A Calming Influence, Part 1

The New Order mining permit is often compared to a tax or user fee. There's no question that our Agents provide highsec residents with many essential services. But they're not merely cogs in an impersonal machine, vast though the Order's power may be. Our Agents care. Sometimes our most important job is listening to the carebears' problems.

Mariyah had a lot of problems. Over the past 7 years of playing EVE, she'd grown drunk on bot-aspirancy and bad fitting advice. The destruction of her Tayra was inevitable. The only question was whether the person who ganked Mariyah's ship would care enough to help her address the root causes of her problems.

As luck would have it, Tisiphone Dira was the ganker on duty. And she did care. She cared a whole bunch!

Our enemies accuse the New Order of trying to provoke carebears into behaving inappropriately. In my experience, the carebears need little encouragement. What they need is guidance.

Rick Therapist isn't the only therapist on our staff. Every Agent is called upon to act as a therapist for grieving miners and haulers. The first job is to calm the carebears down. At its core, the carebear's anger comes from a place of indignation; they feel they've been treated worse than they have a right to expect. The answer, then, is to make sure the gank recipient knows that the gank was his fault. That way, the logical part of his psyche knows not to be indignant, and his emotions follow suit.

Unfortunately, not all carebears are strong on logic.

Many highsec dwellers who get content delivered to them while AFK persist in blaming others. It takes them longer to embrace the unique selling point of EVE, which, let's face it, today basically consists of us.

"There is no Code," says the carebear. For something that doesn't exist, it certainly manages to destroy a lot of trillions of isk formerly owned by those who violate its rules. Less effective groups of PvP'ers--including nullsec empires, wormhole "owners", and lowsec campers--have a smaller impact than we do. And highsec PvE'ers have the smallest impact of all. By the carebear's reasoning, nothing exists in EVE.

As the saying goes, it only takes one psychiatrist to change a light bulb, but the light bulb must want to change. In the meantime, our Agents can nudge the carebears toward a healthier lifestyle by violently punishing their maladaptive behaviors.

Zulu Dorn, for example, probably wouldn't have been willing to listen to someone who tried to convince him not to autopilot his fail-fit Cheetah. Even the most persuasive person in the world might not have succeeded in talking him out of it. In a split-second decision, Tisiphone opted for actions instead of words. One suicide Thrasher later, the Cheetah was gone.

Now Tisiphone didn't need to persuade Zulu to stop making the mistake with the Cheetah. She only had to prevent him from repeating the mistake.

But that's easier said than done, for carebears are accustomed to doing the same thing over and over.

To be continued...