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EVE-Online RP Discussion and Resources => EVE Guides, Mechanics & Gameplay => Topic started by: Saxon Hawke on 23 Sep 2010, 11:28
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Okay, I've tried a number of different configurations for corp hangars over the years and not been satisfied with any of them.
How do you all set yours up? What do you do to safeguard against theft/misuse?
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There are two ways to attain absolute security:
- CEO has sole access to corphangars. Anyone asking for access is immediately removed from corporation. The moment a second person enters into the access equation, you've got a security hole I can merrily wiggle through (i.e. by studying both people with access long enough to pretend I'm one of them on an alt; by figuring out which is the weaker link, and co-opting him, etc.)
- Corphangars are not used for anything but basic ammo and crap. All possessions of actual value reside in private player hangars. Corporation is a de-facto empty shell, used only for communication and brand identity. (this is our method in GH-SC.)
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Word. I don't even have offices, let alone corp hangars. xD
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^ That.
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I'd go with Station Warehouses, sure they can only be built in station, and are so large that they cannot be moved. But being able to have separate passwords in the hangar sounds like the way to go. Just name them appropriately and send out the passwords to the appropriate people.
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There are two ways to attain absolute security:
- Corphangars are not used for anything but basic ammo and crap. All possessions of actual value reside in private player hangars. Corporation is a de-facto empty shell, used only for communication and brand identity. (this is our method in GH-SC.)
^^
also this
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- Corphangars are not used for anything but basic ammo and crap. All possessions of actual value reside in private player hangars. Corporation is a de-facto empty shell, used only for communication and brand identity. (this is our method in GH-SC.)
I agree, thats the best way to deal with the corp tool really......basic utility stuff, nothing of value.
What i've found to be limiting though, is how one can properly channel group efforts in eve, even as CEO you can be tempted to steal everything and ditch former members, since anything at some point must pass throught the hands of a "trusted" individual.....be it profits, deliveries, BPOs, etc. There is this ever present feeling that whatever effort you do in the game to cooperate with others and build something togeher, will be swiftly taken at the right moment regardless if you are cautious.
In the extreme that you think everything through the concept of "don't invesnt what you can afford to loose", time cannot be recovered in any way, so regardless if the ISK loss was nothing major, all the time effort goes down the drain.
I learned to just "shrug-it-off" and continue, but it really baffles new players when you try to explain it to them.
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What is described by all above is not corporate security. Hellgremlin is taking advantage of the mechanics of cooperative effort, not game mechanics. If only the corporation CEO has access to the hangar it is largely a waste of isk and does not produce cooperative play.
Do you incur a risk? Sure, but real life businesses incur these kinds of risk. Penalities exist in the real world that do not in Eve. Hellgremlin may very well be in my corporation and able to transfer items from an alt to another character. If I assumed all new members are GHSC then the corporation can not achieve its goals.
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I have to disagree with you, at least partially. It IS a security method, albeit one that does so by reducing the attack surface to the absolute minimum rather than implementing strict controls to enable large swathes of functionality.
Obviously this doesn't work for all corporations, but then since corporations (and players) have different goals, one wouldn't expect a one-size-fits-all method.
FWIW, I know that Suddenly Ninjas follows the same method GH-SC does. Infiltrating them wouldn't get you very far.
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I always keep just a limited stock in the corporate hangars, rest in my personal assets. Not that a bunch of modules and some frig / cruiser hulls are worth stealing.
Another great method is not to be a complete douche (for lack of better word) so people want to fuck you over.
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For the ILF it basically boils down to a few issues.
First, we give away a lot of stuff to our pilots and advertise that we do as part of our recruitment spiel. Ships, equipment, ammo, etc.
Each of these used to be in their own hangar appropriately labeled and easy to find. With the exception of the ships, they were open to everyone and people could just go find what they wanted. Individually, the modules were not worth much but we built up a huge stockpile over the years. Then, about two years ago, a guy who had been in the corp about a month committed suicide in-game. His character was gone. And then we realized that all the hangars had been emptied. The total loss was probably about half a billion isk worth of T1 gear.
So we changed the configuration to minimize loss. Each division got its own hangar to deposit all of their own stuff into. This became a problem because not every division had the same stuff in its hangar and if pilots couldn't find what they needed, they had to find someone from another division to look in their hangars and see if they had it. It was such a hassle that people stopped using the hangars.
