Alliance & Corporation Recruitment Center

HRU has been helping new players since June of 2010.

Hard Rock University

We specialize in training new players in all aspects of industry in EVE.

You aren't alone climbing that initial learning curve. Mining, refining, research, manufacture, shipping, markets. This includes PvP avoidance. We've also got corps in both hi sec and null sec you can "graduate" to.

The First Rule of Acquisition: As a merchant my best asset is handshake deal in a network of long term relationships.
The Second Rule of Acquisition: No matter whose it is, blood is expensive.
The Third Rule of Acquisition: Money is just another form of information.
The Fourth Rule of Acquisition: Never let YOUR greed become a cost of doing business.
The Fifth Rule of Acquisition: No matter how tempting, do not believe your own advertising.

Excerpted from Warp To Zero

Plenty of opportunities to learn in a variety of environments.

You can be a student and a teacher and an officer. Ringleader or cog in the machine. Lots of roles to explore.

Even some interesting enemies.

TS3 server

Active members in US and EU timezones

Long standing contracts for all your ore, salvage, etc.

Hardcore and casual players both welcome.

Our Public Channel: Vomitorium Emporium




http://heartsandmindsalliance.org/index.php?option=com_kunena&func=view&catid=4&id=45&Itemid=200




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 the guys who know that the whole thing is a pyramid resting on a shifting foundation of chunks of ore. You can hear the sound of it thudding against the dented plates of your ore hold as you sleep at night.

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 notice. 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.

You've expanded horizontally and vertically and now have your finger in all steps of the industrial process. You see how the game works. Industrial PvP and Military PvP. With your information network as the edge of the coin.

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.

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 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

Horrible or Wonderful Either Way This Is True for an Effective EVE Corp

And now the hideous truth. The moment when you, as uneasy as Blackbeard's eighth wife, slip that key out of the drawer you aren't supposed to and unlock that door. I've been there. Its all going well. Too well. You and your new corp have gotten through the honeymoon but are still having sex almost every day. You're relaxing. its happening. Its just..... That door. You trust your new spouse, oh certainly beyond a shadow of a whisper of a 151 KM warp to point's worth of doubt you do trust your newly betrothed and beloved or why would you have married them in the first place. Its just.....

That door.

So you open the fracking thing and after you do you almost wish it was seven heads on spikes with yawning jaws and maggots in their eyes because what's there is so much worse what's there are...

Spreadsheets.

There is no escape from them. Once your corp or alliance gets beyond a certain point you will need them. It is hard to tell when that point is because something will eat away at you like the thought of the key does Blackbeard's bride. And when you finally realize what it is, you, like all of us, will find spreadsheets.

I recommend a complete and total capitulation before the vastly superior force of necessity. (Sometimes simple surrender serves you best my friend.) In order to do so, just open a google docs account. (I said I never would and I did.) You can assign access to documents including spreadsheets to your officers. The horror. The horror.

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.

Your Leadership Group

This topic deserves a guide of its own, as long or longer than this one.

The daily care feeding and grooming of your membership at large can be done by one or more of the designated management team but if you wish to continue in your job as being in fact CEO or Alliance Executor you'd better be the one taking care of your leadership group. You have to manage your managers. These people are essential to your group's survival. The person who does this job is in fact the leader of the group no matter what their title.

If you want these people to continue to donate their priceless time to you and your stupid group you'd better not take them for granted. That gets ignored only for so long. And then, usually, you wind up with an enemy. It won't matter that the only thing you were guilty of was feeding them all the rope they needed to hang themselves. That's all it takes.

You MUST make appreciating and caring for your managers and volunteers your first or one of your first priorities. You MUST. YOU MUST. No matter how busy you are. Let something else slide.

YOU MUST MAKE APPRECIATING AND MANAGEMENT OF YOUR MANAGERS AND VOLUNTEERS A TOP PRIORITY OR YOU WILL LOSE ALL OF THEM.

The talent and dedication you waste will just leave without a word. Except the ones who will be angry humiliated at having volunteered to be used and taken for granted. They will betray you, steal, rip things up on their way out. (The funny thing is that the angrier they are at you, usually the more loyal they were at the start. Isn't that funny?)

Your members will see this pattern, even if you don't. The better ones leave. More and more the people who volunteer will be looking to steal from you, since now they come to the job knowing they won't get anything for doing it except what they take.

Leaders who can't or don't manage at least their key people are not leaders. They're just playing at it. It is ironic. Here in this make believe MMO land the only thing nobody respects you for pretending to be is a leader.

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.