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[Myyona]

Being no fan of corporation infiltration and theft I might have a biased negative view on this, though I accept it as a game mechanic/element.

If I have to believe that a successful infiltration was done IC the entire thing has to be done IC. For one, that requires that the infiltrated corporation is IC all the time and no level of OOC friendship or interaction has been used to gain trust within the corporation. The IC/OOC fuzziness is exactly around the trust issue (in which domain does the trust exist?) which is essential for the infiltration to be a success.

This, along with the unrealistic devotion when using an alt for the infiltration, makes it very difficult for me to accept a corporation infiltration as IC. More often it just seems like a poor attempt at avoiding negative feedback from the community at large. And I, for one, will indeed think poorly of you from an OOC point of view.

[lallara zhuul]

It's EVE, everything goes.

Let me elaborate that.

When it goes to the bottom line, in EVE people will do whatever they want, if it feels good.
People play to enjoy the game, some people just enjoy different aspects of it.

Me?

For personal reasons I am against infiltration in any shape of form, but that's because I like to trust people, so breaking such a basic thing as trust, for me, is a big deal.
For the same reason I do not lie, and partially because my memory is not good enough to keep track of them.

Some people like chocolate, some people like marshmallows, some people like to smack on local and grief people, some people like carebear hugging asteroids in high-sec, it's pretty much all the same.

Of course I am vocal when someone chooses to do something that I would not enjoy or find threatening to me.

It's EVE, everything goes.

[Rodj Blake]

Using an alt to infiltrate someone is not only uncool, but too easy as well.

Now, convincing an enemy that you've turned over a new leaf and that in the future you'll be their best buddy before destroying them from within - that's slightly different.

[Cheiftan]

Using an alt to infiltrate someone is not only uncool, but too easy as well.

Now, convincing an enemy that you've turned over a new leaf and that in the future you'll be their best buddy before destroying them from within - that's slightly different.

Thats a very good point, however i do stand by the concept that spying has become a valid tactic, the real art is how you use the information

[Jade Constantine]

Using an alt to infiltrate someone is not only uncool, but too easy as well.

Now, convincing an enemy that you've turned over a new leaf and that in the future you'll be their best buddy before destroying them from within - that's slightly different.

That almost happened to us last year you know.

[Lyn Farel]

Just like if PIE realized Katashi was my alt and spotted him taking down towers or whatever, then shot him up and issued a statement about Katashi being a paid agent working for Mizhara. Then... well, again pulled out of my ass, Lyn Farrel of KotMC rolls up and goes "Hey, wait a minute. Katashi was not only neutral, he was part of your corporation and could have had a perfectly good reason for being there. Why did you guys shoot and kill an innocent? I demand proof!" and there's fun to be had around that stuff.

If this is ever true, Lyn, we need to talk about how this is 'not Ammatar'...

Not sure to understand the whole thing, but no. :p

Realistically, there is never the option that bob will become a double-agent or gain sympathy for his target.  Bob is just skin baggaged over a different IC character, who controls all of his decisions to be unwaveringly in his/her interests.  Bob has nothing to gain from this job, he's a true slave.  I view this as at variance with good form in RP.

Let me counter.  My first infiltration was Xaiah infiltrating Aegis Militia.  Xaiah was originally created as a carebear alt.  She was a Caldari created around the same time Bacch was in Star Fraction shooting the Caldari loyalists.

There was an opportunity to infiltrate Aegis Militia with her, so I did.  I spent nearly 9 months in AM, and while she never had sympathies for their goals (ie, Amarr Victor [insert latin spam here]), she did get to know a lot of the pilots in AM.  Xaiah flew in AT 4 for Aegis Militia (incidentally, about an hour before I flew with Bacch for SF--that was rather hectic) and did her best to perform as well as she could despite her true loyalties, and she did favors for members of the alliance not merely because it suited her purposes, but because she got to know and like many of the pilots.  At the end of the day, however, her beliefs were stronger than any sense of loyalty or duty she felt towards the pilots in AM, and so when the time was right, she acted.

Had she truly been a slave, she would not have flown for AM in the tourney.  It was a last minute favor begged for by some of the leadership because she was the only one online that could fly a particular ship, but she could have easily bowed out and no one would have held it against her since it was sprung on her at the last minute.

