A Fixian Mindset

Forums, the bane, the boon.

2007-03-07T07:23:00.000-06:00

Heya folks,

Well I had my computer go down for a bit, but before that even happened I had a tad of trouble finding what the heck I had actually used as my username and password here. Coupled with a recent lack of material to post, I hadn't actually found the motivation to really dig for it. I'm not really a guy who will post just for the sake of posting to keep things looking fresh, I need material that is relevant for me to make it worth my time. Well... go figure, I do believe I have some new material today.

Over the last few days and nights I've had some thoughts running together in regards to communication, specifically forums, more specifically alliance forums. Now I'm a self confessed forum whore, I just checked, and I actually have exactly 4000 posts on the FIX forum at the time of this writing. I actually outstrip the next closest poster by almost 1500 posts. Yep... that is sick, you're quite correct... I think I'll run naked through the forum to celebrate.

Anyways, as you can see from the above, I love forums. However, recent events have caused my brain to start pondering things a bit deeper despite what my earnest desires for typing normally account for. So what is it that got my attention going in this direction? Some members leaving my corp, and a few from other corps in FIX. The interesting thing I found was when talking with these recently departed is that they all had one thing in common to say 'I love my corp, but I just can't deal with FIX anymore'.

Well... shit... that isn't good. It didn't matter what corp they were departing from, they all said the same thing. Logic says that there has to be a root cause that brings about such a common theme, but people were having trouble putting their finger on it. Ofc, that is what started me thinking, but this set of thoughts was a bit more nebulous than most of the ones I have. Other than my own corp forum, I've only participated in three sets of community forums.

The first forum belonged to the CFS. Good Lord above, have mercy on those forsaken souls that inhabited that dark festering pit of chaotic divergence and strife. *cough*... yeah, to keep it short, that particular forum wasn't very productive; I'd go far enough to say that anyone who read the verbal excrement enough was bound to be tainted forever towards the CFS in the future. The good news was that the CFS was full of completely disparate corps that didn't work with each other, so damage done internally to corps due to strife within was very minimum in an odd way.

Now after we left the CFS, we turned independant, it honestly was a golden age for our corp as we came into our own. We gained in prestige, power, and found ourselves owners of the station in 9CG. The only thing we were missing out on was wealth, which really wasn't surprising considering the frequency with which we managed to go out of our way to get blown up. Our relations with other corps and their members in the area were excellent; the amount of communication we handled was also very high due to station ownership, one of my personal goals at the time was to get the toughest, most pvp oriented corps in the region to base themselves from our station.

The interesting thing in this time period was that there were no forums beyond our internal corp forum. Absolutely everything my corp did was handled in-game, anytime we talked with someone it was on a personal level. Now I'll come back to this point later, because it is relevant, but moving on now...

From the time period of joining the CFS to joining the FIX, I believe we lost a grand total of zero members to other corps.

QDF formed up, and we had a forum that was provided for us by BA at the time after things were started to move along. The only people really in there were corp leaders and QDF admirals along with the members of BA who were hosting the forum area in the first place. Overall, it was a pretty peaceful place, not a heck of a lot of chatter other than the essentials.

Then FIX was born, and with it, a rather large forum indeed, these days it has roughly 35 sections to it, and any member of FIX has access to the low security areas. In the last two years it has seen almost 112,000 articles posted within it. As forums go, it's not half bad, but I'd be lying if I said that on occasion it hasn't got a little hot in there, on a couple of occasions in the past before the fallout of CODA it got damn explosive.

Time to get to the meat of this post. Communication is vital, but I believe there are better ways to do it than through a forum; when you mix the rank and file of multiple corporations into a huge communal area, there are going to be misunderstandings no matter how hard you try to reduce them. One interesting on-going project has been the development of an in-game wiki for sharing information, it really does suddenly come to mind that the benefits of this could be far superior to what I had intially considered for it. Vital information like the time of ops, when various POS are going into reinforced or what is due to get hit next and what ships are needed are all easily communicable. You want to know what is going on? Log in and find out.

That's not the real purpose of this post (to promote a wiki), the real purpose is about the focus of individuals and corporations. Going back to when I was talking about my own corp being an independant in Querious, our goals hadn't changed, we still wanted to improve the region however we were able. The difference was we took no cues from anyone, and we looked to our own business and let everyone else worry about theirs.

