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Tuesday, 27 November 2012

Spies please X up

Posted on 22:00 by Unknown
"Logis X up" or "Firewall X up" is a call for pilots of certain ships to put an X into fleet chat to notify the one who asked about their numbers. TEST has another running joke "spais X up", where "spai" is a leetspeak for "spy". Someone carelessly reading always X up for common hilarity. Also, when someone asks "where the fleet is", he gets some "spy" comments, but soon someone gives him exactly what a spy would want to see: the fleet location.

To my surprise, I wasn't kicked for spying. I am trying to find the recipe of success of HBC and communicate to others, including enemies. If I do it right, I aid the enemy by giving them vital info. This is the definition of a spy. Yet the only comments about my activity in the forums were "we never had an EVE-University spy before", referring to that teaching people is an EVE-Uni thing. Also, when forum porn got out, no one started to seek who was the spy of EN24 because no one cared. Spies are considered unavoidable and not worth fighting off from the grunt level. There is no spy check in Dreddit and you aren't asked to provide private information to TEST via API if you are just a line member.

Let me point out something crucial: if you have any form of spy detection, you are not newbie friendly. You can anchor cans, spam them via mails, recruit on the forums, assign them teachers, give them start money, celebrate them and all, it means nothing if you have spy detection. You ask the newbie to fully trust you: give you his full API, contract you his ships, put things into the corp hangar and so on. In turn you give him no trust. He won't get your API, he won't get your ships and he won't have access to the corporate hangar. If he is a true newbie not yet adapted to the EVE culture, he will find such "full cavity search" in a video game offensive. If he is newbie in a sense of being in highsec only for half year, he'll be suspicious and expect recruitment scams.

Only veterans understand the need of spy detection in EVE. Only veterans see the difference of risk between the corp and the member. Only veterans can see the load on leadership. So only veterans will not be offended by your request to fully trust them without getting any trust in return. In the moment you tell a newbie: "prove that you are not a spy" via any technical means, you probably lost him.

To make it worse, a newbie can easily "be" a spy without any bad intention. He is unaware of security measures and can easily tell or do things that will give crucial information to the enemy. Then he'll be kicked as spy. Let me entertain you with my own newbie mistake: I wanted to cap up the titan during travels but couldn't target it (after jump there is immunity I didn't know about). So I told something like "I can't lock you titan for some reason". I did not see which tab I clicked and told it in local, to the amusement of the fleet and the "spy" spam. Local channel is now on the other side of the screen, away from fleet. The only way for a newbie to avoid such information leak is constantly be in doubt and double-check every action to make sure. Not a fun way of playing.

There is an alternative to spy detection: spy-resistant policies. For example if you only haul 1B in a freighter, you won't be suicide ganked even if everyone knows your location. Similarly the titan I gave out in local wasn't bothered since he used a well-designed and well-known titan midpoint with several supercaps being able to rescue it in a minute. Having spy-resistant policies is necessary to operate in a newbie-friendly way.

Why do most corporations choose spy detection instead? Because spy detection lets the veterans go easy. If no one knows that you are hauling 10B in that Rifter, it will probably get to Jita as no one scans Rifters. You can move your fleet without scouting, you can leave valuable ships in a POS shield, you can manage items without having to deal with passwords or limited access cans or whatever. Spy-resistant policies are demands towards the veterans how to act in order to remain safe despite likely spy attention.

No one wants to make extra effort for other people, especially for newbies. It's much easier to let the HR guy do some extra work and the others play as they want. The costs paid by newbies are ignored as they aren't members yet. So we can assume that every corp will prefer spy detection over spy resistance. Why does Dreddit stand out by being probably the only nullsec corp with no full API request? Are the Dreddit veterans are some superhumans who are ready to make the necessary sacrifices for newbies they don't even know yet?

No, I think Dreddit veterans are just as players as everyone else. However the corp size give them no choice. If you have a HR guy who can catch a spy with 99% chance and your corp picks up 10 new members a year, you'll be damaged by a spy once in 10 years. That's acceptable. However Dreddit gets about 100 new members a month according to the Dotlan graph, so Dreddit hangars would be emptied every month if it wouldn't be designed in a way to be able to operate with known spies on board. It's simply impossible to keep spies out of a large corp, therefore it forces the veterans to suck it up and make the extra effort or deal with the inconvenience that spy-resistant policies mean. Without the paranoid and offensive measures of spy detection newbies both feel welcomed and can learn without always having to fear that they make some serious trouble by a mistake.



I somehow missed this kill last week. I'm without words. The Kestrel of PLEXes is now dethroned.
The purple ratting Machariel with warp disruptor and nanos is an interesting thing too.
13B Freighter is bad enough but since his killers used drones, I'd guess he died to war targets which makes him a capital idiot.
The Goons keep doing the Lords work in Uedama. The Lord do not wish thee to fly 12B worth of totally random crap in a Freighter.
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