So we changed the configuration in an attempt to improve usability. Rather than dividing the hangars by division, we divided them by rank. The newest players had access to the least amount of gear and the stuff was the lowest end quality. As you moved up, you got access to more and better stuff. This turned out to be a nightmare to administrate and didn't make the usability any better.
That's where we're at now and with an influx of new pilots, I've got people asking for a hangar system revamp. Sometimes I really hate being the boss.
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In regard to previous replies: Co-operation inherently needs trust, and presents a risk. However, if one wants to achieve more than any single person can achieve, co-operation is required.
Business risks can be managed by balancing potential gains and risks, and by taking sensible precautions.
The things I feel are most important are
- Having some kind of recruitment policies
- Understanding how the access system works; it is pretty complex and not always logical
- Good conceptual model of what corp work and equipment you want to have and how you want to organize it, so doing one thing for corp or needing something does not require giving access everywhere
- Accesses on "need to" basis (rather than trust, seniority, nice-guy, had it before etc)
- Making a recovery plan. Understanding what you can afford to lose.
Theft will happen, like ship losses in pvp, spies, or blue-on-blues in diplomacy.
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Create insurance.
In real life the loss of theft is countered by the consequences of getting caught and punished.
With no legal and no extra-legal means to punish an offender other than by fines, one must insurance risk of loss another way.
In its most basic form, if one puts 1 billion worth of stuff in a hangar, each person that wants access has to pay a deposit of 1 billion. Deposit is returned when person leaves corp.
If corp member wanting access doesn't trust the CEO, then what is he doing in the corp, and why would he want access?
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Create insurance.
In real life the loss of theft is countered by the consequences of getting caught and punished.
With no legal and no extra-legal means to punish an offender other than by fines, one must insurance risk of loss another way.
In its most basic form, if one puts 1 billion worth of stuff in a hangar, each person that wants access has to pay a deposit of 1 billion. Deposit is returned when person leaves corp.
If corp member wanting access doesn't trust the CEO, then what is he doing in the corp, and why would he want access?
Not a bad idea.
However, you could pretend to set up a new corporation, do recruitment, grow big enough, then boot everyone and make off with the insurance. Needs more initial investment than joining as a thief, but I am sure someone could make it work.
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For a brief while, Esna was a director in a smallish corp (Order of the Golden Lobster). During this time, we nominally had a "ranking" system in which older members were assigned access to higher hangar divisions, the practicalities of living out of POSes in nullsec lead to us doing something quite different.
Each new arrival would be assigned a division 1-5 and allowed to acess just that division tab. We tried to balance the number of people using each division tab so that we could have as many people assigned a seperate tab on each POS' corporate hangar array(s) as possible. Before any member was given a tab on the CHA, they were made to understood that anything they stuck in there was subject to loss by corp theft, emergency removal due to POS deconstruction, and outright destruction of the POS. I personally reccomended each member create a small cache of safe-spotted GSCs to store their really valuable stuff.
The final two tabs were the POS fuel and director tabs. POS fuel was restricted to starbase officers, and although not as secure as the director tab, we really didn't think anyone would bother to make off with just the POS fuel if they had those kinds of roles. Directors, finally, was obviously directors-only, and required a mail from a director or known director's alt, or voice/vent acknowledgement before anyone else could get anything removed from it.
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Saxon, it sounds like most of your members could utilize a single hangar for the "freebies," perks of being in the corporation and you may need another hangar for POS fuel and directors. Perhaps a directors-"take" and all-"view" blueprints hangar so members can create copies for their own use. This means you probably will have 3 hangars unused - so what?
Slightly related - is there a corp tax? I ask because this could be considered a form of insurance.
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Saxon, it sounds like most of your members could utilize a single hangar for the "freebies," perks of being in the corporation and you may need another hangar for POS fuel and directors. Perhaps a directors-"take" and all-"view" blueprints hangar so members can create copies for their own use. This means you probably will have 3 hangars unused - so what?
Slightly related - is there a corp tax? I ask because this could be considered a form of insurance.
I think we will likely end up going toward something like what you have suggested here. I might break the freebies into a couple of hangars to make it easier to find things.
We do have a corp tax, but those funds are used primarily to fund things like our anti-pirate bounty and our hull replacement programs.
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We do have a corp tax, but those funds are used primarily to fund things like our anti-pirate bounty and our hull replacement programs.