You want respect? Simple, you bring more ships, bigger ships, more often, and fight like a son of a bitch to keep Querious safe. Everyone wants to be respected, and whoever is taking names and kicking ass gets viewed with respect. Not all corps are the same size or the same focus, doesn't matter, it's what you can do for the region that people noticed. Got only 8 guys online, but all 8 come out to a fight... you have instant respect; don't have many pvper's in your corp but you're building ships and mods out the wazoo and providing them to friends at cut throat rates? Respect.

Don't show up, cause problems on a regular basis, can't play nice with others? Well those folks found their assets locked into the stations and their butts were fired upon the whole way out of the region in the old days. I like simplicity, there is a great deal to be said for it.

Here is the thing, when you are part of an alliance, there is such a thing as too much integration. Not just with assets and operations, but mentally. There comes a time when everyone is waiting to see what everyone else is doing, and it's an unhealthy state of affairs, things bog down fast. What it leads to is people wondering who is and isn't pulling their weight... in all truth, they shouldn't give a shit beyond the weight they themselves and their corp are pulling.

A forum provides vital communication, and a centre to a community, but it will also throw focus within the rank and file. It can also cause stress, and stress is one of those things that is a real enemy to any alliance. It's hard to get pissed off over a wiki.

In my mind, the alternatives to a forum are fairly straight forward. If you shut down the forum to the rank and file, that leaves them with only one alternative to get information... in-game. If you can combine that with information that is accessible and updated in-game, as well as being secure, simple and efficient, then a source of possible stress is removed.

Attitudes and feelings spread depending on how easily consumable they are. If it goes back to the feeling corps have that 'It's not the corp, it's the alliance I can't deal with anymore', one has to investigate the root causes and methods of prevention.

Anyways, that is my hot air for today. Time to get back in-game, focus on my corp and corpmates, and go pick a fight.

A look back.... way back.

2006-12-05T06:16:00.000-06:00

Well Kali has arrived now, and everybody has been going nuts with the new toys. As I'm writing this, CCP are working away at getting up a new patch on the server to institute some fixes and some changes. I haven't gone over the patch notes in great detail yet, so no comment there. Overall, I'm pretty impressed with how smoothly Kali was put into place... I had a bet with two corpmates, on how long the delay would be beyond the alloted 24h's for CCP to get things up and running, we even had a rule in place saying that the server had to be up at least 45m in order for it to count. I overestimated how long it would take, I owe a T2 fitted cruiser to my buddy.

I'm getting astrometics finally trained up to L5 so I can take advantage of those new probes, and get in on some of the exploration. I've always been a huge fan of exploring, and I have fond memories going back over 3 years past of ripping around in a Tristan and checking out the sights, and seeing 'what could happen?'. If I had more time to myself, I know I'd still be doing the same thing today. It was on one of those trips three years ago, that I had undocked in a Tristan from our home in Stacmon, Placid region, that I found myself first flying through Syndicate, and then through Arridia, and finally I ended up in a region I had never been before, Khanid.

Up until that point, I had been as far west and as far north as you can get; when setting out my intention was basically to check out the south a little. As I started flying towards the higher security system of the region, I bumped into a few guys on the way that hailed me in local. We got to chatting and things took an interesting unexpected turn. They started to tell me about something called the CFS. I'm obviously going 'what's that?'... well it seems that the CFS was so new, that there was some disagreement in local over exactly wether the 'C' stood for Coalition or Confederation, but the short of it was that there was a new alliance starting up.

Apparently it was very hush hush sort of stuff... however they seemed to think that didn't include telling the new guy in local all about it. Well the guys I was talking with got some intel that a pirate in the area was causing some trouble, and before they took off, they decided to ask me if I'd be interested in coming along? Well this is the sort of thing that made my roadtrips worthwhile in those days... new things to do, places to see, and people to shoot; so off we went.

Little did I know, but my trusty little Tristan would actually come in handy that day. Not due to my skills in pvp (near non-existant at the time), nor due to a superior setup I had fitted (it was probably ass), but it turned out that I had read a guide on scanning by a guy named Kalshrinth (sic? known as the Loremaster, this guy had a number of guides out, and was a pretty famous figure back in the day) not that long ago, and it was something I was pretty good at.... and it was also something the rest of these guys didn't have the first clue about. Next thing I knew, I was in-system in a CFS gang, and nobody could seem to narrow down where exactly this pirate was. I volunteered my services.

