Another Rave About EVE

I know I know, I've been talking about EVE nonstop, and some of you might have already heard my ramblings of this recent interesting encounter in the universe of EVE.

But, here goes...

So, EVE is an open ended mmorpg, where the players themselves create and write the story of the game by playing it and "making" events happening. One of the most recent "universe worthy" news (they have news bulletins and "E-New Papers" in the game) was the loss of a Titan-class ship belonging to one of the greater Corporations of the game. Abit like real-life i might say, where a flagship of a certain country gets sunked by opposing forces..

But, there are things that happen in a much smaller scale, which also seem to resonate with the themes in real-life. I very recently had such an "encounter". To put things into perspective, I shall begin, at the beginning.

There is a universal channel in EVE, called Rookie Help, which acts as a newbs instant forum. Newbs in the game can post their questions and queries in the channel, and whoever knows the answer to those questions could reply them in-game on the spot. pretty handy, but since there are so many new players, the channel has to be monitored, and the users will have to abide by rules set by the game masters.

one of the rules of using that channel- it has to be in English. non-english speaking players could join their respective channels, all coded by a language.

So this guy comes on, and started speaking Russian, shortly after, he was directed to the Russian channel, intrigued by this, i wondered how many languages the game does support? so i poked around and learned that there are over 40 languages and each having their own channels. Being able to speak and write Chinese/mandarin, i hopped into the Chinese channel, and to my surprise, everything is in Chinese!! even the MOTD (message of the day) was in chinese.. it said "welcome bla bla - discussions on tribes, races, government issues and topics are dissallowed in this channel", "typical" i thought to myself.

eager to join the Comrades, i quickly poked around my Vista OS to look for the language pack, so i can type in chinese.

All of a sudden, this guy comes on and says "Hey, can anyone help me translate American into Chinese? I need to tell my chinese corp member something".

No one replied, being "affluent" in both languages i volunteered.

I was invited to a channel, and had to run through several procedures with the Corp guys so i can tell the chinese guy what to do. all the while translating from english to chinese, so the dude could understand what was required of him.

Soon, i learned that, the Corporation was sort of a "gangsta" corp. what they do is, recruit chinese isk (game currency) farmers to their corp. Since corps can tax their employees of their income (then some would be returned as "paychecks") the corp could benefit alot by having lots of chinese farmers in the corp (who presumably do nothing other than get isk-which is sold for real money in return),If youve played an MMO, you should know exaclty what im talking about.

So, the chinese guy was "recruited" into the corp, he didnt speak any english.

The guys at that corp then wanted me to find out more about the guy they just recruited. the most important info of all was "does he have any friends?"

surprised but not surprised at the same time, the guy said he has around 50 friends, working in the same RL-company as him, as ISK farmers. These guys mine in-game money to be sold as RL-RMB -as a living. 24/7, their job is to get in game isk.

The corp wanted me to negotiate with them, asking them all to join the corp, in return the corp would provide military protection against rogue pirates, who quite often prey on the poorly-pvp equiped ships of these farmers. other benefits of being in the corp includes getting a reduced - docking fee when docking at a space station, in low security sectors. The corp would also provide them with "ratting" space (killing NPC pirates with bounty on their ships placed by the ingame police- the CONCORD). these spaces are controlled territories, and are relatively free from rogue pirates. (the guns from the POS-plyer controlled stations, will rape ships entering their space without a starbase security code, which of course, corp members/alliance would have access to)

If the income of the corp was good (supplied by the employees/farmers), munitions, repairs and even entire ships will be given as compensation, if they were to be lost in their line of isk farming duty.

In the end, I managed to sway the chinese guy, to join the corp, and bring in a few of his friends, just to see how the corp treats them, and did they hold true to their word, and if the conditions are right, all 50 and more people will join the corp.

This is a huge advantage to the corp, having people like that under their control. the income-tax gathered by the corp would be enourmous.

the chinese guy thanked me greatly, for securing a protection-deal with the company, and the company too, was grateful for my negotiation/translating services. they were so glad i got them possibly a multi-billion isk deal, putting their recruitment/contracting requirements aside (being a large corp with controlled space, they only hire well-established players) they wanted to recruit me on the spot because of my supposedly-rare ability to speak a few languagees and dialects. they also promised me a large paycheck.

thinking to myself, if i were to join the corp as a full-time translator, id be talking most the time, not shooting. that would be abit boring imo :P so i kindly refused, but offered my services as a free-lance translator.

for my "troubles", the corp awarded me with a gratituie gift- of 22million isk. which was o.O alot for a newb player like me.

all in all, it was great fun.