EVE General Discussion

Sure it wont stop a GOOD spy but it weeds out the lazy ones, nothing will ever truly stop any spy joining but there are some corps who want to do basic levels of security.
If you're not happy joining a corp who can see your API then find one that doesn't do security checks, just don't complain if that corp has a smash and grab at some point and loses a bunch of stuff.

Also you link to RL is quite amusing, I don't think potential employers ask for current balance and past transactions because in RL you can't walk out his office carrying every little thing he ever owned and his entire corporate wallet. Neither can you get all his employees shiny cars destroyed by relaying information to a rival company.

The difference being of course that one only has one real life. I can't "wash" him or "recreate" him.

Be nice if we could, I was a bad boy when I was younger. Maybe that's why MI5, CIA and ASIO won't gimme a job

Yes, because we recruit members of our external communities into the game and show them the ropes.

As others have already said, an API check can't stop a dedicated infiltrator. But the point is not to absolutely prevent all infiltration attempts, but to make them more difficult. Sometimes it's not about stopping thieves to get in, but about making them choose another, easier to infiltrate corporation. As the saying goes, you don't have to run faster than the bear, you just have to be faster than the other man running away from the bear.

If you have a garden, do you put a fence around it? Does it make it impossible for thieves to get inside?

While preventing obvious zero-effort thieves and spies from getting in is one reason, there are also others to ask for an API. For one, it helps confirm the story the recruit is telling me at an interview. Can he really fly all the ships he says, or does he only have the bare level 1 skills to sit in them? Is he self-sufficient in ISK making? Is he buying PLEXes? Will he spend three hours a day grinding ISK? Is he not telling me about some past associates out of fear?

It is also a show of trust. If you aren't willing to share what ships you bought a month ago, can I really trust you to tell the whole truth in the future? The corporation will likely ask you for much bigger leaps of faith, putting your ship and your pod on the line being the least of them - why exactly is revealing your history an issue?

Yes, chances are, you are really just trying to protect the level of privacy that you think you deserve, and there's nothing wrong with that. But I can't really know if you're just unwilling to prove the truth, or you are actually hiding something. And in any possible situation I would much rather let 10 excellent recruits go, than to let even one potential spy in.

If this is bothering you, there are hundreds, maybe thousands laid-back, friendly corporations which will gladly let you in on your good word only. These are run just like guilds in other games: simply a group of people who like to play together. But other corps play this game in a more serious manner, in order to compete with other serious corporations. If even one corporation in an alliance recruits openly, the entire alliance is easily compromised. (The "faster than the bear" idea again.)

Why would you be worried about a bad spy?

What corp gives members the ability to do a smash and grab besides noob corps?

You're proving some other poster's point.

I guarantee you, you're alienating 100% more players than effective spies. But it's worse than that it's giving you a false sense of security. If it isn't giving you a false sense of security than why are you even doing it?

I view "noob friendly" as being friendly to noobs in EVE. The goons kill 2 week old characters in retrievers. What you're calling noob friendly I just call neckbearded snobbery.

Because there are certain game mechanics currently that force you to give them the ability if you want them to have any use whatsoever. (Ship maintenance arrays, canceling industry jobs, corp bookmarks - just to name a few.) And I'm not even talking about sharing intel.



I am fine with that. As I wrote above, I'd rather alienate 10 great players, than to let in one bad apple. If you recruit enough people with a strict recruiting policy as it is, why would you want to loosen it and open up to more threats?

If you're giving random players roles who you don't know you're going to get burned eventually anyway. Try talking to people on TS3 or something before doing that, you don't need to force him to turn around and spread his butt cheeks before hand.

That's not true, corps were demanding for full API before the custom API's it was practically a cause of the change.

That's exactly the point. A person who passes through our recruitment is no longer "a random player". That's what the recruitment should assure.