Getting out my trusty scanner, I warped to the sun and did a full range 360 scan... nothing... 1 planet was out of range, so I warped there and did it again, sure enough, the guy was in range. Pulling up the range of the furthest moon I cut my scan distance to half of that and scanned again, basically narrowing him down. With a few quick rinse and repeats, and a quick directional scan to verify, I had the pirate narrowed down to being around a moon. Off we all went and charged in there guns blazing ready to take him down. Well it turns out the pirate wasn't exactly stupid, he was aligned and got out of there the second we came in. Over the course of the next hour though, I got a lot of practice in with my scanner, including busting a safespot the guy had made. Never did catch the guy, but I throughly enjoyed working as a team with these guys, and in return I found that they had really appreciated having me along. A week later, my 6 man corp joined the CFS on invitation.

Now, reading over the above, it's not exactly thrilling stuff here. In fact, taking over an hour to chase after 1 guy in system would be considered a bit nuts. But this is only about 3 months after launch, everything was new... and the vast majority of us could definately fall into the category of 'noob'. We weren't even using voice com's for any of this stuff, everything we did was typed out in the gang chat, I didn't even know what Ventrillo or Teamspeak was back in those days. We all just kind of flew around pell mell all gung-ho trying to blast whatever we managed to actually target. Obviously... I wasn't one of the trailblazers of pvp, you can see that easily enough from the above. I learned early on that my more natural skills were in other areas, for the most part that happened to be diplomacy, and I got my first taste of that about two weeks into launch.

I think it's worth realising that Eve had something of a different feel for me back in those early days, likely for all of us. I was an empire nub, flying around an Imicus with a couple of mining lasers, looking for a nice juicy roid to sink my teeth into. Back then, you could actually find ore right up to Arkanor in empire. Imperium Technologies was a production corporation, I'd go out in my Imicus, and then ninja mine like crazy to get 20 loads of ore for a single refine of something like Bistot; I'd refine that, then take the minerals home to hand over to my C0-CEO, who would throw that into Tristan production. We had a decent thing going in Placid, we had either squeezed out all the competition or made cartel agreements with them; we even wardec'd one corp that didn't cooperate.... Oh YA baby! Market PVP! BOOYAH!

So one day, I was out again in my little frigate, and happily mining away, warping from belt to belt as rats came in. Those little rats could be pretty nasty, they practically instalocked and opened up on you without delay, so you had to be on the ball. I was cycling through the belts, and warped in to find that the system had some new visitors. Quite suddenly, I found myself faced with about 12-15 other frigates, and 2 Moa's. I mean... holy shit... Moa's! That stuff was friggin pricey man! This is like cutting edge firepower here, I had previously seen a few people in tier 1 cruisers, but this stuff was top of the line.... and they were locking me as they approached. I honestly can't remember the name of their corp anymore, all I remember is that they were all from Iceland... I recall wondering to myself if perhaps some of them might be dev's, they sure were well organized, and way ahead of the average curve.

I looked up their info quick as they approached me, none too friendly like, and realised that this was a huge corp, there were over 50 guys in it.... 50! I get a convo from one of them 'Get out of the belt, or we'll kill your ship'. I'm thinking to myself, hey I was here first, minding my own business... what the fuck gives you the right to kick me out of this belt? Sure enough, that's what I told them as well. For some reason, it turns out that two cruisers with their guns locked on my tin can of a ship was considered by them to be what gave them the right to claim the belt. Now, I can't remember exactly what was said, but what I do remember was that I argued with them for a good 10 minutes or so, all the time, waiting for them to open up on my sorry ass with those cruisers. I mean, this was actually risky business for me, that Imicus cost 350k, that would be a fair setback to lose it. Well I left the belt and started work again in the remaining 5... I wasn't going to win the arguement at that point.

So I'm back to work, carrying a bit of a grudge however. 1 less belt means less places to mine where there weren't rats, that increases the amount of time it will be for me to make my cash. I warp into one of the belts..... and there they were again!!! They had completely mined out the first belt, and were working on the next one. I sit there watching them, and think to myself 'fuck this', at this rate, the area I'll be able to mine in is going to keep decreasing until I have nothing to work with, only 4 belts open to me now means wait times for rats to leave, if I lose one more belt, this system is going to be a bust for me.

The Moa's lock me, and start to approach. Nope... I'm not budging, fuck that, time to win one for the little guy..... or get blown up and later realise that arguing the right of way as a pedestrian while a truck bears down on you is a really stupid idea. They convo me again, they want to know if I have shit for brains. Now, they knew I was upset the last time, this time I explained just what their operation meant for my own activity, and they were pissing me right off as they continued to narrow down where I could work, I think I might have compared them to a swarm of locusts at the time. 'Warp out or we'll waste you're ship, last chance'. I'm pissed, very pissed. 'Fuck it asshole, go ahead and shoot me ya prick! I'm a small corp now, but give me a couple months and we'll see how well this turns out for you in the longrun! I need to mine, you go ahead and decide if you want to shoot or not'.

