EVE New Citizens Q&A

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.

7/21/11

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.

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.

Thank ya.

Smiling Friends Social Club

You Choose Your Level Of Involvement

Freelancer

"I only gotta sell out four more of these guys for my new Tengu. That guy Praxis really came through. I wonder how much he'd be worth"

"I've got to prove myself to be worthy of their trust!"

The first tier Freelancer. You are paid for services rendered, with a smile thrown in. And the occasional bonus you hadn't looked for. We have pay scales and missions aplenty to keep the part time spy and mercinary fat and happy.

Handpicked Predator AND/OR Protector

"Hihihihihiiiiii. He was funny. Eyes all wide. Hahahahahahahahahaaaaaa."

"I had to stop it. It was wrong."

The second tier are the Handpicked Protectors AND/OR Predators. Only artists, the still functional but insane, the mad scientist, the alchemist, the traveller in the untracked wastes of human perception need apply.

It is to you I say: Yes. I'm here. Let's do it. What we always do whenever we assemble in groups of more than one. Come on in. I'll jump through your hoops and once I've proven myself to you we'll talk. And you know I don't have to promise you. Anything. I'll do what I always do for you because I won't be able to help myself.

Protector of the Weak AND/OR Intraspecies Predator

"You mean I got to do that to him for his own good? I love being me!"

At this point we are doing it for the art. For the love of it. You don't need us any more. Except as smiling friends. Evildoer or Lawman, you will be expected to play your role with consummate skill, passion and ruthlessness. SFSC Director or not, you will be part of the Inner Circle.

8/7/11

The silence of my old corpmates is thunderous. Clearly I have failed to communicate the substance of my demonstration/experiment/spectacle to them. Though it is presumptuous of me to think it my responsibility, after all we all make our own choices, and my friends have made theirs. Do I respect their choice? Even though my haze of anger and bewilderment, I must concede the point that their choice is not unreasonable for them. That was harder to write than I thought it would be. Nonetheless.

How completely I'd failed only came to me towards the end, when AR sent me that email saying that they were expecting me to behave myself and not make a spectacle with emails or anything to the alliance as a whole before I finally left.

I remember being mildly surprised. I'd thought I'd made it clear that I had simply dismissed the alliance and everyone in it. They had, for me, ceased to be a meaningful pick of pieces for my little game.

I did not love them enough to torture them in the ways they needed in order to learn what they needed to learn about their current situation. There were no bond with which to wind their heartstrings. I had no need to suffer with them in order to undergo the necessary....inoculation.

And inoculated they will be. Against what? Why, mindgames of a specific type. Now they will know what to do, and they won't need to know how they know it.

My experience in nullsec so far is that industry takes a clear back seat to PvP, no matter what they tell you to get you to join their alliance. Most of nullsec is an active war zone. It is very rarely advisable for a business to set up production infrastructure in an active war zone. Unless you are allied with a group of PvPers who are good enough to keep the peace in their territory, or at least scouts where needed, you are better off buying ore in the nullsec markets and just shipping it to hi sec for production there than you are mining in nullsec for example. Your new alliance will almost always want you to go to their CTAs and if you want to that's great but if its a cost of doing business for you as a player, you have to measure carefully the benefits. There is some industry stuff that really doesn't work very well in nullsec. You just can't do the kind of mass market manipulation in nullsec that you can in hi for example. You can't play market games of any kind really. The alliances don't like that kind of thing except for whatever their leaderships are doing, naturally.

As far as I'm concerned the combination of your trade and hauling skills--your cloaky hauler/blockade runner and your jump freighter is the single most important thing to succeed in nullsec industry. If you can move stuff from hi sec to your alliance's (and their blues) marketplaces and back you are looking at the biggest margins in the game. You risk your ships and you lose your volume, of course.

I will treat you honorably, even when we disagree. There are two reasons. One beyond my control and one that's a question of aesthetics. First, when you in the business of treachery, betrayal, spying and fraud, turns out your word is the catalyst that makes all your other assets work. Just as importantly, by being honorable I get to enjoy the rich irony of running an organization dedicated to terror, traitors and lies using friendship, frankness, and fairness. Better than dark chocolate.

I won't pinch pennies but I won't stand for being defrauded unless I really like you in which case its ISK I'd give you anyway that you're having more fun getting from me through theft. I won't come after you if you betray me. I just won't play with you any more. I consider that punishment enough.

Your character will be paid for results and only results. Hard work that results in a near miss results in nearly getting paid. I reserve the right to keep my counsel about anything I might want to give you extra on your next mission because I believe you did it even if you didn't prove yourself this time.

Proof of your Dastardly Deeds is mandatory. Screen shots, chat logs, recorded chat room convos, email copies, and corroboration by other agents within the organization will be required. I reserve the right to not be convinced by your (doubtless) sincere account of not having any proof of a given claim.

Cartography: The Art of Treasure Map Making

wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Cartography:_..._Treasure_Map_Making

A philosophical treatise by Praxis Astra commonly acknowledged as the founding document of the science and philosophy of neuromemetology which concerns itself with the effects of symbols, ideas and culture on the human evolutionary processes. This is typified by their famous slogan "Don't mistake the star chart for the galaxy!" Neuromemeticians also concern themselves with the effects of culture on their own psychology and physiology; as well as how to consciously control these. The third chapter of this book is actually the now famous "Gold Standard" dialogue usually published as a separate work. (The "Gold Standard" argument is that in the information age the true medium of exchange is no longer gold or even information, but the minds that are capable of using information and that create new and even evolutionarily significant information.) Several training systems are associated with neuromemetology, including the infamous Hearts And Minds of the alliance of the same name.