Backstage - OOC Forums
EVE-Online RP Discussion and Resources => EVE OOC Summit => Topic started by: Khloe on 25 Feb 2013, 00:55
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Science fiction settings afford roleplayers/actors lots of interesting opportunities to utilize 'props' to generate conversation between characters. A cadaver of an alien, tubes of colorful, bubbling liquid, or a charred engine part are just a few examples of such tools utilized in such a manner. However, what I find fascinating is that in the realm of New Eden, paperwork is by far the most popular prop utilized by roleplayers to describe their activities.
In an environment where Capsule pilots have the capability to rival nations in power, technological advancement, wealth, and influence, filing reports and forms continues to be the bane of law abiding characters and pirates alike. Can anyone explain why it's so popular?
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Possibly because we've all got hangars full of these (http://games.chruker.dk/eve_online/item.php?type_id=3814)
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Because quite a few of us are in alliances which require a fair bit of reporting, and talking about what our characters really do with their lives includes referencing their admin?
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I am particularly fond of emphasizing Ghost's pro-active reporting to the Nation and the Citizenry as a showcasing of his position of power. Through what ever perception people have of him, through all the work he does in the Nation's name, showing he 'still has to file paperwork' shows there's something much bigger than him just behind him.
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Paperwork doesn't just mean forms and reports. It can also mean things like calculating profit margins, evaluating market trends, and making all other sorts of spreadsheats and such. All of these are extremely common activities in the world of EVE, even for the players. So I don't see why there's anything wrong with people falling back on it.
Alien cadaver will require analyzing and testing. Recording the results of those tests will be paperwork. When you find a charred engine part and take it apart to find any parts worth salvaging, you're going to be taking notes of that and categorizing what's useful and what's not. More paperwork. Tubes of colorful, bubbling liquid are made by science, which is a very paperworky field.
Paperwork is everywhere.
In an environment where Capsule pilots have the capability to rival nations in power, technological advancement, wealth, and influence, filing reports and forms continues to be the bane of law abiding characters and pirates alike. Can anyone explain why it's so popular?
Simply put, "rivaling nations in power", "technological advancement", and acquiring "weath" and "influence" all by necessity require paperwork. Pod piloting is as much an occupation as it is "internet spaceships zoomzoom". You can't expect to dominate the galaxy if all you're doing is yapping in Summit, drinking booze at parties, and baselining.
Now, you might say, "Well, you can talk about more interesting things!" I agree, but! You can always press them for more interesting topics, by asking them what their paperwork is about. I'm sure they can tell you stories about what they're documenting. I did it all the time on my Lawful Neutral bureaucrat on another MMO (since I was typically actually doing paperwork, so it was easy enough to tell people what I was writing if they asked me).
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When I FC a fleet, I have to write an AAR. Else my pilots won't get reimbursed for their loss. When I get actionable intelligence, I have to pass that along. When I lead a training op, I have to submit the syllabus to the directorate. I recently took a stab at rewriting a page for the goonwiki, that was more paperwork. The more powerful one is, the more paperwork needs to be done. A CEO of a 5 man corp can get away with just undocking and shooting things. A CEO of a ten thousand man alliance is going to be stuck in meetings and reading reports all the time.
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I use paperwork as an excuse most of the time. It's generally not work with paper but all sorts of admin, as outlined by other posters before.
Excuse means: When I, the player, have to log off. Can't have everyone sleep 20 hours a day, no?
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So what some of you are saying is that when your characters are doing paperwork...you're literally doing paperwork. *facepalm*
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I see "paperwork" as a catch-all term for "busywork". There's lots of forms of busywork for capsuleers, even ones who aren't CEOs or in positions of leadership. Reviewing reports that were escalated upwards by senior members of your staff because you need to see/sign off on them, ship refits, stuff like that.
In an OOC sense, for me it usually boils down to "I'm doing something that prevents me from putting my full focus on EVE." Whether that's playing another game (which, to be fair, I usually actually just say that Morwen's going to go play a game), chatting with people on TS, or actually doing work from home, is another matter.
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In a world where death and taxes are no longer necessarily constants, humanity finds itself mired in bureaucracy.
Embrace the paperwork! Become Transhuman, and in the process embrace the inhuman! Please fill out form 11.71b if you would like to know more!
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In a world where death and taxes are no longer necessarily constants, humanity finds itself mired in bureaucracy.
Embrace the paperwork! Become Transhuman, and in the process embrace the inhuman! Please fill out form 11.71b if you would like to know more!
Stop pitching your Toaster Implantation Consent Form dammit.
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Just go back to him and tell him you were asked to fill out form 11.71c instead.