There is a long pause.

'Ok listen man... don't say anything to the other guys, but go ahead and mine beside us, we'll take care of any rats that spawn'. After that, they were totally cool.

Oh sweet victory. It was the dawning realization that many matters could be solved by approaching things from the right angle, that the pen did have a place amongest the many swords of Eve. I've been in alliance level politics for a long time now, I sincerely do wonder what it would be like again being an independant empire corp these days, and what sort of encounters people have every day. In some ways, I think I'd find that there is a lot that hasn't changed, especially from my encounters with the Alachene Guard - unorganized, gung-ho, no hindsight... it's a sharp reminder of what the CFS used to be like. Amazingly enough, my first blog entry, which revolved around these guys, wasn't the final encounter. Many of my corpmates got the opportunity to finally get a taste of dealing with them. They are 50 corps strong now, and all my guys could say was 'wow... just wow'. It turns out, the CFS has been reborn, and it's in Alachene.

No idea if anyone will enjoy this latest entry, but that's the nice thing about blogs, I write it for myself.

The Kali Forecast

2006-11-06T20:37:00.000-06:00

We currently have a few threads going on in FIX in relation to Kali. Honestly, I can't imagine a self respecting alliance that isn't looking on with great interest to the changes that are coming our way. There are a lot of changes coming our way, and as such there have an abundance of topics we can pick apart.

An area I haven't seen yet, is the long range forecast of Kali on alliances. It's unfathomable to think that CCP hasn't put some thought in this direction themselves, for several reasons. CCP is opening up 8 new regions for our exploration, pleasure, and conflicts; but this is just the icing on the cake of what they truely have in store for alliances.

Having been around Eve for a while, I've had the time to realise that when CCP institutes changes, there can be a considerable pause before the changes they have envisioned take effect. This is due to us, the players; it simply takes a given amount of time for us to first recognize the changes for what they truely are, and secondly for the amount of time it takes us to evolve as a universe into their projected vision.

Case in point; when Eve kicked off, the market was an aspect of Eve that required evolution in order to come to fruition. Early on, players were able to sell minerals to NPC's for set rates. There were limits in each system and station for what NPC's would absorb in the span of a day. Prices for these minerals didn't fluctuate either; going from tritanium to megacyte, they were 1, 4, 16, 64, 256, 1024, 4096. New players might be saying 'Huh? Zydrine was only worth 1024 isk per?'

It took time for the market to evolve... when the server first started up, nobody owned a single BPO, there was nobody manufacturing anything. You can be sure that a great many of us were in a rush to start however. That left us with three immediate sources of income, mining ,ratting, and agents. The very beginning of Eve was a time period that I doubt any of the people there for it will soon forget. Of course, people sold minerals to NPC's, collected bounties from rats, and earned their agent rewards. Many of these people reinvested their hard earned isk into buying BPO's, and then production began in earnest, undercutting the NPC market, and creating a fledgling dynamic economy, which has continued to grow into the complex animal we have today.

So why is this important to us now, and Kali? Because CCP are doing it again it appears, but most people aren't going to realise it for several months, and perhaps not see the trickle down effects in many areas for over a year. 0.0 is about to get a lot bigger, and I'm not talking about the eight new regions either. Welcome to Eve Economics 102.

If the theory held that alliances only claim what they need (in some cases that theory holds, in others it doesn't), then alliance claims to space would be objectively based upon the earning potential of an area for it's members. Now, let's jump past the question of territorial control in regards to routes, because while it does effect arguments regarding claimed space requirements, its is for secondary purposes to an alliances need to be self-sufficient.

The needs of an alliance are based upon the membership and their activities. Basically, the more guys you have in your space trying to earn some cash, the more area you need for them to make that cash without treading all over each others toes. In comes Kali, and some rather fundamental changes. What we're being told at this point, is that each system post Kali, will have a minimum of 10 available 'encounters'. Now this can range from shifting plex's, mission-like settings, to hidden belts, and whatever else CCP has cooked up for us. You can take all that, and squeeze it down to it's base component though... money making capacity per system is being increased dramatically.

