15/05/11 08:39 AM
| Arkonor | 285 |
| Bistot | 217 |
| Mercoxit | 192 |
| Crokite | 187 |
| Hedbergite | 171 |
| Hemorphite | 168 |
| Jaspet | 152 |
| Dark Ochre | 147 |
| Pyroxeres | 118 |
| Kernite | 106 |
| Veldspar | 99 |
| Scordite | 93 |
| Gneiss | 90 |
| Plagioclase | 88 |
| Spodumain | 82 |
| Omber | 81 |
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On Doing Things Together
As part of an ongoing series of posts about corporation life, one of the issues that I have wanted to discuss for some time is the concept and process of being a team and cooperating. There are many pilots out there in New Eden and many of them want to be left alone.
- They are running missions and hoping Ninjas do not suddenly appear to steal their salvage.
- They are quietly mining ice with the desire for Battleterons V’s to be bothering others in some distant system.
- They are changing their sales by 0.01 isk to keep others items from being the best price.
All in all, they are not doing anything wrong other than missing out on the single biggest reason to keep paying a subscription to an online service, namely, interacting with other pilots. The single shard [Can you still call a system without other "shards" a single shard?] universe with all pilots interacting in the same temporal dataspace is essentially the paramount momentum behind being in New Eden. Even the aforementioned solo pilots rely on the rest of the universe to make their activities have meaning. They need others to buy and sell goods, power POSes full of arrays and even explode in fiery bursts of atmosphere and essential fluids. Without all of that, their activities in New Eden quickly become Sisyphean in nature.
[caption id="attachment_945" align="alignright" width="150" caption="Moar Droan Plz"]  [/caption]
For the rest of New Eden, the whole of the experience my best be paraphrased by Kirith Kodachi’s re-occuring motto, “Do Things…. With People” [though I am also sure he would like the rest of New Eden to chant, "Fix The Rokh"]. Whatever it is you like to do, I am positive there are others out there who would like to do it with you. There is always something more to do in EVE and someone new to do it with. It is an almost limitless universe with pilots constantly searching for new ways to beat the house, break the bank and burn the barns. If you constantly find yourself flying your ship solo, then you need to seriously ask yourself, “Am I doing it wrong?”
[caption id="attachment_952" align="alignleft" width="150" caption="Sharing is Caring"]  [/caption]
Please do not misunderstand me. I am not advocating against solo PvP or saying there is not a place for flying a mission or ratting by yourself. There are always times when you have to step to the side and get something done. No one else can raise your security status for you as well as you can. No one else wants to solo PvP with a partner [though two-man roams are wicked fun]. I AM saying that even all of those activities are better done in the midst of a group of like-minded pilots who both want to see you succeed and are trying to accomplish similar goals. It does not really matter what those goals are as much as your agreement and participation with them.
[caption id="attachment_953" align="alignright" width="150" caption="Rep or Die"]  [/caption]
In the end, you really have to ask yourself, “Am I doing stuff with people?” and for some people the question looks more like, “Am I supporting the group of people around me, doing the things we love?” Sometimes this can mean doing things differently and even expanding your horizons to include new activities or ones that you would normally not do. I do not mean to imply that you need to do things that you do not like, but rather there will be things that must be done, and the people that you have surrounded yourself with will likely find them just as burdensome as yourself. The more you do stuff with people, the more stuff that you can do with people.
Another pilot made the point that sometimes there are people who, for whatever reasons, prefer not to be around other people. Believe it or not, but there are other people out there like them. The reality is, we all have a need to belong even if we do not want it. As much as we might hate to admit it, we do need the next person [with the occasional exceptions, but you can just pod those pilots].
On Getting Bigger, Better or Bagged
There is a natural tendency towards entropy. Universally, stars die, systems decay and heat dissipates. It is the order of things to become less ordered. Therefore, it takes energy to even just maintain things, let alone change something. This is also true for players, corporations, alliances and coalitions. They do not tend toward activity, progress or profit without work and energy being put into them. As I mentioned in Brass Tacks, WHEN relies heavily on its directors to maintain these levels of activity, progress & profit. It is not a pretty job [at least if you look at Riyu or Mick], but they do it well. In WHEN we face entropy on several different vectors and often at the same time.
 A base-level of entropy is found in the POS tower that we live out of. Without a regular infusion of fuel, it has a natural tendency to burp and die very quickly. This takes a certain amount of effort on the part of various pilots to insure that there is fuel in the tower, spare fuel in the wormhole system and ongoing procurement for fuel from various sources [markets, players/corporations, private planetary interaction]. It is not a significant level of activity, but it does exist and is a posteriori to our continued existence.
