15/05/11 08:39 AM
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On telling pilots to ‘get lost’ without so many words
Listening to corporation colleagues get themselves organised about who is in w-space and who is in empire space, and how to transition back again, gets me thinking. It should be surprisingly easy to trick a pilot in to getting isolated in w-space. Or, at least, to let a colleague know he is annoying you.
The only way to travel between w-space systems, and to get in and out of w-space in the first place, is to use wormholes. These need to be scanned initially but, once resolved, can be bookmarked and the bookmarks used for navigation. The bookmarks can also be shared and used independently, although I’m sure we’d all like a more robust system.
It should be difficult to get another pilot lost in w-space, because bookmarks for the current system show in green in the nav-comp, and there should be at least a pair of bookmarks per system for the way in and way out. But pilots can be trusting, and often take data at face value. Abusing this trust is the key to isolating pilots.
Let’s say a pilot wants to return to the home w-space system from empire space. You scan an exit, bookmark the wormholes, and contract the bookmarks to the pilot so that he can follow them in. Normally, he won’t be returning in a scanning boat, which is why the following method will work to isolate him in empty space.
Scan the exit normally, and make regular bookmarks; you’ll need them for yourself. Make a copy of the bookmarks and store them in a separate folder, as you won’t want to get the two sets confused. Now delete a couple of crucial bookmarks, such as a pair of wormholes in the same system. A pair of wormholes across different systems would be funnier, as long as they break the link in the right place.
The normal route should be complete:
home ↔ w-space ↔ w-space ↔ empire space
Keep this route for yourself.
A simple broken route deletes a pair of wormholes in the same system:
home ↔ w-space ×→ w-space ←× empire space
Or you can break the route across systems:
home ×→ w-space ↔ w-space ←× empire space
But don’t break the link in the wrong place:
home ←× w-space ↔ w-space ×→ empire space
The pilot won’t be able to get in to the system in the first place, but even if he does he will still be able to navigate out.
Missing bookmarks are quite obvious, though. Certainly, enough pilots have ventured in to systems without ensuring they have the wormhole back bookmarked, including myself, but any pilot paying attention will notice only one bookmark present in the system and realise that he needs two to navigate properly. So you need to make some fake bookmarks. It may be obvious, but it is important enough to have to state: the fake bookmark must be made in the same system as the authentic bookmark it is replacing. This will not only colour the bookmark green in the right system but make the pilot warp to it instead of the wormhole, as required.
Creating safe spots will work for the fake wormhole bookmarks, or you can simply warp to a celestial object and bookmark the warp-in point. Sending your colleague to a celestial object makes him easier for any local activity to hunt, until he makes his own safe spot, which adds to the amusement. When you make the fake bookmarks you must label them to look authentic. Give the fake bookmark the wormhole designation, it’s signature reference, the class of system it leads to, and any other notation you normally use. You can simply copy the details from your correct bookmark. If it looks good, it is unlikely to be questioned.
Contract the bad bookmarks to your colleague, sit back, and watch corporation chat explode with confusion and pleas for help as the pilot warps to empty space in both directions, isolated in w-space with no recourse to scanning his way out. Ha ha ha, what a jape! The same method can also be used to poison a shared bookmark container. Replace a pair of wormholes with empty space fakely labelled, and watch the fleet warp out with no way home. Oh my, the larks that can be had! For added fun, and some level of plausible deniability, claim the the wormholes have unexpectedly collapsed.
This method isn’t flawless. A keen capsuleer can check the authenticity of each bookmark on every stage of his journey, by selecting the wormhole and seeing if ‘approach location’ appears for the wormhole he’s supposed to be sitting on, and not ‘warp to location’, or by creating his own set as he travels. But the idea is that many pilots trust the bookmark set implicitly, and do so whilst in ships that have no method to scan for wormholes. And the only guaranteed way out of a w-space system is to self-destruct and bio-mass your current clone.
On Reaching A Point Of Change
There are sadly, times when your world changes. While changes are fresh and often refreshing, the are also all about things being different and even the most positive of changes still carries with it a high level of stress. Take for instance some of the most stressful events available to humanity: slipping into your first pod; getting married; plugging in +5 implants; flying your first interceptor; having children; upgrading your medical clone. These are all positive events with great rewards attached to them. We learn, grow and become more than we were through them. And still they give us stress and often force us to re-evaluate our position.
This eustress as it were is a cumulative process in the body and pod pilots are not immune. It is a function of our terrestrial origins and comes ‘part and parcel’ with the biological fleshy sack of bones that we stuff into our pods. This is for the most part a good thing. However – like all stress it needs an outlet. Some people find their relief in mining, other from running missions for various corporations and still others from trying to stop other pilots from completing the first two.
[caption id="attachment_966" align="alignleft" width="150" caption="What We Saw From Outside"]  [/caption]
So to has been the move to a new home in a higher class wormhole. We came into the new home with isk in our eyes and the sun aft. There was great excitement, motivation, participation and preparation. The transition from a class 3 to a class 4 wormhole carried with it an added set of challenges that required adaptation, innovation and adjustments in how we perceived and pursued the profits around us. So too does the shift from a class 4 to a class 5. Here also is the need for adaptation, innovation and adjustment. The rewards are potentially much greater, but also the dangers. There is the ever-looming threat of better pilots with bigger toys coming to visit. The concentrations of enemies and the requirements to face them are both higher. If there is one other thing that remains constant in moving from class to class, it is the progression of difficulty.
