Interstellar Espionage via Copy-Paste



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.

Right-click context-menu for Copying a bit of text
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 vulnerability timers for strategic structures, track other entity’s fleets, and generally know what’s going on in New Eden, and can usually make an educated guess as to what a fleet is for.





Thus, spying in EVE tends to be much more casual than real-world spying. Out-of-game communications are generally untraceable unless your target requires you to install some sort of spyware. Which, in turn is easily defeated by using VM software or just having a second PC.



The actions of spies has a pretty significant impact in large-scale wars within EVE. It’s next to impossible to keep spies out of an alliance of any size, so leadership must assume there’s going to be spies lurking in every chat channel, every fleet, and every State of the Alliance meeting. As a result, the average line-member rarely gets told concrete objectives to any operation or military campaign before it begins. Orders are handed down to be someplace at a certain time and be ready for whatever.



On one hand, it’s a little sad, as most pilots don’t really get to see the true metagame of EVE, the careful and daring balance that military directors make as they move supercapital fleets from various staging points like chess pieces on a board. Even when you’ve been part of a fleet on a major operation, you don’t always get told what the ‘real’ objective was. Often leadership will claim victory even when things didn’t go well, the propaganda machine pushed the narrative that ‘we won the objectives that we *actually* wanted’. This has led to a long-running joke in the EVE community of “didn’t want that system anyway”.




Because of all this misdirection, the best intel a spy can get is from inside a hostile fleet. The spy joins the fleet, gets into voice-comms, and relays any important info : destination, current location, what ammo is loaded etc. You’ll get exact numbers of ships, relay fleet movements as they are ordered from the FC, etc. Even an new spy can be more effective than the best-trained scout for keeping track of a hostile fleet. That goes back to one of the basic concepts of EVE - active player hours are the most valuable thing in New Eden.


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