[caption id="attachment_936" align="alignleft" width="150" caption="Downward Trends"]  [/caption]
Another item of concern that need to be kept up with include pilot attrition. While I would like to claim that 100% of WHEN pilots are online and in ships every day or even week, that would be a bit of a stretch. We do try to keep our active membership roles current and in any given week, close to 80% of member pilots are online and actually doing stuff [With Others - Kirith Kodachi]. Part of this has been that WHEN was a small family corporation that worked together on everything and the core active members were also the only members. As we have grown, it has been encouraging to see a high level of member interaction on a regular basis. We still have a few that are more occasional in their activity levels and we are very accommodating of their situations if they let us know.
Recruiting is another answer that we have applied to attrition and recognise as a sword that can cut both ways. While it is necessary on the one hand to have new pilots in the corporation in order to grow [and by extension do more things with more people], it can also introduce additional issues to deal with. Things like training/explaining, ship/supply logistics, storage space and organisation all become more complex as additional wetware is added to the mix. As Penny so eloquently wrote in Applicant Security last week, it is also necessary to be ever mindful of players that want to join/infiltrate the corporation with an intent towards nefarious purposes. Be it theft, sabotage, espionage or just drama, a new corporate member can make it difficult for everyone involved to enjoy their time in their ships.
In the discussion of entropic entities with corporate effects, there is also perhaps the most devastating: Complacency. What do you do when you have reached your goals and become everything that you intended? Or perhaps you are still working on the first steps and things are going very smoothly. You need to be prepared to have the next step in mind and be willing to cast the vision necessary to keep things moving forward and keep pilots engaged and excited about what is happening around them. There will come a time when success is also the very thing that can bring you down and start to erode the corporation more than just natural loss.
On Being Paranoid or How To Steal From Your Next Corporation
 A new member of the corporation turned up in our corporation communication channel recently, one neither of the two directors currently on-line had met before. Or, indeed, had even heard about. A quick poking with a stick met with no response and we jointly agreed to kick the unfamiliar face back out of the corporation. It was perhaps the shortest stay of any new member, as well as the fastest re-recruitment time. It turns out that the capsuleer was a secondary character of a current but still relatively new member of the corporation and had applied and been accepted by another director.
There is no problem with directors making decisions, it’s what each of us is meant to do. But I feel our process is lacking some oversight and scrutiny, and perhaps some discipline. I notice that we get applications that are empty, with no introductory or explanatory text about who the character is, why they want to join, or what procedures they have already been through and with whom. This makes it rather difficult to assess the application beyond ignoring it and hoping to find out more later. I am hoping to change this, and have already rejected a blank application with the explicit reason that we shouldn’t accept such uninformative requests.
We already ask for access to the capsuleer’s limited API key—and rejected someone who curiously argued against giving this standard nugget of information—which at least helps us see if the actual skill set matches that claimed, but it doesn’t offer much about the character. For this, we ask the capsuleer to join our recruitment channel and stick around for a chat. This lets us gauge interest and attitude, ask pertinent questions, and see tolerance to inane banter—as long as we’re not in the middle of hunting in w-space when our concentration may be elsewhere. A potential recruit should therefore be able to give details of this conversation, who he talked to, and his API key in the body of the application, as a minimum. At least we have details that can be verified and we have another measure of the trustworthiness of the recruit.
Troubles with recruiting go deeper. I am not entirely sure how to accept secondary characters in to the corporation. Bear in mind that for a w-space corporation who lives entirely out of shared hangars the possibility of theft is a real and very expensive risk, one that we have already suffered. The ability to segregate the availability of resources is difficult and inconvenient at best. Personally, if I wanted to steal from a w-space corporation a secondary character would make a lot of sense. But I would reverse the roles.
[caption id="attachment_926" align="alignleft" width="150" caption="I'm just a high-sec trading alt..."]  [/caption]
I would apply to the corporation with my secondary character first, my limited and innocuous skills making me seem harmless. Training in science and industry and not being able to fly anything bigger than a battlecruiser would help shape perceptions. I join the corporation and loiter for a while, being helpful and raking in some iskies. Then I log out and log in with a different character, joining the recruitment channel and asking if my ‘trading alt’ can join the corporation. Surely there can be no harm in this. A high-sec trading character, who is confirmed by the other character to be controlled by the same person, poses no threat to operations.
Except that this ‘alt’ is actually my main character, years old and able to pilot many big and expensive ships, probably even able to pilot an Orca stuffed to the hull with loot and other ships. In a quiet period, my secondary character contracts the bookmarks for the current route between the w-space tower and empire space to my main, and I bring my main to the tower to steal all I can pilot and park it in a personal hangar in an empire station. To avoid the corporation paper trail maybe I liquidate my secondary character’s assets, give it all to my main, then biomass the character to start a new mule.