Sorry, I have a "bad habit" of thinking from an economic/business perspective in Eve and this does not make sense to me unless you have a larger number of PvEers who gain a measure of protection from effective PvPers. As for hull replacement, it is added insurance and rewards negative behavior (losing), but makes lots of sense if engaging in activities to achieve corporate goals.
It can quickly become a discussion of what does a corp tax pay for, if anything. This can be extended up change for alliance taxes.
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I'd suggest one division, available everywhere, with things such as:
Fitted t1 frigates and destroyers, some t1 cruisers.
More expensive things go into hangars that are more restricted. With a rank structure, someone's squadron boss could obtain equipment for junior people. That sort of thing.
I've found the station containers, are rather complicated and fiddly to use. They don't hold assembled ships for example.
And, while you can put blueprints into a query-only hangar, to in theory allow people to use them to build stuff, the roles they need to do that, also let them do stuff with all other corporation factory jobs, which is not necessarily a good thing. e.g. drunkpilot pres rong butan situations.
There are occasional rumours of corporate UI overhauls though.
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Sorry, I have a "bad habit" of thinking from an economic/business perspective in Eve and this does not make sense to me unless you have a larger number of PvEers who gain a measure of protection from effective PvPers. As for hull replacement, it is added insurance and rewards negative behavior (losing), but makes lots of sense if engaging in activities to achieve corporate goals.
It can quickly become a discussion of what does a corp tax pay for, if anything. This can be extended up change for alliance taxes.
It's best not to think of the ILF as a corporation. It gets messy if you do. We are a political movement made up of pilots from a wide variety of professions. Pilots give according to their ability and receive according to their need. Everything that is done is done to collectively advance our goal of a safer and more prosperous Intaki.
Initially, we had no corp tax. Then we had a 5 percent tax to pay for our offices. Then my corp members told me that they wanted to pay more tax to pay the corp back for the things they had received. Who am I to argue with that?
It's interesting that you say that hull replacement encourages negative behavior. I've never seen that in an ILF pilot. Whenever a pilot loses a ship and puts in the request for a replacement they are usually humble and apologetic to need the service. They want to contribute to our cause, not be a burden on it.
I think that goes back to the culture we have developed internally. Unlike some Intaki separatist groups whose focus was to tear things down, the ILF has always been focused on building things up.
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The "corporation" model works great for some sorts of pilot organizations. I'm thinking of Gradient, for example, and Hell's Librarians -- industrial corps, if you will. But for other organizations, such as political movements (e.g. ILF), military units (factional warfare), and cooperative individual pilots (pirates, explorers, traders, etc.), it breaks down rapidly.
Frankly, the "alliance" model works better for many things, if it weren't for that pesky 1b fee that's too expensive for many groups. Each individual corporation retains the ability to launch their own starbases, have hangars and wallets, etc., as well as issue contracts and market orders. Personally, I like the approach of "small pieces, loosely joined", where each pilot is relatively independent but supportive of each other. Alternately, an alliance could have many small corporations, where each "corp" is more or less analogous to what most folks currently consider a division.
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A lot comes down to the reason for which a corp exists. A lot of corps only exist as "a banner" to fly under.
If all you use a corp for is a collection of people, who enjoy a common activity (mining, PvP) and do these things together, then there isnt much need for corp or alliance hangars or programmes. Its when you get to a point when it becomes a group of people who want to fly together AND support one another things become easier if you work together, pool resources and have a propper system.
The first BPO I had wasnt mine. I proposed the idea to buy some BPO's, corp members contributed ISK for the cost and got access to it. All subsequent BPO's have been bought with corp tax. When the corp moved to WH space we needed 600mil ISK and called on all shareholders to contribute capital or face a dilution of shareholding.
Without aiding eachother we would most proberbly still be mining and mission running in high sec.
You just need to be sure of who needs access. I run a method where you have no access unless it is needed, and you ask. Most members can view all hangars, but why do you want "take" rights out of the ore and minerals hangar?
EDIT: I can see how the method proposed by Cassillia (loose alliance) could work for a corp such as mine. For instance, if we found a group of people we want to fly together with and opperate with, like a group of like minded political allies, an alliance could work because we keep our independance and ability to aid one another as a small corp like we have been doing, without risking any corp merger or loss of assets though theft ect. If things dont work we leave and move on. But this could easily be accomplished without an alliance though shared comms channels, shared forums and shared standings. But I suppose you dont get the "shared banner" to fly under if you do this.