Handy Search Tip

For as long as I can remember there has been a search box at the top of hanger windows. In the wormhole I regularly use this feature to find any given ship by typing part of its name. To get an overview of all my own ships in our shared SMAs I can type my unique identifying characters into the search box and only my handful of ships show. As you can imagine this makes life much easier when 20+ people store their ships in the same place.

Many Ships

Name Search for 'Blue'

By complete accident the other day I discovered the search feature extends to ship types as well as ship name. I was hunting in our corp SMA for a particular ship with the letters 'mot' in the name. I didn't find the ship I wanted but another totally random ship appeared in the list whose name did not include the string 'mot'. It took a little while for me to realise I was looking at a Mammoth and that was why the match was made.

Type Search for 'Dominix'

Matches for 'nav' include Navitas and Navy Domi

I've already taken to this new found, and probably ancient, feature like a duck to water. Gone are the days hunting for familiar icons in the SMA window; now I can just type "noctis" when I want to bait people into shooting me. Hopefully some of you reading this post will also find this wonderful discovery useful to know too.

Missed A Memo?

I've been flying around in wormholes for the past couple of weeks finding nothing but empty, offline POSs. This has lead to some paranoia on my part. Several times I've checked the overview settings, unticked the 'Use Active Overview Settings' tickbox on the d-scan. Nothing makes any difference.

I'm not going crazy. Really, probably not.

So what gives? Did I miss some memo that we all need to move out of wormholes. Is Illusion of Solitude about to become some unique relic of a time gone by when men were men and corps survived in the most inhospitable part of New Eden? I have no idea. Can someone tell me where everyone else is?

Trust

In the real world there are many facets to abusing trust which can result in a myriad of outcomes. Sometimes the only repercussion is being outcast from a group of friends which, if you place little value in said friendship, may make whatever you gained worthwhile. Other times there can be legal ramifications if your position allows you to steal or otherwise break the law. In between these areas is a whole spectrum of variation. To add to the complexity the outcome of an abuse of trust also depends on how forgiving the people you betray are.

Online gaming takes the concept of 'trust' and screws with it somewhat. It takes the real-world ideal and looses off the moral restrictions we are normally subject to. In most areas of EVE there are many mechanisms available to mitigate the dangers of abuses of trust. If you are in a hisec/lowsec/nullsec corp you can keep all  your stuff in your own hanger. Corp directors have the largest burden of trust but even they cannot take from members' hangers leaving only the corp wallet and limited assets as pickable fruit. Here the risk rises from hisec through nullsec as the potential earnings of a corp rise. Still any theft is limited to corp assets and a properly prepared CEO should be able to mitigate the issue should it arise. If an unrecoverable theft is experienced then you were probably doing it wrong in the first place.

For corporations who live solely in wormholes we are presented with a separate set of challenges when it comes to managing risk and trust. While we have the same issues concerning the corp wallet there is also the additional problem that all assets in a POS are technically corp assets. Members are allocated to a POS and a hanger and are restricted by permissions to a particular tab in said hanger. There is always a risk, however, that one member could steal from another member due to screwed up permissions. If that occurs the fault ultimately lies with the CEO. Also there is a total lack of segregation beyond the POS level for ship maintenance arrays. This means a single thief can have a significant impact on the morale of a corp (but only if the corp lets them).

I was chatting with one of the guys in our newest corp to join my alliance. It was the end of a fairly quiet corp fleet night and I'd had some wine. The conversation topic went to the state of POSs and I was restating my standard position of being largely happy with the current state of POSs. I really don't have too many problems with them. It would be nice to have permission granularity right down the the hanger level - i.e. restrict pilot 'John Doe' to tab '1' in CHA 'a' at POS 'Praise Bob' - but I'm not keen on too much more security beyond that. To me living in wormholes is like an extended camping trip. Nothing in the hole is worth anything. To realise its value you have to take it back into K-space. People who forget this important detail are setting themselves up for failure and cannot blame CCP for lack of security features should the worst happen. I see a lot of talk about the 'sanctity of the sandbox' and how EVE is a game based on players creating content from the tools we are provided. If this is truly the case why do we so despise POSs? Why not embrace the 'tool' for what it is and learn to love our "pulsating bubble of trust".