The first of these was a series of events that occurred 7-10 days ago within our corporation. We had made the decision to leave our previous alliance, and we were in discussions with another alliance about potentially joining their organization.
One of the things that they require is a full listing of all Full API's from corporate members. I had no problem providing them with this information, as we collect a Full API for each applicant to our corporation. We collect it via Google Form and it is maintained on a single sheet for just this type of need. Within a few hours, I was informed by the alliance contact that there were some problems with some of the API's.
This post is not about the wonderful world of API collection and maintenance, but rather what I did in response to the information that there were "issues" with some of the API's. I sent e-mails to the individual corporate members, and informed them that there was a deadline and that they needed to respond by the deadline to remain with the corporation. There were some questions as to why, or I already provided it, and those I could deal with. What really threw me for a loop was the response from one member who was AFK for about 7-10 days prior to the API event.
Now, I do not recall the circumstances surrounding the day that I recruited Spector to the corporation. I recall that we spoke to great length as to the difficulties he had encountered with other corporations/alliances in the game and their views on his disability. Maybe I was setting up a tower in low security space. Possibly I was working on crunching numbers for manufacturing Confessors. The real problem with Spector's API was my failure to collect one from him in the interview process and then not providing him with accurate and efficient instructions on how to obtain one.
Upon receiving the mail from him, I replied back and offered my apologies for how the situation was handled, but clearly I had screwed up this interaction with this previous member of the corporation.
You see, there is a huge part of EVE which is very much social. The social aspect of this game literally is it's own society with members from different countries, cultures, languages, and other beliefs all coming together to fly spaceships (or just spin them). My fault in this incident was how I handled the social aspect of an individual who had been maligned by others in the game and almost kicked when he was down. I advocated trying to be a champion for just these types of individuals, but when a perfect opportunity comes along to do just that I failed miserably.
Rixx has a post today which has extended his theme from earlier this week on Paradigm, and one of the lines in there resonated with me while commuting to work today:
"But I would like to think that more and more of us are striving toward our better Angels. One has to believe this, doesn't one? If you don't, then what is left to you?"
The entire post is one of the finest pieces of writing that I have had the pleasure of reading, but the tone and the theme of this individual post, the guest posts this week, and the original one on Paradigm are bringing up a huge topic.
Clearly Rixx is starting the process of getting others in the game to think about it, and I definitely want be a better Angel. We can do better.
What the hell? This guy is an obvious spy, and a real nasty jerk as well from the sound of it. If he really had such health problems, either he wouldn't hesitate to provide an API(it's really not that hard), or he wouldn't want his stuff back because he'd be qutting the game.
ReplyDelete