[caption id="attachment_967" align="alignright" width="150" caption="What We See From Inside"]  [/caption]
As we have set up our operations and began to prepare for the future, several things have become apparent.
- Change generates a lot of excitement and activity that is not necessarily reflective of ongoing reality.
- Perceptions are based in reality but do not always reflect the whole picture.
- The progression of difficulty is not linear and iterations on a theme are less likely to be as effective.
- While loss can be a motivator and tool for education, it can also and often is disheartening.
- Losses are always painful. Even the small ones.
- Sometimes you can simply be unlucky. Other times it is sheer luck that makes things go great.
So in the end we are having to wrestle with our own perceptions and expectations of what we want out of the whole experience. We are each coming to terms with how we will cope and for some it means more changes. Some have decided that the best way to deal with it is to move on to something else. It is not unlike the earliest of starts when we learned how to die very well and what to watch out for. While we are no longer the idiots in the neighbourhood, we still have a lot of learning to do.
On Making Decisions
In the life cycles of corporations and alliances, there are decisions that have to made and choices that have to be faced. There are often as many or more choices and decisions that need to be ignored and left to wither and die in the desert of inattention. Member pilots are all [or were] human and as such have opinions, ideas and speculations that they feel is necessary to share and express with the leadership. Sometimes these are viable options that need to be considered in the light of the ever changing space-scape, while others are valuable tools and nuggets for future use. Some things that they share are sadly just simple thoughts that they opine at every possible moment. To both groups I say thank you. It helps to know that you care enough to at least speak up and often to put actions to words and make things happen.
There are other decisions that fall into the “Critical” category. These include things like setting standings/treaties, war declarations and responses, recruiting, moving and policies. If the CEO or executor manages to screw a decision like this up, the results can and often are disastrous to the rank and file, the corporation/alliance and can even have a fallout affect on other seemingly unrelated entities. As CCP tries to present in their Butterfly Effect and Causality videos, there can be far reaching consequences to all the choices made in New Eden.
Now is the point where WHEN and GREAT are facing decisions about the future. We have been enjoying our time in the class four wormhole that we call Home. Home is where you anchor your POS, as they say. But lately some of the challenge has been leeched away as anomalies become routine, cosmic signatures are done without concern and – hold on to your hats – combat pilots are even mining and harvesting gas for diversions. Thus we contemplate a shift to a class five wormhole to create more opportunities and potentially more conflict. We are scanning around for systems and will settle on one in the near future. We have some competent pilots and I think personally think we are up to the challenge.
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.
On Scanning, Shooting, Salvaging, Harvesting, Hauling and Helping
In a whirlwind rush, the list of things to get done piles up and begins to look like a impending avalanche. There may be fields of ore just floating out in our system patiently waiting to hear from our barges. There are definitely wormholes that have yet to be found, surveyed, catalogued and stored. There are gases dispersing, hoping to be harvested and stored until processing. There planetary resources to extract, refine, process and export. There are reaction to be run, research to be installed, POS arrays to be unanchored, moved, anchored, onlined and utilised. There are resources to be exported, sold, contracted and traded. There are fuels, modules, ships, ammo and skills to be imported. There are possibly neighbours that would like us to alleviate their shields, scour their armour and generally remove their hulls from them.
And none of that even begins to include the number of people that need to be thanked, congratulated, hailed, ignored, watched, befriended, shot, reshipped, berated and/or bereaved. Throw in some ongoing conversations about the nature of the universe, whether ships really fly in space or swim through it, who did what to whom and where to go to get some good, hard spiked Quafe.
The world we live and fly and fight and engineer in is rich, deep and very, very personal. It takes more than just a passing interest in spaceships and spreadsheets to appreciate it fully. This is not to say it’s perfect. The interface confounds me on a regular basis, my ship seems to occasionally have a mind of its own, the drones only respond 100% correctly on the second Tuesday of each week and occasionally my overview tells me I’m somewhere else.
We are busy little Wormhole Engineers. We like our part and the jobs we do. If you are looking for a stable source of income and relaxed, arm-chair piloting – keep flying. There is none of that out here.
On Friends Coming To Join Us
[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="128" caption="Bandits In The Hole"]  [/caption]
This last week or so has seen our good friends and alliance-mates the Fearless Bandits come out to play. They are mainly the Greater Realms’ highsec mission and PVE corporation but they are looking for some diversion and adventure so they have trundled out to the wormhole to set up shop. They have already proven their worth on multiple occasions previously, have been a part of the alliance planning and development from the beginning and we are thrilled to have them along for the ride. It is always a good thing to have more friends around.
While they are primarily focused on mission running in high security, Empire space, they have very quickly adapted to life out in the ‘holes. There are still questions to be considered and answers to deliver, but it’s still a pleasant addition. They now have their own tower up and happily living from it as they join us for several combined operations. Initially they packed light and so we’ve loaned out a few of our now standard fits for them to use. It has helped to know exactly what they are flying and how it should perform in integrating them into our “well-oiled machine” [insert laughter here].
In addition to FEARL coming out to play, we’ve added several new faces who are old faces come round again. Some former corp-mates from long before have finally rejoined us and really stepped out mining/refining game. Hats off to them for helping to capitalise on the resources we just had floating around for lack of more barge pilots.
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