A Fixian Mindset

Hey... what's that sticking out of your Closet?

Halloween has come and gone, like many people that will be reading this, I got rather blizted that night. Normally my memory is pretty sharp the following day, but a few details have become slightly blurred however, like how I got home, or why there is a rather shapely bra stuffed into my coat pocket? You'd think I'd at least be able to remember that part, but it seems even the friends I was out with that night can't seem to come up with an explanation.

Anyways, the recent revelry and spirit of Halloween made an old phrase pop into my head this morning as I was once more pondering the mystery bra, 'skeletons in the closet'. FIX have plenty, as do the majority of alliances. The longer you've been around, the more time you've had to toss some bodies into that dark enclosure. An interesting fact is that while the bodies tend to be biodegradable, if you stuff enough of them into close proximity, bacteria doesn't have the room to breath and get the job done, so the body count mounts up and remains pungently fresh.

Well the damn closet is full to bursting, which only leaves one option; take out some of the fresh ones, cut them up in the bathtub and submerge them in acid. At least, this is what Hollywood tells me is the proscribed method for these situations. The body in question today has a toe tag labelled CODA... he's a fat bastard, and is taking up way too much room, so this may get a little messy with the chainsaw.

Many folks in CODA like to see themselves as being responsible for creating a split within FIX, where we saw half our membership leave the alliance in order to form a new one that goes by the name of Pure. It's held up as a sure sign by others that FIX was defeated by CODA in the war. Now... FIX was defeated, we were near broke, short on ships, and were about to lose our last station. As I've said previously, FIX wouldn't have fallen apart at the seams due to this, it would have pulled back and regrouped, and whoever held those stations would never know a moment of piece within the space of a few weeks from that happening.

But FIX did split, and it's very easy to come to the conclusion that this was fully due to the war and the internal tensions that such a prolonged siege can create in an alliance. Well the fat bastard is going to be put to rest today.

FIX was split internally well before the CODA war started, but Fixians past and present are a stubborn lot, and showing an internal weakness to the outside just wasn't going to happen. Good communication is the bedrock of a solid alliance foundation, and our communication across timezones between different corps sucked, really sucked. There was also the problems of ideologies, there were two competing schools of thought in FIX, and it generally fell across timezones where this seperation in opinion occured. Difficulties had been resulting from this for months.

Here is the thing though, I think it's safe to say that everyone was loyal to the idea of FIX, but there were disagreements in exactly what FIX was, and how it should operate. Several attempts were made on both sides of the ideological divide to sort the situation out; what was obvious was that our current form of government wasn't up to snuff, and couldn't provide the solutions FIX required, what we needed was a rewriting of our structure. With FIX having 22 or so corporations in it's roster, things were very unwieldy.

What a number of us felt, mainly coming from a North American timezone, was that the ideological differences were too great to overcome with simple measures, and that a degree of seperation was required, and a filter to the level of 'noise' in FIX. Valhallan, who is the CEO of Band of Builders, and FIX's current Chairman of the Board, came up with what I believed to be a viable solution and I was happy to put my support behind.

What he proposed, was to create states/provinces/counties/workgroups (term it how you will) within FIX. Those corporations that already worked closely together would continue to do so, but look after their own immediate affairs. Oversight on the workgroups would be overseen by the broader FIX government. It was basically the creation of a middle management, current FIX measures couldn't handle the affairs of 22 corporations, and way too many corporations concerns were falling through the cracks. The military side of things wouldn't change, nor would direction on overall FIX policy, and the FIX government as it was in the day would retain final say in all things. That is it in a nutshell.

The other side of the fence really, and I mean really, didn't like this proposal in the slightest. One term they latched onto was 'Balkanization', they stated that we'd end up in a competition for resources, that the workgroups would try to claim areas for exclusive use, that pvp'rs wouldn't help out other workgroups that were being attacked, and we'd all end up at war with each other. I admit, the first thought that came to my mind when reading these responses on the forums was 'Are you fucking mental? Did you even read the whole thing?'. Disappointment was quite prevalent among the proposals supporters at how it had been shot down, and how dead set against it the other ideological group was.

It's worth noting quickly where we were all at during this; at the time, our current form of government was based on the JCoS (Joint Chiefs of Staff) at the top making the day to day decisions, and direction and final say coming from the Council, who was made up of all corporations representatives. Now the Council had been hamstrung by the three point plan that had been created by then JCoS Nez Perces, and had no power at all, which left all the work to the JCoS. We were supposed to have eight of them, but we never seemed to have more than three at a time. So three people were responsible for running all of FIX. I thought it was bullshit, and so did many others, many of us felt like our concerns were permanently on the backburner.

Well, the other side of the coin was that a proposal came back in our direction. They wanted to setup a cabinet government (The Board, which we currently operate with now). The Chairman of the Board would choose his own cabinet. There were just three things that we had slight technical problems with...
1. We had concerns that this kind of government wouldn't be able to overcome, and fix, the current ideological divides we were experiencing.
2. The person who had made the proposal, Gritt Pebbledasher (JCoS at that time), had attached his own name to be the first chairman to the proposal, as well as who he would choose for his cabinet.
3. Representation from our 'political party' in the cabinet, was very damn thin. Valhallan was on the list, and that was about it.