More people will be able to 'work' a single system than we've previously experienced. Let's take a couple of constellations, and a fair sized alliance as an example, and go from there. For this example, we'll say we have 12 systems within these two constellations, and we have a peak of 120 online characters at any given time within the alliance. Now, we already know that each system will have a minimum of 10 encounters per system, so we know from that, that these two constellations have a minimum of 120 possible encounters available at any given time. Obviously, some of these are going to have greater potential for earning cash than others, let's say half are crap, that leaves us with 60 decent money makers. Now, out of the guys you have online in the alliance, how many are doing their own thing, how many are out pvp'ing, doing corp business etc, and how many are looking to make some quick cash?

Odds are very much in your favor, that you have an abundance of extra encounters available for the people that are making use of them. So what is the direct impact of all this on an alliance? For one, it means that people aren't forced to queue up to run a complex, or moving from system to system in the hopes of finding a spot they can go ratting in, or finding a spot to mine peacefully (a rare breed, but I heard they do infact exist). Here is the immediate result from this; we'll find a greater concentration of players in the same systems, because they can work there without stepping on each other. Space, just got larger.

Quite suddenly, if the money earning potential holds out that is, an alliance of 1000 people, only needs a couple of constellations to be very comfortable in, whereas before it required at least 1 region for that many players to maximize their potential. Most of us remember the Exodus expansion, CCP was trying to move people out to 0.0.... didn't quite work. Half the reason why it didn't work, is because if some poor empire dwelling soul stuck his head in there, the alliance inhabiting that area would very likely remove his head for his troubles. My space, we earned it, get the fuck out. Limited resources creates a backdrop for conflict, the strong rule, the weak get podded back to empire.

Eve however, is beginning to get just a tad more populated these days, and doesn't really show signs of slowing down if CCP can keep overcoming the various server issues that come with having more players. At this point, a few questions are likely popping up about the logic and reasoning I'm using. I don't expect that alliances will suddenly say to themselves 'Oh hey guys! Check it out, we don't need 4 regions anymore, let's dump 3 of them!'. Which brings us back to the example of the evolving economy that CCP created.

Kali isn't like throwing a switch, and the mass exodus to 0.0 occurs, it's going to be an evolution over time. Alliances are forged, they live, they prosper, then they die. It's a cycle that only a few manage to avoid. I know I've been picking on ASCN lately, but by far they best serve this example I'm about to provide. Let's say it is a foregone conclusion that ASCN will die. Those people who were members of ASCN will splinter into smaller groups, based on politics, friendships, past actions etc. Some will leave the area forever, going to different pastures. Those that remain however, will forge new alliances; smaller alliances, with smaller territories.

What they'll find is, that their small holdings are enough to sustain their alliance members needs, and then some. Well, small alliances may not want to remain small, so they recruit new corporations and they grow their existing corporations. Not so suddenly, you have a much greater population density than you did before. Aha you say! What is to stop the natural predatory imperialist expansion that we know to be coming? In two words, constellation sovereignty; it requires three outposts in a single constellation, and then from there by the time Kali 2 rolls around, we'll be seeing outpost upgrades, system defenses, and all sorts of neat things that will increase an alliances hold on it's claim... and cost a heck of a lot of isk besides.

Wars will still happen, this sure as hell isn't the dawn of the carebear age. People will still piss off others, tread on toes, and be percieved by their neighbours to be an easy target. The greater the level of conflict in an area, the faster the evolution will occur, up until the poor mapmaker has a fit trying to keep up with all the alliances and changes that pour in every week. I half wonder if I have actually figured out what CCP has planned for us... or if I'm completely off base... or if I'm seeing things that CCP didn't even realise they were building into our futures.

Kali will be interesting, and will remain so well into future patchs due to the changes that are being wrought.

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

2006-11-02T08:17:00.000-06:00

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.

So... wtf is the deal with BoB?

2006-10-31T13:16:00.000-06:00

Due to my work in FIX as a diplomat, I'm in contact with plenty of people on the outside looking in. Ever since BoB took over the Querious region, and FIX remained in the area, the most common question I get to field is 'What is your deal with BoB?'

Sometimes it's asked politely with overtones of polite interest, that's cool. Other times, occasionally happening in the Eve-O forum, it's a variation on 'The Avernus I once knew would never have swallowed this 12 inch BoB deal'... you know, the overtones of not-so-polite interest.

It really centres around one main point of contention in most peoples minds though; folks like to think to themselves 'Why would a once proud and strong alliance with a rich history of conquest, conflict and track record for beating the odds, roll over and take it in the ass from people who used to be their enemies?'

