Full Disclosure

Late Monday evening brought about a series of e-mails between my CEO character and a recent new member to the corporation. 

This member had joined us on Saturday after he had popped into our public channel on Friday evening, but before any of the recruiters had a chance to speak with him. 

He represented himself as a 95 million skill point pilot who had millions of SP in the Science and Production areas.  Basically here was someone who had at least skilled for invention and manufacturing.  We have been seeking members like this, as you are limited in slots available to your character(s) at 11 maximum.  The more pilots involved in the process, the greater quantity that can be produced or invented at any given time. 

Needless to say, we were impressed with his skills.  He chatted with a recruiter and completed our questionnaire.  One of the requirements on our questionnaire is for a full API.  Some individuals provide it with no issues, some with a brief exchange as to the "why is this needed?" 

Our recruiter threw his API information into jackknife (api screening tool).  This confirmed the skills that he had, ships and modules he can use.  But, there also is one additional feature that it provides; the ability to search eve-o forums for character trade posts.  Our recruiter noticed this, but we kept it in our back pocket for use at a later time if necessary. 

Now, a bit of information on our corporation and security.  We take this very seriously.  There is literally two other individuals in corp who have the access to Take an item from 2 corp hangar sections.  And, the directorship control what is ever placed into those sections. As to manufacturing and invention, we have a similar setup.  The members who eventually get that role will have the ability to Query the hangar with the inputs for their jobs.  But, they never will have the ability to Take. 

The new member was not online Sunday, so we fast forward to Monday.  It is 4:30 am local time and I am auto-piloting one of my director characters back through hi-sec. While going about this, the new member keeps posting in corp chat that he needs the roles to build things.  My spidey senses start to queue up at this time.  Yes, a builder or inventor joining a new corp would be interested in getting up to speed on these things.  But, he would not be moaning about his inability to do so in corp chat or rage quitting for hours at a time when no one is hearing his whining.  Poor baby. :(

I decided to give him an assignment and posted it via or forums.  I thought everything was moving along well until I returned home late at night and one of the members in the Leadership circle mentioned that the new member had posted on the eve-o forums looking for a mining corporation.  I reviewed the post and noticed some liberties had been taken with the post which were outside of his assigned task.  I decided to start pushing buttons to see where things went. 

I inquired as to his association with the character who ultimately ended up with the buyout offer for this character.  He claimed to not know who it was. 

I then linked the sale forum to him, and he now decided it was a good time to disclose that he purchased the character.  A little too late there. 

I then proceeded to inquire as to how we actually knew who he was.  He represented himself as a 95 million SP industry character.  Technically he has the skills for those functions, but has he ever done those things?   How can we sure?   How can it be validated?   Even with the security me smashers we have in place, you still do not want to expose billions of ISK in inputs to someone who you have no idea whether they know what they are doing or even who they are. 

Needless to say I had made the decision that it would be best for all parties if we were to go our separate ways.  But, before I even had the chance he pulled the handle on his ejection seat, but not before who fired off a wonderful gem of a corp mail to the entire membership. 

A lot of this drama could have been avoided if he had just disclosed that this character was not his originally and that he had only purchased it recently.  Yes, we may have still had issues with him in the future, but we cannot even cross that bridge if there is zero to little trust in the first few opportunities between member and corporation. 

Full disclosure would have helped him. 

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.