You can imagine the uproar, it was huge. I could see the writing on the wall for FIX though, my greatest fear was that my own members, and those alliance members who were of similar ideology as myself, would in essense become 2nd class citizens of FIX. It went up for vote as is.

The corps that had invested in the Easter Egg, and were all a part of the one 'political party', ended up all voting no, or abstained, with one exception. The exception was my own corp, I voted yes for the proposal. I've said it in the past, yet quite a few people refuse to believe me when I say that I put Alliance first, Corp second, and my personal desires third. I've been sorely tested on that over time, but I felt that if this didn't pass through the vote, we were simply going to lose a whole bunch of corps over it. I put my money where my mouth is.

I was pretty much willing to be a second class citizen in FIX, because I'd hate to be responsible for the breakup of FIX, I had said as much in the discussion thread in the FIX forums. Well... I was strongly disliked, or in the very least, considered untrustworthy, by the other side due to the accusation from earlier that I had attempted a coup. However, it seems they were willing to overlook this for my 'services' and due to the choice I had made in the vote.

Without much time passing, I was approached by Gritt, his CEO, and a CEO for one of the other corps that was aligned with them. We had a short discussion, just before they were all going off to bed. They basically told me this: 'You have one night to go to the other corps that voted no, and get them onboard. If you don't succeed, we leave FIX.' It wasn't exactly early in the day either. That meant I had 6 specific corporations where I had to get hold of their leadership, and convince them to swallow their pride, and go along with the deal without further complaint... not fucking easy by any stretch.

Over the next 10 hours, and well into the early morning, I hammered away in conversations, tracking down CEO's and directors, conducting TS meetings, and using every ounce of persuasion and logical arguement in what I believed was to avoid the breakup of FIX. Out of the 6 corporations, I talked to and convinced 5 of them; the last corps leaders simply weren't online that night. At the end of it, I sent out emails and forum PM's to all three of the people who had approached me regarding this, letting them know that I had succeeded, and there was only one corporation left to talk with. At that point, I turned off the computer, called in sick to work, and went to bed tired as hell, proud of my night's achievements, worried about FIX's future, and hoping I was making the right decisions.

I woke up and went to read the FIX forums.

One day into the new government, Gritt had resigned the position of chairman, his corp and the other main corp of that powerblock (who also held positions in the new cabinet) were leaving FIX; FIX is in total shambles with zero notice. Holy fucking rusty shank in the kidney Batman... how pissed off am I when reading this? Within a week, we were down to about 14 corporations. The alliance Pure. was created shortly after from the corporations that had left FIX. I don't hold anything against the pilots of those corporations, but I have some very specific feelings towards various leaders and have some definate thoughts towards the level of backbone they apparently possess.

Two FIX corporations from around that time ended up merging their corporations into Band of Brothers, my personal best wishes go with them. FIX was down to 450 members, and those that remained had just taken a massive kick to the nads with the events that had transpired. Everyone expected FIX to fold. Fuck that noise. We were going to pull out and regroup, and get some serious payback towards the CODA alliances for ousting us from Querious, and we were going to hit whoever was in our stations over and over until the time came to take back what is ours. We had several things on the to-do list, on the top of that list was getting some R&R for the boys, make some cash, and get everyone back into ships; build up a reserve, start harrassing Querious, build up our capital ship fleet, and then go on the offensive. May the man above preserve those sorry souls who got in our way, because we were going to steamroll them with passion and spite.

Then BoB entered the fray with CODA, and everything changed. They came to us with a proposal, and we liked what we saw.

FIX kept the cabinet structure, there was no reason to change it; there is only one prevailing ideology in FIX these days. We have learned some lessons though. The split was over 5 months ago, in that time period, we've had one corp move on, and we've accepted only one corporation into FIX, PPL (who were previously members of HDY, which is an ex-FIX corporation). The total number of pilots in an alliance mean little in how well everyone gets along, but what does matter is how many leaders you have. The more leaders, the more voices... so the more corporations we have, the more leaders we have. The result is, FIX has become extremely particular about adding new corporations to our roster, preferring to grow our own corporations. At the time of writing this, we're just coming up on having 1000 members again.

Quite some time had passed before I spoke with anyone from those who had left FIX. I had a question I wanted an answer to... why? Why leave FIX when you give me the terms to what is required for you to stay, and we come through with them? It doesn't make sense to me, what possible reason could justify the actions they took. I got to ask my question. Turns out that Gritt had a short talk with one of the rank and file pilots from one of the corporations I'm aligned with. The guy in question is a known hothead, hell of a good pvper. Well he threatened to pod Gritt, because he was pissed off.

That was it. That was all it took to make them leave FIX.

I think I'm done chopping up this body, lots of meat on it, but the backbone appears to have gone missing.

posted by Avernus @ 8:17 AM