The above sentiment has on occasion made be want to break things. There are generally three groups of people who like to ask variations of the question:
1. Ex-FIX, by far the hardest group to deal with.
2. Ex-SA or Ex-CFS... we never really cared what they've thought however.
3. Onlookers, somewhat akin to the morbidly curious thinking they are viewing a car wreak.

Each group gets a somewhat different, short on indepth detail, answer:
1. The ex-FIX answer depends on two things, where they are now, and how long they've been gone from FIX. The earlier someone parted from FIX, the more detail they are likely to get. If it happened to be someone who left on good terms, and has remained on good terms with us, they'll get the best information that I'm able to give them... barring a few things, and with my apologies that I can't share it all.
2. The ex-enemies, are normally only looking for cannon fodder to pass around and fire off on the forums when the opportunity presents itself, and they can then divulge the vast wealth of knowledge they apparently possess on the subject. The answer they normally get - It's confidential.
3. Onlookers, who have no vested interest, are normally truely interested for the sake of curiousity. They basically get told what could already be garnered if they had simply looked into the subject a bit further themselves. I have no problem with sharing the basics and it can lead to some good conversations.

There are a few common myths that keep popping up though, and deserve a bit of feedback. They aren't always easy to answer though, so this will take a bit of time... and I'll likely tackle other FIX myths later on

Myth #1 - BoB were your enemies, you guys sold out. (The biggest myth of them all)

I guess about a year ago they were our enemies in actuality. BoB were already in Fountain, pushing into Delve, and FA was dead. BoB was certainly well known, and there was already an abundance of forum topics in Eve-O in regards to them. The Eve-O forums, while being 95% full of crap, also contains very important information for people who know how to keep their eyes open. We didn't ignore the information that was available to us; like:
- BoB doesn't like whiners.
- BoB likes good fights.
- BoB will respect those that respect them.
So, when BoB came after FIX, nobody whined, nobody posted on the forums, nobody examined the 'injustice' of it all. When they showed up in our systems, we brought out everything we could find to fight with... on the occasions when we simply didn't have enough to fight with, we actually told them so in local, and gave our apologies. When we got our asses kicked, we said GF in local, and when we occasionally won a fight, we did the exact same thing.

The insidious tactics of FIX won the day, we turned enemies into friends. Hard fought, hard earned respect was found to exist between FIX and BoB; the immediate result of it was that we got a NAP out of the deal.

Stage 2 kicks in, and Sir Molle posts a topic called 'The Gift'... I think that was the title at least. The basic gist of it was that all standings from BoB towards others were reset. FIX had known that the NAP we had wasn't going to be long term, and we decided to make the best of it, we had after all gone through this before, and while we'd be shooting at each other again, none of us felt that there was any danger of BoB going to any sort of lengths to destroy us... they liked us a bit too much for measures like that.

Under these circumstances, it was during this time period that FIX tried to put up it's first Outpost. The Easter Egg Incident occured. I haven't read anything to the contrary, so I believe it's still the only Outpost platform that has ever been destroyed by anybody. The short story on that is we screwed up on our getting the filler in before downtime... if we had another 10 minutes, that sucker would have hatched. The tale is well told by this point, but FIX went on system defense for the next 24 hours straight. For many Fixians, it was the most fun they've ever had in Eve... not so much for myself.

My own corp members had helped put in a pretty fair chunk of isk, along with all that isk and work that our allies had put into it, I really didn't want to see this egg get cracked. A combined SA and Huzzah fleet came after us first, a single pilot had posted a screenshot of the uncompleted egg on the Eve-O forums, the cat was out of the bag. The FIX fleet was ready when SA/HF jumped in, I was on the wrong side of the gate at the time, flying with some old friends who had come down to reinforce us at my request (I was pulling in every favor I could that night, contacting whoever I could). We managed to pick off a few pods as they jumped back out... it been a massacre on the other side.

BoB arrived on the scene shortly after, they had been burning thrusters at full in the hopes to get a three way fight out of the situation, something that would simply be a massive highlight for their campaign. They arrived, and I got told to start doing what I could on my end to get BoB to back away. Having seen a high level BoB member (think it might have been Dianabolic) post in the Egg forum topic before it was locked, we assumed they must know all about it. Well, we knew a fight was going to happen, and sure enough, BoB crashed through the gate... it went badly for us, and we took some punishing losses, our guys started podding themselves back to 9CG to get new ships, and I started up a convo with Blacklight while BoB began to shoot at the Egg.

