Gun Point Diplomacy, Drama, Space Guilds are Hard.

Well- it’s been a while since I wrote anything informative- and my god has the last week and a half been entertaining, yet full of Drama. For a bit there, our CEO was away on business, and our Military Director was on the other side of the planet visiting family; so for Rina Kondur and me, it was a hectic week. The corp is still rapidly expanding, we have this alliance thing we are constantly trying to keep inflated; and really- I just want to log in and kill nerds.

Before I go headlong into the deep end with my thoughts and opinions, I just want to take a second and thank the rest of the Amarrian Militia for putting up with us, I’m sure it has been trying; and sometimes pushing butans is more of a solution that we didn’t put any thought into (I’m using the word ‘we’ very loosely and almost collectively to mean ‘me’). I’m sure our sacrificial thrasher fleets have purchased quite a few Stabber Fleet Issues that have no doubt killed many of our non-Fweddit brethren.

Space Drama, Best Drama

So in the absence of Dear Leader, our Military Director, running the corp as a whole was left up to Rina Kondur and I; in a rush we were not really expecting. It seriously went from ‘hell yeah, we got this’ to ‘oh FFS what now?’ in what I can only call the pickle race (you know, where you slather a pickle slice in whatever condiment you have handy, throw it at a fast food window, first one to the bottom wins) except the only condiment we had at the time was literally bacon grease.

Just want to take a second to remind you- I am new Internet Spaceship Director, and want to provide content for my dudes by blowing things up, and generally having a good time. Apparently if I am intoxicated I tend to act very, very brazen and solve all my problems with a sledgehammer (or a expel from corp button). I make mistakes, deal with it.

The Justin Credulent Story-

Probably not one of my finer moments, but realize- at the time our collective knowledge of Faction Warfare mechanics was still growing, I won’t apologize to this kid simply from the way he acted; but I will admit since he has been removed I have done the same thing he has (with less gloating).

So anyway- new players in FW tend to have completely fucked overview setups, most of them don’t even know they are doing something wrong and are tackling that red in the middle of a blob of people that aren’t tackling him, but hey- fuck common sense, right?

So as a pilot with ‘unfortunate’ security status, I am a victim of some would-be hero tackling the big mean spaceship pirate with his T1 Punisher, I normally send a convo to the guy and say something along the lines of ‘same team nerd’ or something along those lines (completely sobriety dependent). So anyway, long story short- this new guy that I have butted heads with on the forums in the past puts in an app to join Fweddit. If you’ve ever been a Director of a corp, especially a new one, you are very eager for new pilots, but eventually get an application that you already have a pre-conceived notion as to how it would end.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice… So I accept the application and go about my business in real life, you know- taking care of the house and what not; I take a break to check r/fweddit because, well redditors do things like that; and see a call out thread, with a chat log of this dude flipping out in corp chat after bragging about killing a blue. Bear in mind, this is literally 2 days after JEFFRAIDER killed a dude in 7^th Fleet and took a massive standings hit (LOLDIVINECOMMODORE) and ended up not only getting booted from the alliance, but spending a week and a few hundred million ISK doing data center tag turn ins and COSMOS missions.

So- even though we have a couple hundred dudes in corp, I immediately log in with my Directator hat on to investigate what happened. I asked in corp chat, convo’d the dude (which he rejected, then blocked me); went to push the button- and he was in space. Ok fine, KOS Order. So anyway- he gets to Gallente space, realizes he is in a hostile militia; docks and drops.

He then proceeds to shit up our subreddit talking about how immature we are, and how we don’t back our members. This particular ‘member’ had been in the corporation for less than 5 hours. Let me say that again- 5 hours. I’m by no means a reddit mastermind, and most of the moderator buttons are black magik to me, but in this case, I figured out and banned my first person ever from our Sub-Reddit. Because fuck drama. He went on to attempt to sell his character, and bumped the thread a dozen times in 45 minutes only to have an ISD lock it.

Nobody has heard from him since, and I’m pretty sure none of us miss him.

The Minmatar Infiltration-

See I understand that as a corporation, our recruitment standards are pretty lax, be active on reddit, have an account that is 3 months old or be vouched in by someone in Fweddit. You don’t have to be real life friends or anything, it’s not that serious- just be a good person and have a strong desire to have fun.