Maybe I’m just being paranoid. But trust in recruitment is difficult enough without having gaping backdoors that bypass the procedures meant to protect the corporation and its members from harm. I am starting to ask for more stringent measures for every step of the recruitment process and not to assume anything, whether it’s that the alt really is an alt, or that the applicant actually has spoken to a director and not just filed a blank application in ignorance. It’s difficult to learn someone’s character when the system allows it to be masked so easily. The best we can do is follow good practice to keep our exposure to risk at a minimum. There must be a better way but it may take a while, and some failures, before I find it.
On Getting Down To It
 When there is something that needs to be done in WHEN, often the process begins by various people proposing various ideas, others commenting on them, tweaking and refining them until there is some consensus and agreement. This does not mean we all agree with everything that everyone does and very often the views and actions of a particular pilot are hers or his alone and do not reflect the position of the corporation or alliance as a whole. We have always operated on a very anarchi-cratic basis, whereby people are free to move, fly, pursue their own interests. We appreciate teamwork all the more for having been out on our own and knowing that our next flight could be the last.
There are few occasions however when there is an event or purpose that must be completed without discussion or preamble. When this time roles around, there are the WHEN directors who can and do take decisive action. They are invaluable and their hard work makes the corporation [and to a large extent the alliance] just work. I do not want to ever be accused of not giving them enough credit, so I am taking this space to pat them on the back. Mick, Penny, Riyu – keep up the good work and keep flying. WHEN would not be there without you all.
 In addition to all of this, WHEN has been growing for the last couple months and is now seeing fairly consistent fleet action through the holes we find. Coordination has improved quite a bit as newer players are brought up to speed, both in skills and skill. While it is good to have a dedicated salvager for speedy clean-up after PVE operations, it is not good to begin to expect one particular person to always fill that role or even to let them do that. They need to grow and experience additional parts of the universe around them. As a personal example, I’m even doing something I thought I could avoid for the longest time – training to fly some battleships. While I am loathe to admit it and abhor the large hulls and their pondering pace, they are an integral part of many operations in New Eden. I much prefer … well anything smaller, but will soon be able to fly some of them and eventually even fit their Tech 2 weapon systems.
Other WHEN pilots have picked up Logistics, Tacklers, HICs & HACs, and Strategic Cruisers on their journeys as well. It is exciting to see new members begin to stretch their pods and slide into new roles that they may not have ever considered before. They have all learned to scan to at least a survival level, even if they are not very fast or good at it. There is a lot of pride in getting back into your ship and finding that the corporation has already scanned all the exits, killed a mining fleet, ambushed a strategic cruiser and ran a null-sec plex all between lunch and supper.
On Adding, Subtracting and Finding Yourself Happy
 Some things are easily quantified and measured. They can be numbered, totalled, divided, analysed and reported. This is basic maths and accounting, in that you know how much of something there is and how much it is worth in time, effort, profit, etc. These are the things that most people aim for and are more than happy pursuing. More and better ships, profit, ore, isk, research, production, flying, etc.
On the other hand, there are the unquantifiables. The things that defy counting and spurn attempts to wrangle them into mathematical formulae. The time spent teaching a new corporation member the way things are done or walking a newbie through basic scanning 101 can be really hard to put a number on/in/by. How do we assign a value to the logistics pilot that kept several millions or even billions of isk on the field longer in a fight? Is there any quantitative measure for the time spent making sure the POS was set up efficiently so that arrays were easily accessed without flying back and forth all over the bubble? How about the amount of energy and resources put into manning a gate camp?
Still another thing to consider is how much isk is enough? The answer ranges from the PVP pilot who like heroin addicts, just wants enough for the next fix, er, ship to the full-on industrialist/trader who needs all of the isk to be satisfied. Most of us fall somewhere in between where we have a comfortable point, varying slightly by our preferred hulls and fittings. We could all use more and could survive on less.
Orakkus recently wrote about what it takes to be a Solid Pilot, and I think it is just as applicable to the discussion of value [and worth a plug as well]. There is a certain value to a pilot that can fully fit a sniper battleship and the one that knows she needs to stick to something else. It is often immeasurably valuable for fleet commanders to know that the the people in the fleet know their roles and can adequately fill them. I am afraid of only two things in EVE: 1) Logging in and finding that my friends have decided to pack it up and move to some other venue; 2) Idiots.
The first is mitigated by the communication channels that friends share in and outside of New Eden but the second is something that shatters dreams in fits of screaming nightmares. This is another item of value that is hard to quantify. How long do you invest in people that seem to be unable to learn or at least very slow to pick things up? Almost every cost/benefit analysis argument generally boils down into either a he-said-she-said situation or becomes so subjective as to be meaningless.
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