It's not the best known fact about Blacklight, who is known best for heroic consumption of scotch.. oh, and that whole CEO of BNC thing, but he's also accounted to be a bit of a softey. Hey... when you're short on cards in your hand, you try whatever angle you think will give you a shot. I gotta apologise to BL, but I pulled out every last guilt trip I could possibly muster that night, and I think I did a pretty decent job of it... predicting the doom and splitting of FIX over the course of our convo, I just kept groping around looking for heartstrings to tug on... friggin anything to stop them from shooting that fucking pain in the ass EGG!

Well we all know what the final answer was, I'd love to have been able to trumpet a diplomatic success, but it wasn't to be. Blacklight may have been slightly less impressed overall, the second the diplomacy was considered a deadend, our next fleet jumped in.... Blacklight was primary.

I swear that wasn't my doing. :D

Well, we went in, got shot up something fierce each time, and took a few down with us, but nowhere near enough. We had another fleet ready when the egg finally popped, we jumped that in for good measure as well. Before the Easter Egg, my corp had maintained a postive kill ratio vs BoB, after the Easter Egg... not so much.

Well, the shit hit the fan in FIX... but not because of BoB and the Egg. Four corps in FIX had worked together to get that Outpost up, and considering internal tensions in FIX at the time with some other corps, we had kept it quiet up until the very day it went up. I was already in shit with the powers that be during that time period in FIX, since FIX leadership at the time had two things against me... One was that I can be a complete pain in the ass, the other was that they were utterly convinced that I had tried to stage a coup in FIX a month prior. Yeah well... from a personal perspective, the Egg wasn't exactly another glowing remark on my resume.

Don't get me wrong, people were definately ticked about the Egg, that's 26ish billion isk of uninsurable assets that just got flushed. It's not like I was doing backflips due to the joy of losing 4 ships and a nice chunk of cash the night before. Oh wait... we were talking about why FIX doesn't hate BoB right? Ah right, well put it this way, we fucked up, not them (we being four corps who put up an Egg at a rather bad time, and screwed it up to boot). We knew we were a target, we definately knew that an Egg would be a Huge target... so who do you blame, the guy that broke your egg, or yourself for putting it in a position to get broken? FIX has a good habit of taking responsibility for it's actions. We created the scenario without any outside help ;)

How to conclude this? It's all looking a bit patchy to my eye, and I know people are still asking themselves, 'Well.. WTF is the deal with BoB?!!!!' Does it matter? It matters to BoB, it matters to FIX, but any details you read here are going to be completely without meaning if you don't know what the relationship between BoB and FIX is. I can't speak for BoB, nor will I try to, I can't even fully speak for FIX, but I can speak for myself, and my corp, and many of my friends who happen to be in FIX. When others figure it out, the deal isn't that hard to figure out either.

Everything has to start somewhere

2006-10-27T17:24:00.000-05:00

I've had a few members of my corporation, Imperium Technologies, bugging me for the past while to start up a blog. They are well aware that I'm not a person who is adverse to sharing his thoughts, be they controversial or otherwise. To be perfectly honest, I think it's fair to say that my habit of sticking to the beliefs that extend from those thoughts, tend to bring as much trouble towards us as from some quarters, as it may actually garner us respect from others.

In Eve, I don't tend to roleplay, I try to present myself honestly as I actually am, to how I run my corporation, as well as how I interact with the challenges put before us, be it situations or people. I think the majority of the time it has been a benefit, but then there are those other times.

I try to live up to fairly high standards in how I conduct myself, and I'm not particularily slow to make stands in issues based upon simple morals and values that I hold myself too. This has ended up bringing me into conflict with people on more occasions than I can honestly recall over the past three years. I think my mindset has been referred to in turn as a relic, worthless, a holier-than-thou attitude, etc etc etc.

The short of it is, once I have thought over the issues at hand, and come to a stance, it's pretty damn hard to waver my mind unless some very good arguements to the contrary are brought to me. Man... does that ever have a habit of pissing people off. I call it sticking to my guns, others just call me a stubborn son of bitch. Oddly, it's the very rare occasion that those people will say that I won't listen to reason; perhaps it's because I try to base my own arguements on reason, and not so much on emotion, and that's where problems start. I'm not a cold asshole, but emotional arguements towards going in a direction I don't like, don't move me very far.