I’ve come up with a few deterrents of my own for potentially rooting out spies, so anyway back to the story; it’s an off night- I think it was a Tuesday or some other non-busy EVE day. Applications were pouring in as usual, to the tune of something like 1 every 15 minutes or so. In the beginning I will admit we didn’t even look at them half the time and just pushed butan, waved in corp chat, gave out Thrashers and went to die in glorious space battle.

Now- after the JC incident, we look a little harder. Anyway I get 3 applications that look a little suspicious, and say something to the effect of needing a full API to get them Mumble/Forums Access, which they eagerly provide. I’m not going to disclose names or anything, but people realize- Full API access means I can read all your damn evemails, look at all your transactions, and check out your contract history. Having your potential ‘spy’ have multiple ISK transfers of over 1b ISK to a character in the Minmatar Militia is usually a good sign that you’re not here to lose Thrashers.

Although I respect anyone that actively WANTS to spy on us, I mean if you can live through the Mumble conversations, the corp banter, and the actively losing ships to anything we can crash them into- well so be it. But seriously- Here is a fine demonstration of our ‘Battlecomms’.

Drunkplomacy

This is a thing that just should not be, and I’ve made many promises to many people in my beloved corporation that this thing will no longer be. Remember before when I was talking about mistakes- this is probably one of the bigger ones. I can’t go into specifics, but I’ll say enough to get my point across.

Yes sometimes It’s hard to NOT get caught up in the ‘our fleets are bigger than your fleets’ ego measuring; and many of us are doing our best to work together… but sometimes, just sometimes: things go very awry.

So there we are, roaming and plexing, plexing and roaming; just another beautiful weekend day inside, at my computer desk, waging the hard war of orbiting beacons for 20 minutes… when one our adorable newbro’s in a T1 Rifter no less takes a pop shot at an Outlaw.

Shit happens right? No problem. Whatever. We tell him to stop; he’s a friendly, etc.

Few minutes go by (pretty sure this was one of those Minmatar bore tactics or ‘we took the button all the way up to 5 seconds before capture’ so you have to sit there for 40 minutes) and again, someone takes a shot at him. To which he FLIPS OUT in local. Threatens everybody, so to what I thought was hilarious, go to his corp screen, see ‘Declare War’ button, giggle, *mouseclick*, all 40 dudes in Mumble are howling into their mics with laughter.

I thought it was pretty damn funny. There’s a thread on reddit about it being pretty damn funny.

What wasn’t funny however, that even after our modest request to have him sing ‘call me maybe’ in mumble (good ole fashioned fun, right?), he declined and we left the war active, unfortunately he was planning on withdrawing his corporation from the Amarr Militia. This is not cultural victory; this is not being a team player. Sometimes it’s hard not to get caught up in our own version of ‘fun’ which typically entails giving not a single fuck, blowing things up, and losing many ships in the process.

I sent the surrender offer this morning; to just end the war and let our previous victims of our good time, go back to what they enjoy doing- without getting caught up in some egotistical bullshit because I was feeling all badass.

Someone told me in the past that you don’t need to victimize your would be allies to make a point. I should really start keeping that in the fore-front of my thoughts when I am making ~decisions~.

The War On Serious, Killboard Stats and Drama Llamas

So as it stands, pretty much- our membership is a small slice of every aspect of the game, the thing we have in common is a reddit account; and while some of us actively lived in Sov Nullsec for years, many of our membership havn’t even set foot in Nullsec or even know it exists in the first place.

We are here to have fun, yes we will lose ships by the dozens.

Yes, we will continue to fight anything that stays on a gate long enough to get tackled.

Yes, we will continue to not care about killboard stats.

We do however, want to push forward the war effort, take systems, farm Navy Geddons, and generally enjoy non-stop PvP- that is the entire reason we chose the Amarr Militia, and not the Minmatar or Gallente. Most of us are completely against PvE in any form that features shooting little red boxes for standings and/or LP.

This is quite literally my stance on EVE as a whole.

Also- Shalee Lianne is my BFF, and fellow blog writer chick (I’m not a chick, but she is- read her stuff).