside, most sov is worse than useless. (CCPs monkey trap: gourd with hole. Inside gourd are berries. Monkey puts hand in but can't pull fist out until he lets go of the berries.) Territory? How the bloodly blue blazes is territory going to help ME? Does a color on the daily sov map put ISK in MY pocket? Or, for that matter, the pocket of the corp I'm a mamber of? Does going to tedious CTAs to defend that territory make the game worth playing for ME? Those are not academic questions. If territory is what you want, you'd damn well better find members who have the same answers to those questions above as you do BEFORE you claim territory.

Happy Thanksgiving to all my fellow Americans out there. And to all my non US friends: All you have to do to join in is give some thanks for all the good people and stuff in your life and you're good to go!

The group keeps you grounded and it imprisons you. I have people who work for me who recognize nobody's existence but their own. You can feel it in their reactions. If I were a dancing bear to be negotiated with or an alien, floating on my tank of liquid ozygen, they'd have the same reactions, the same plan. They see things only in terms of their own gain, or mine. To these creatures there is no reason to listen to a man's story aside from the tactical information to be gleaned. No amount of love or hate or time or familiarity will change this. I feel more kinship with my slaver hound bulldog than I do them. I wold mourn his death more than I'd mourn any of theirs.

These are the true intraspecies predators. They have no Word. They don't live as members of a social species. They will never understand that the best and worst things in life come from other people. They will never see the abyss that opens when a life is ended.

I find their company very stimulating. I spend a lot of time being aware of very basic things like where everybody is in the room.

So what's in this for me, the guy writing all this.

1. I love making groups that work well and that's the thing in EVE I find more fun than anything else.

2. I think it sux that all the military PvP guys seem to hate the big fleets so much. Isn't there some way we can do all this without them having to HAVE to do it?

3. I really really prefer the idea of oligarchy based on expert authority rather than the lone alpha male model. This way I get to have my cake and eat it too.

4. I want to write this. Script it. Put on a show. Be openly the Minister of Propaganda and be the head of the secret police secretly. (I've been waiting for 49 years to type that phrase and didn't know it.) Oh and the head of our diplomatic corp. Every one of our diplomatic corp are going to be spies. Just like in RL.

5. What I need is a TEAM. I need the folks who really want to do that other stuff I can't do myself no matter how much I might want to. The Merchant Prince. The Admiral of the Fleets. The Pirate Lord. The Minister of Hi Sec The Director of What I Don't Even Know About Yet.