Spidey Sense Was Tingling

Yesterday was an interesting day in our C1.  One of the newer members of the corporation was out exploring a chain of systems off of the C1.  The C4 next door was occupied and the corporation was working on closing some holes.

One of our newer members (in corp less than a day) decided it would be a good idea for him to sit in their hole, launch his probes, and in his words "continue to probe down the chain".  I think for the purposes of our story, we will call him Gandolf.

Now, most pilots in EVE when probing down sites such as wormholes will use Core Probes.  Not Gandolf.  He likes to use Combat probes to conduct all of his probing activities.  Now, I will acknowledge that you can use Combat Probes to probe down sites, this is not the standard method.  See, Core Probes double the sensor strength (40 vs. 20) over the Combat Probes, are able to narrow down to 0.25 AU for scanning (0.5 AU) for Combat Probes, and finally have a Maximum Deviation of 0.125 vs. 0.25.  For all purpose scanning of sites (wormholes, gas, combat, relic, data) nearly everyone in game will use Core Probes as you can scan faster with their use.

The other wrinkle in this episode was how most pilots in EVE react when someone drops Combat Probes that appear on their directional scanner.  See, the Core Probes are much better to use for general probing, but as their name implies, Combat Probes are really good for one specific action; probing down ships.  As you can guess, the wormhole corporation was not very pleased that Gandolf was probing in their hole using Combat Probes.  It got to the point where one of their members jumped into our public channel, called out Gandolf for being in their hole and basically said "get out of our hole".

At this time, I actually was in a convo with our primary recruiter and I mentioned that things were beginning to look rather bleak for Gandolf on the prospects of him remaining in the corporation long term.

The final nail in the coffin for Gandolf came late in the even when the other director and I were on Teamspeak.  He mentioned that he was having some issues with Gandolf.  The director stated that he had been convo'd not once, but on two separate occasions in basically 24 hours over Gandolf.  I then proceeded to tell the story of what occurred earlier in the day.  It turns out that Gandolf was convo'ing members of neutral corporations he would encounter in wormhole space.  One of the key parts about living in wormholes is reducing your presence and avoiding getting found and possibly killed.  This is one of the reasons why we do not talk in local.

We both basically decided that it probably was best for Gandolf to leave our corporation.  I attempted to remove him from corporation, but he was in space.  Sigh, I guess we will need to wait for him to either dock up or log off.

In corporation chat, I started to ask Gandolf to give me his perspective on his activities earlier in the day.  He then proceeded to give me the details as he saw them.  He totally saw no issue with convo'ing neutral pilots in wormholes, he likes to sit on hostile holes and observe enemy fleets, he routinely uses combat probes for general probing.

About 30 minutes later, when I came back to my computer after being AFK, I noticed a convo request from Gandolf.  I checked corporation chat and he was not there.  I thought, now we can kick him from the corporation.  Funny, the game would not let me kick him.  Turns out he left of his on accord.  When I mentioned this to the other director, he seemed slightly disappointed.  See, we were hoping he might log off in our POS, we boot him from corp, and when he logs on the next time he is bumped out of the shields, scramed and killed.  Now, there was no opportunity for the tower to get it's first taste of blood.

All-in-all something about this member did not feel right all day yesterday.  Whether it was the use of combat probes for basic probing, the refusal to comply with naming conventions for corporation bookmarks, or the fact that he was actually convo'ing neutral wormhole pilots when he encountered them.  Overall, his behavior was not the type of behavior we were looking for in a corporation member.