GeneralStab Logs: The Mittani On RMT

Some people make the GeneralStab channel sound like it just contained a lot of trolling and nothing said in the channel should be taken seriously.  Admittedly, I've only had time to go through about a month's worth of logs at this point, but I read a lot more than trolling.  Take for example this discussion about RMT from 5 June 2011.  I'm not going to do a raw data dump of the log.  Instead, I'll try to break it up into digestible chunks.

First was Rat Salat from Morsus Mihi attempting to explain why using the proceeds from moon goo for RMT just wasn't feasible.

[08:54:14] [rat salat] But I do find the whole tech RMT accusation pretty funny
[08:54:23] [rat salat] Let's say MM corp A has 8 tech moons
[08:54:30] [rat salat] CEO can maybe skim 4 moons
[08:54:39] [rat salat] Which is what? 800 bucks max?
[08:54:55] [wibla] rawr-hirr-rat-salat_: 800 bucks per month would, actually, pay for my house loan xD
[08:55:08] [rat salat] Maybe if you live in a fucking trailer park
[08:55:24] [rat salat] 800 bucks a month? that's 200 a week
[08:55:29] [rat salat] fucking mcdonalds money

That got The Mittani started on the subject.

[08:54:53] [the mittani] i know a rmt transaction of about 2 trillion
[08:54:58] [the mittani] that's about 40k usd
[08:55:09] [the mittani] don't knock rmt, it's p. serious cash at the upper levels
[08:55:36] [the mittani] fuck, iskbank had records of about 300k in profit
[08:55:56] [rat salat] Advice... skip the rmt, quit eve and get into med school lol
[08:56:14] [the mittani] rmt is relatively easy and doesn't involve 120k+ of debt
[08:57:06] [the mittani] it's not like humans do work to generate rmt isk
[08:57:09] [rat salat] No, but it does take 80 hours to control the corp
[08:57:14] [the mittani] it's all virtual machines running bots, or moon products
[08:57:23] [rat salat] Now, botting, that's different
[08:57:32] [the mittani] primarily it's questor in l4 mission hubs
[08:57:33] [rat salat] There's some RMT to be made there
[08:57:50] [rat salat] 1 bot over a month makes a tech moon look silly
[08:57:51] [rat salat] so yea
[08:58:57] [the mittani] and due to virtual machines, you can run as many bots doing missions as your cpu can handle
[08:58:59] [rat salat] E#xactly
[08:59:18] [rat salat] So tech for RMT is fucking irrelevant as far as I'm concerned
[09:01:59] [the mittani] goo embezzlement is an 'out'
[09:02:12] [the mittani] if you set up a rmt shop as a business from the start, you do bots in vms in empire
[09:02:31] [the mittani] if you, say, decide to go 'fuck eve' and you happen to have access to goo, though

I'm not sure how much of The Mittani's wisdom is from experience and how much is from briefings he received from CCP.  But this next segment of conversation peaked my interest.

[09:03:44] [the mittani] pretty much any alliance without a public financial spreadsheet and an auditor is subject to rmt accusations in this day and age, though
[09:03:55] [rat salat] Except
[09:04:05] [rat salat] your alliance is the only one who does that lol
[09:04:14] [bring stabity] at least you get the joke
[09:04:21] [the mittani] most of the clusterfuck does that now, tmk
[09:04:38] [bring stabity] modernization of alliances is a cool thing
[09:04:54] [bring stabity] look back 2 years, and no one cared at all. too busy hating the forever war and yelling at cheating devs

Of course, I really shouldn't have been surprised by the revelation that an alliance that lost all its space due to not playing its bills would take to keeping really good books.  Especially when the leader who had to pick up the pieces when it all fell into the crapper was The Mittani.  Also, the affair with OWN Alliance that The Mittani documented in Sins of a Solar Spymaster 54 should have suggested the role accountants play in null sec politics.  Apparently Goonswarm Federation is leading the way.

I found one last item interesting from this exchange.  Here we have null sec players, including not only the leader of one of the largest alliances in the game but also the chairman of the Council of Stellar Management, looking at level 4 mission running bots as a superior method of making isk than operating technetium moons.  For all those botters wondering why CCP wants to go after botters, now you know why.