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Being a n00b, Again

Since my cover-story is new-eve-player, I’m essentially re-starting the game from scratch. EVE has an API that allows authorized groups to check into your character’s background - what corps you were part of, your financial history, what chat-channels you’ve been in, where all your assets are, etc. I can’t transfer any starting-cash to my spy-alt, so I gotta start as both a completely unskilled, and a completely poor character. One of the core mechanics of EVE is the acquisition of Skill-points. EVE doesn’t have character levels like other MMOs where you actually need to play to get stronger, you just need to wait for your skill-points to accumulate. This is both good and bad for a spy - I don’t need to grind to get leveled-up, but I also don’t have a lot of options to speed the process up. This leaves me painstakingly looking through target-corp’s fleet-doctrine* lists, trying to find what I can train into quickly so that I can have a place in any fleet that might be pinged for
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Cafeteria Style Identity

To be a spy, I had to create a whole new identity - a new email, new usernames, a new set of passwords, more importantly, and I must decide what personal details will I try to lie about, and what will I try and leave as genuine ME stuff. Building a cafeteria-style version of yourself is an odd experience. Anything I divulge on target-corp’s comms is something I can’t talk about on home-corp’s comms. (Since there’s spies in just about every corporation.) If a particular Spongebob meme gets posted in home-corp’s forum, I can’t share that on target-corp’s Slack without risking getting outed. So I’m picking and choosing from my own personality what my target-corp’s identity will be, a little bit of [thing] There’s this weird feeling when you’re trying to switch personas. “Wait, can I reply to this thread with my sweet, sweet cultural reference? Who am I right now, and would I know about that thing? “ Lots of careful risk-reward management. Is it worth the little bit of community-building
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Interstellar Espionage via Copy-Paste

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One of the major jobs of an EVE spy is to relay information from your target-corp’s slack/discord/forums/jabber/etc to your home-corp’s intel team. Did a ping just go out to form a fleet? That’s info home-corp’s Fleet-Commander team is going to want to have. Strat-op posted? That’s key for home-corp’s directors to strategize around. Big drama brewing over a forum post? Your corp’s propaganda division needs the full text pronto. The biggest bang-for-buck activity is simply a Ctrl-C Ctrl-V from one window to another. You'll do a lot of this as a spy If you’ve been around EVE for a while you might wonder why a ping is so important - especially since the amount of Op-sec on most means there’s only a time and a form-up location. Rarely is the fleet’s objective or plans actually made clear in a ping or the scheduled-op. However, if home-corp has an organized recon team, it’s not hard to make a good guess to what the objectives are. Good alliances maintain a list of vul
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Hi, I’m [REDACTED]!

I play EVE Online, I fly for a mid-sized null-sec alliance, and I’m a spy. Or at least, I was. This will only be published a long, long time from when the events described actually happened. At least, probably long after. This is my little story. I’m starting this blog since I’m lacking in ways to talk about it. Real-Life friends are a little bored by my EVE sperging, and in-game friends are 100% off-limits due to Op-Sec (operational security) reasons. That, and I’ve never really seen any life-of-a-spy blogs before, only shadowy references ‘a spy did a thing.’ The idea of a MMO that legitimately supported spying was always a draw into EVE for me. Stories about spies, betrayals, epic battles swayed by the actions of a few key folks who lied their way into the right place at the right time were one of the things that pulled me into the game. EVE sunk it’s hooks into me rather quickly, and less than a year into playing I started into the spy-game. It felt like a whole new avenue of th
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