In any case, for all the "dat's not doin it right" comments about RP and infiltration, it will continue to happen.  There are ways to prevent it from happening to you, though none are foolproof, but there are ways to protect yourself from serious damage being caused.  You make choices when you run an organization.  How paranoid do you want to be?  How much do you really care about your forums being leaked?  Do you want XYZ group to have intel on your upcoming operations?  Maybe you want to spring a trap and you know you're infiltrated so you broadcast something to the entire alliance with plenty of advance notice to ensure your enemies know what's going to happen where and when, but keep the second part of the plan close to your chest so that when they think they're springing a trap they're simply playing into yours.

To me those are the fun parts of the espionage game.  I don't care what they ate for breakfast, if someone has too much control over the color of their socks or whether their parents were murdered by terrible horrible [insert your choice of pirates, slavers, or other boogeymen here] or not. 

Then again, my view of RP starts when I log into EVE.  I'm not actually a pilot, nor am I a capsuleer, and nor are any of the other players in my alliance.  But when I refer to them I tend to throw around the word "pilot", tend to refer to my ship as "my ship" rather than "my internet spacepixels," and everyone on my TS3 server refers to me as Bacchanalian rather than Rick.

You did not even try to speak with the people of AM afterwise, did you ? Or you just did not care of their feelings ? Not to add the whole smacking and chestbeating we had to face after, and even if we may argue that this is RP, it is again the whole point of my "uneasyness" when we start to mix infiltration with RP. Reading a lot of people (that were not even the authors of the sabotage), it sounded more like a big OOC taunt and childish mockery glued into an IC coating.

I perfectly know what happened, I was there and this was just before I got co-executor of the whole alliance. AMC corp was so washed up and broken morally after all these repeated infiltrations that we had to take that and assume that poisoned gift for them (and because it would never have happened in our corp, it was run exclusively by 3 RL friends). It was the last of the blows and rotten stones that eventually leaded the whole leadership to collapse (hey, this sabotage was not even really hurting in terms of isk damage, it was pure moral and backstabbing damage). As you said yourself, they were a very genuine bunch of friends and I still recall how scary was the Conclave forums private parts where everything ended to revolve around witch hunts and unsane levels of paranoia.

For what we know of, this infiltration was not even totally RP. How could it be when Xaiah was speaking with us all OOC-ly on a regular basis ?

Note : I remember that myself had several good ooc(/ic) interactions with Xaiah and quite liked the player. I was a little surprised to hear what happened when Soratah announced the thing. He sounded very pissed.

Well said, Farel.

I'm recalling that Moira ooc infiltration on my guys a few years back with some unpleasantness.

As I recall, the infiltration was done entirely in character. Althea Ekran, a very well known alt of mine, pretended to be leaving Moira due to hating Julianus Soter, and was tired of participating in the Federation's wars.

Althea Ekran then joined Vitalia's corporation, Khanid Provincial. Now, At this stage, Althea Ekran was operating as Julianus Soter's operative. The long standing, and long-RP'ed interaction between the two in various public and semi-public settings, was that Althea was Soter's right hand gal, with covert operations as her speciality. The intent was to destroy the Provincial's new Archon, dealing a blow against a Khanid Kingdom loyalist corporation and ally of the Caldari State.

Which part of that is out of character?

Addendum: Better part: Althea Ekran's character history is about how the Khanid Kingdom made an underhanded deal with a Caldari megacorporation, eventually throwing her to the wolves as the bodyguard of a noble family in the Kingdom. Hence, when the ruse was discovered by Vitalia's pilots, and the plot thwarted, she put in her bio "DEATH TO THE KINGDOM".

Well, should we now outlaw that kind of roleplay? Is that what we've come to? What game is it that we're playing, anyway?

Was Khanid Provincial 100% IC on all of their comm channels, always ?

[Casiella]

To deviate slightly from the OP: does everything one does IG have to come down to "good RP"?

[Merdaneth]

I think it is next to impossible to do good infiltration jobs totally IC, since a lot of 'secure' communications find place on an OOC level and using out-of-game tools to.

If OOC communications are unusable for IC infiltration jobs, you'll find very few organizations worthy to infiltrate.

In my experience trust of a character is often based on trust in the player. If my character is perfectly obedient but I the player insult my CEO during OOC conversation, I'm not gonna get that director position. However, if I insult my CEO during IC conversation, but I'm good buddies (or RL friends) with my CEO, it is much more likely for me to get that director position.