It'll drive them nuts. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5vxnBvWXO8)
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Oh, that would be a bad idea. Form 11.71c is also known as the "Form to Determine Permission To Have Carcass Donated To Division Nova With An Estimated Time Frame Measured In Planck Time"
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Could you sign it, please, Tib?
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No.
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I hope you have all the paperwork done for that new table of yours.
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:P
You think that's bad, my whole staff keeps passing out from having to sign everything in triplicate.... in blood.
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Running a power cult does cut down on a lot of the paperwork though, once everyone signs those scientology-style billion-year contracts it's smooth sailing from there!
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Brutor dont "do" paperwork.
Such is the realm of skinny-armed Sebiestors and their pale ilk.
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Brutor dont "do" paperwork.
Such is the realm of skinny-armed Sebiestors and their pale ilk.
+1 hilarious
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Brutor dont "do" paperwork.
Such is the realm of skinny-armed Sebiestors and their pale ilk.
+1 hilarious
[insert literacy joke here?]
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Paperwork, administration and corporate bureaucracy is an essential element of Caldari RP. The real trick is to make it sexy, that's why my characters tend to write reports and file forms in various states of undress.
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Brutor dont "do" paperwork.
Such is the realm of skinny-armed Sebiestors and their pale ilk.
And that's why they stay in the Big House, and you go straight to the trit mines.
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In all seriousness, as a corp in wormhole space we're finding we have to actually create paperwork and forms just to keep everything organized due to old, outdated POS mechanics and communal in-game lifestyle that entails. It's either paperwork to distinguish one person's Sleeper salvage from another's or a socialist structure.
At this point socialism sounds pretty OK. I can't imagine managing that many forms on a daily basis if we grow larger...
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Renting in Fountain back in '09 and running the 'Gateway' (C2 with c4/hisec static) were both the most profitable (at the time) and admin intensive things I have done in EVE.
Our relationship with our landlords was pretty tight - obviously second class citizens, but we paid up in advance and still turned a good profit + actively assisted in fleets and intel channels. The issue was keeping a ledger of all rent contributor corporations and holding annoying 'city hall' meetings regarding people thinking they should pay less and their in-alliance corporate neighbours should pay more. Essentially this turned into the pragmatic camp being forced to devise ever more elaborate ways to explain and enforce the 'how to raise the funds and profit - 101' guides we'd cobbled together while trying to shout down (and being shouted down by) a combination of embezzlers and wannabe Ayn Rand's who had some kind of insane notion that an industrial alliance should be the dominant partner in a rental relationship because 'we got's rights goddurn it' (my eyes rolled to the point that I needed the assistance of an optometrist to get back to the paper work). That's an example of management/people related paperwork and trust me, I never really want to go back to that, even in as big a supporting team as I had, if only because unless you can bring the hammer down on non-compliant groups, you'll start to get 'bright spark' ideas that basically amount to pocket lining at the expense of paying the rent.
Environment driven paperwork, of which wormholes are the only example I can think of outside organised Incursion fleets with rotating rosters, was much more palatable to my tastes. The lack of local and market facilities really helps people to come around to the concept of deferment of gratification until the right time, simple because the rewards are so great. When even your most casual and thus lowest paid site runners are making a few billion in a week in a c5 or c6, the issue of embezzling and pocket lining is killed immediately for 'low rent wannabe crims'. All your low-sophistication scams (outside emptying arrays, which comes down to mechanical security and awareness campaigns) pretty much lose their risk/reward scope or fail outright to get anything going. The downside is this leaves your truly sophisticated, goal driven or pathological agents in the mix, without competition or the potential of 'allying with a try hard who blows their cover'. This increases recruitment checks (which are limited in their ability to discover truly good sleeper agents anyway - but keep out the rabble), increasing paperwork, and it also means you need to know that several people are responsible for calculating payouts, to ensure parity and the ability to verify if someone is, through malice or incompetence, diddling the numbers.
This all sounds very arduous, but to be honest, wormhole paper work, after codifying the format of it and 'best practice' (all very boring when you do it I know), ran smoothly and because any threat to the system was credible and infrequent, people driven by a more adversarial work-ethic had someone other than their colleagues to 'worry about'. It was the constant stream of bile, bitching and try-hard scam attempts (that largely failed) in null that made the paperwork difficult - though this is coming from the POV of a young (now defunct) alliance led by a small group of very different (and abrasive at times) individuals, so it is not reflective of more dictatorial/established alliances who can trade on military power and brand to ease the pressure of discontent when dealing with financial/logistical 'discussions'.
Wall-o-text ends.
tl;dr - I preferred wormhole paperwork to null paperwork, but the rewards scale favourably compared to the complexity of the work in both cases. Reasons are in the text above. Learn to patience!