There's one group that will always be loyal, that will never betray you, that you can count on for money, ships or whatever else you need, that will check prices for you when you need it, that will always agree with your decisions. You won't find them on any ticker. They're the metacorp.
The metacorp, short for metagame corp, is all of the characters in all of the accounts that you own. I know a lot of people who at least dual window, keeping a miner, trader or shuttle scout in the secondary window. In some ways, this metacorp matters even more for the spy than it does for the PVPer who funds ship replacement with mining. But even for the non-infiltrator plaeyr, it can be useful to consider how your various toon interact with each other. Who makes the money? Who does the scouting?
Let me give an example:
I've got two accounts. ABC's entire account is essentially "burned" since any big alliance will want an API key that shows all characters. His alts will stand up to casual inspection but if someone really starts digging, there's a body hopping Gallente Reborn staring back at him saying "hi, I'm a spy". So right off, this is the home of my trader alt. . .who, through a weird twist of fate is part of a nullsec alliance. My essential, day to day ISK making will probably always come from this account.
My second account is currently training for Covops and cyno for an amusing side project I have in mind. He might make some money at it, might form a corp or any number of other things. He won't be doing it soon, though. In some ways he's the most amusing of my current "bodies" or "toons" or whatever you want to call them but he's not going to be PLEXing my accounts in the near future and he needs time to grow into my goals for him.
OK, so that's three out of six slots on two accounts. Both of them have training queues that will last months. So what to do with the other slots? Well first, each account has an NPC corp, totally unskilled shuttle pilot. Each exists for price checks or advance scouting for the opposite account. If I ever get a third account, though, it won't need a shuttler. I can use one of the other two. So to recap we have:
Account 1:
ABC - the public face of the spy operation
Trader/explorer: who makes the money
Shuttle pilot
Account 2:
Secret project X guy
shuttle pilot
?????
The ????? spot is spoken for, too. This will be my first real infiltrator, a bought character. Checking all the characters on his account won't "burn" him, in fact it'll reduce suspicion. He'll be on the "good guy" account while the money to purchase him came from the "bad guy" account. The only downside to this is that I'll have to pick whether the bought infiltrator or Project X gets to train. So all of this may necessitate a THIRD account. Considering I'll be 1bil a month in PLEX and 10-30bil to buy and outfit a good PVP toon, it may be a bit before I really have to deal with this. It might be interesting, though, to look at your own accounts and see what the lineup on each account says about the characters in it. Since I don't know how other people think about these things, I'd love to see an example of how your metacorp is laid out.
"He'll be on the "good guy" account while the money to purchase him came from the "bad guy" account."
ReplyDeletehow will that "reduce suspicion"? even assuming you can keep it out of your journal/transaction logs - you have a character that is bought for with money that you couldn't possibly have earned on that account - best case this looks like RMT to a recruiter.
Anyways, I'm probably taking this whole spy thing too seriously - you remind me more and more of http://heartsandmindsalliance.org.
If you are serious then stop talking so much and pull off a few corp thefts and scams (preferably ones in which you have to talk to the target like recruitment scams or renting out 0.0 space you don't own) because the only way to improve your skills is by practicing them.
Investing 10-30b into one spy character which you will subsequently burn because you have no previous experience infiltrating any corp does not sound smart at all.
here is my "metacorp":
Character 1: pvp and capital pilot - my main
Character 2: forum alt
Character 3: random 3m SP alt (some trade & combat skills)
Character 4: high-sec mission alt
Character 5: covert transport/hauler alt
Character 6: covert cyno/probing alt
Character 7: Leadership alt (Claymore/Loki)
Character 8: scout/probing/market alt
Character 9: market/jumpfreighter/forum alt
Character 10: supercapital alt (in training)
Character 11: Tengu alt
a few words of explanation on that layout:
ReplyDeleteof course the number of characters and accounts has grown over the years and is not any planned "ideal" setup, many of the characters were bought on the bazaar at some point (4,5,6,7,11).
I play a lot on my main so I cannot put any other useful characters on that account without hurting myself.
Most of my characters have cyno 3+ trained but I mostly use 5,6 & 8 as cyno alts - keeping these on accounts without capitals is of course preferable.
If I need a cloaky scout I can use 6 or 8 - 8 also gives me the option to scout for 4 if necessary (at times I have used 4 as an additional subcap pvp pilot).
I have a lot of duplication of skills between characters (especially 6 & 8 and 5 & 9 have considerable overlap; 1,4,11 are all subcap pvp capable though only one has really good coverage of all races' ships) which may seem like a waste but makes life a lot easier.
Maybe I should also add how I am currently using my characters:
Character 1: deployed in Delve
Character 2: posting on forums
Character 3: unused
Character 4: running missions in high-sec
Character 5: low-sec cyno and supply runs for character 1
Character 6: 0.0 cyno & scout for character 1
Character 7: unused
Character 8: scout & cyno for character 11
Character 9: cloaky 0.0 hauler & cyno for character 11
Character 10: unused
Character 11: running missions in 0.0
And here I thought I wasn't talking much at all. To be honest, I'm only taking this as "seriously" as the rest of my life allows. Right now that's not much at all. So I'm focusing on laying the foundation for ops to follow. I'll go into more depth in a later post but even without buying characters, I'm looking at 1.5bil/month in PLEX plus gear costs starting from zero. If you have suggestions on your preferred way of making PLEX money, I'd be happy to listen. Scamming a corp into renting null space is one worth trying. Large scale Alliance theft isn't something I can "start doing more" of and report on it tomorrow. That kind of thing takes time.
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