Many people use OOC comms and OOC trust a shield against infiltration, which makes it quite hard for the IC infiltrator. When the going gets tough, people tend to fall OOC.

[Merdaneth]

To deviate slightly from the OP: does everything one does IG have to come down to "good RP"?

Well, part of the goal of a game is to make it fun for as many other players as possible. Things that aren't fun upset people, and if enough of those things happen, people stop playing said game. There is a limited tolerance for fun-reducing players in any game (and any society), beyond which the game (or society) breaks down.

I see "good RP" as a alternative way of saying "productively and fun-generating play"

[Casiella]

Alternately, I think of "good RP" as a subset of "fun gameplay". Other things in EVE (and other MMORPGs as well) can be lots of fun without necessarily being RP per se. Witness how much people loved the snowball launchers, for example. We can also appreciate certain gameplay elements without necessarily finding good IC explanations for them (e.g. customs offices in W-space).

Returning to the OP, then, infiltration occurs to the scale it does in EVE because, even though people don't like getting infiltrated, generally speaking we do like playing in this sort of environment where the metagame (in the game theoretical rather than roleplay sense) matters so much. Many players enjoy the spy game at different levels, whether as observers, spies, counter-intel, and similar roles. I don't think we can take as a given that infiltration's relation to "good RP" (a necessarily subjective term) automatically determines whether we can consider it "fun gameplay".

[Inara Subaka]

So, skimming through the thread I may have missed a point or three.

Long and short of it is: IC infiltration is very viable, and has been done on several occasions (including current situations). The character acts as they need to when interacting with their 'marked' corpmates. As your OOC choices (whether to shoot at a particular target, whether your logistics happen to hit the person that needs them when they should, etc...) are the exact same as your IC choices are, I don't see a problem on that end.

As for "OOC Comms" (forums, intel channels, voice comms, etc...) I see them as IC lite; No, they may not be intended to be IC communications, but if your CEO says "hey, we're going to be pulling an op at this time on this date." you can assume that your character (IC) would be privy to this information (IC it would read the exact same most likely).

That all said, maintaining a reasonable communications channel between the infiltrator and the person getting the information is the difficult part IC. Using alts is "easy" if the person has very few qualms with it, and there's the guarantee that the infiltrating character won't defect. However, it's much easier for an information broker to pay off someone else to do the grunt work (or pay someone already on the inside to defect), rather than try to run multiple infiltrating characters at the same time. Risk in that case is being played, the character/player being paid to be on the inside is feeding false information while taking your kredits. It's one of the reasons I like the intrigue of the intelligence/infiltration side of the game.

[Cheiftan]

To Inara:

You do bring up valid points and i agree with most of what you say, the only thing that worries me is when people make minmatar slave jokes OOC like JR dose to me.

Would we consider that IC.

Im all for infiltration and in my eyes thats not the issue, for me its the blur between IC and OOC.

[Inara Subaka]

To Inara:

You do bring up valid points and i agree with most of what you say, the only thing that worries me is when people make minmatar slave jokes OOC like JR dose to me.

Would we consider that IC.

Im all for infiltration and in my eyes thats not the issue, for me its the blur between IC and OOC.

Not sure who JR is (at least by the initials), but likely if I was in that corp Inara would assume that JR has a bad sense of humor and Cheiftan puts up with it. At least, that's how I'd translate that OOC/IC; unless it's specifically OOC and it's just JR spouting nonsense on comms, in which case I'd ignore him. It honestly depends on the information and whether there's a reasonable connection.

If I know OOC that someone is going to be away from the game for a couple days, I'll just make an IC connection that the character is going to be out of comms for the next couple days for a sabbatical or something. But if they are going to be away because their dog died and they are grieving, there's no reason to make a dead dog reference IC if the character doesn't have a dog.

[Morwen Lagann]

JR would be the alliance executor, John Revenant, Inara.

[John Revenent]

people make minmatar slave jokes OOC like JR dose to me.

Shhhh....

 JR has a bad sense of humor

Check...

it's just JR spouting nonsense on comms, in which case I'd ignore him.

Check...

But yes if you look at the info dump you will see I am a immature guy hanging out with friends OOCly alot, it includes nonsense of comms, very very bad sense of humor, and being a general idiot. Making farting noises, picking my nose, informing of good (And very bad) toilet experiments... among other things.

Its defiantly not how John is...