Header Art by Major Sniper
Hi everyone, I am SatedOne, the new guy at INN. I like talking to people about odd things, if you are an interesting person with a story to tell I am willing to have a without-prejudice conversation and write a bias-free interview. Reach out on INN if you have a story to tell!
Today I am sitting down with Guts (not their Eve name) from Fraternity. Guts works in the spy business!
S1 – Can I get some background about you?
Guts – I am the Spymaster for Fraternity./Winter Coalition. Pretty much I am the person handling all of our spies. If I need another spy in your alliance, I get someone to join. I setup these fancy ping relays so our FCs can automatically see our enemies pings. If we need someone in a fleet, I ping someone to join it.
S1 – How did you get to your current position?
Guts – I got into this position after doing some recon work and flirting with the idea of starting some spy organization because it seemed fun. At the same time, relay access was impossible – even for my favourite strategic FCs – to get. I started recruiting spies myself and gave people who I thought needed it relay access. Over the course of a couple months, I greatly surpassed what the coalition had already, took it over and made the whole organization more official, as opposed to some alliance director having a couple spies.
S1 – Wow, that is really impressive! A lot of personal hard work and a really interesting mindset to make all that happen. What do you think a successful mindset looks like in the Eve intelligence space?
Guts – Most of it is just the willingness to maintain things and not letting loss bother you too much (mostly people quitting the game). Losing an important agent can be super demotivating. You just have to keep working and understand how people work.
S1 – What do you put into making someone a good agent?
Guts – It is simple. Just teaching people how to not burn themselves with stupid IT stuff or confessing they’re a spy. Making sure agents are in an alliance they enjoy is especially important if they are spying on their main. Another thing is making sure they know how to relay information properly.
S1 – So obviously sometimes things go wrong out there in Eve. How do you support people when that does happen?
Guts – The only person I really ever had properly burnt was a spy I had in Deepwater Hooligans. I SRPed all his high-grade pods, then he firesold his stuff in citadels and I paid the difference to the sell price, then gave him a golden parachute into Fraternity.
S1 – How do you build trust with people that are willing to spy?
Guts – Just talk with them, be a person. Mostly it’s a reputation. If you don’t burn or threaten agents and have a reputable null bloc behind you (e.g. Fraternity.), people are a lot more willing to trust you.
S1 – How do you support and look after yourself? It obviously is a big workload and you are just one person.
Guts – I have a lot of free time. Most [activities involved in] handling spies do not require as much delegation or time as you would imagine. The main reason, I think, other groups have handlers is different personalities. Some people just don’t get along and I try not to force things. Delegation can go badly; the Imperium’s Black Hand recently had delegation backfire on them and there are various other examples in other intelligence organizations.
S1 – So what are your favourite memories that you can talk about, or in generality in your work?
Guts – There are two really good stories I share with people. The time someone handed all their alliance’s spies to one of my guys. Also messing with Rogue Consortium (RC) last year. At the time we were friendly with Deepwater Hooligans and gave them a bunch of intel on certain special channels. If you remember the end of HAC meta fight last year. That was caused after someone got purged from the RC-FC channel and I asked him to transfer a Fortizar in Providence to me. They purged their FC channels, and [engaged in] a bunch witch hunting. The structure loss mail for this; I think they fed a HAC cache to kill it. [An] Incursion spawned on it the day after we transferred it. It was the entire game versus us. We (Fraternity.) brought subcaps and Deepwater gated in their supercarriers. We almost saved it. It was a lot of fun!
S1 – So what advice would you give to someone thinking about getting into the spying game for their various groups?
Guts – You just need to be consistent and be trustworthy. You need to keep your word and not burn bridges. Some people might not think what I do as being trustworthy, but I am pretty honest and straight forward on my main.
S1 – Would you like to take this opportunity to publicly shout out to anyone?
Guts – Jeremy Andedare he unintentionally helped me a lot get where I am in game and nobody will believe it.
Thank you very much to Guts for their time and I hope that people find something interesting in this style of article. If you would like to offer feedback please send me a message via the INN Discord, or leave a comment under this article.