I've been accused of having a big ego, quite a few times come to think of it, and I don't think it's that unaccurate either. I'm very confident in my abilities, and I put a lot of effort into seeing that my plans and desires turn into a reality. Many of those plans centre around the alliance I've been proud to be a part of since it's inception, Firmus Ixion, called FIX for short. We've had more up's and down's than I think any other group of players in Eve, in the course of our existance, I think we've had a whopping turnover to the likes of 90% of our memberbase. In all honesty, that's nuts. My own corporation is a bit of a blip in the statistics, we have a solid chunk of the original guys we came into FIX with; I imagine it's the same with the other two remaining founding corporations as well. I think I'll leave my own view on the history of FIX for another blog though.

Blogs are an extension of our egos, a little bit of ourselves presented for public discussion and criticism. I claim to hold to high standards, but that doesn't mean I'm a single faceted do-gooder paladin-like schmuck. I also like playing for high stakes, and I have a definate mean streak that can occasionally service to strike out towards people I don't particularily like, I can be cutting, and I can be pretty damn accurate with the shots I take as well. My friends see me as the guy they can count on, because I believe that a word given is something to hold to even if the result can hurt your own interests. You can already guess how those who don't like me, have come to view my personality.

In the FIX forums, we have a nice little section called Battlefield Stories. I throughly enjoy the material put up there, but I'm a rare poster in that section... I am often the person who ends up in a safespot, or sitting in a station, juggling 10 conversations and overhearing the details of how battle progresses. Once in a while though, I do get to tell a story of my own, and last week, I ended up telling one that is most definately a reflection of myself.
___________________________________________________
Mon Oct 23, 2006 11:27 am
Yesterday was a very odd day for me.

I don't even know if this belongs here, because it's not exactly your usual battlefield story. It started out pretty simply, with me logging on and doing my usual routine of checking my evemails to see what is new.

Once again, as per usual, there were a few new DED mails. I and my directors get an abundance of these as POS run low on fuel, I almost deleted them without looking... but I took a quick glance first.

Your POS in Alachene is under attack... 98% shields
Your POS in Alachene is under attack... 86% shields
Your POS in Alachene is under attack... 60% shields
Your POS in Alachene is under attack... 56% shields
Your POS in Alachene is under attack... 54% shields

urm.... HOLY CRAP!

Silinary logs in. 'Sil, check your DED mail quick!'

'Who's POS is that?' Turns out is belongs to Dark Shikari, a part of his empire operations. Sil begins to prep his carrier, other IT members start to fit up and get ready. I jump in my Helios and take off for a 30 jump trip to Alachene so I know what we're jumping into before I authorise anything... I hope that thing has Stront, looks like it's going down fast... must have dreads I think to myself.

As I've been flying up, I've gone over the mails, there are at least 4 corps involved.
I talk to one of the CEO's of the people on those mails:

[ 2006.10.23 00:22:54 ] Avernus > is our POS in reinforced yet?
[ 2006.10.23 00:23:02 ] sonicram > hi
[ 2006.10.23 00:23:17 ] sonicram > not mine
[ 2006.10.23 00:23:51 ] Avernus > I'm talking about my pos, that your corpmates, along with two other corps are shooting
[ 2006.10.23 00:24:26 ] Avernus > pull in syberbolt
[ 2006.10.23 00:24:54 ] sonicram > huh?
[ 2006.10.23 00:25:15 ] Avernus > 2006.10.22 23:33 Attacked object: Gallente Control Tower Current Shield Level: 56% Current Armor Integrity: 100% Current Hull Integrity: 100%Aggressing Pilot: Syberbolt8 Aggressing Pilot's Corporation: soni Corp Aggressing ...
[ 2006.10.23 00:25:27 ] Avernus > Syberbolt8
[ 2006.10.23 00:25:43 ] Avernus > you seem to be acting unaware of the situation, perhaps you want him in here for this
[ 2006.10.23 00:26:09 ] sonicram > enlighten me
[ 2006.10.23 00:26:28 ] sonicram > no i know what he is upto
[ 2006.10.23 00:26:29 ] Avernus > as I said, your corpmates are shooting at my POS
[ 2006.10.23 00:26:45 ] Avernus > then you are fully aware correct?
[ 2006.10.23 00:26:48 ] sonicram > yes i know
[ 2006.10.23 00:27:01 ] sonicram > what am i not aware of?
[ 2006.10.23 00:27:17 ] Avernus > good to know. shall we pull in corp rep's for the other two corps involved, it will save time.
[ 2006.10.23 00:27:35 ] sonicram > u where offered to join the unofficial allaince
[ 2006.10.23 00:27:47 ] sonicram > no responce was made
[ 2006.10.23 00:27:59 ] Avernus > no information was sent to me on any such thing
[ 2006.10.23 00:28:36 ] Avernus > at least, if it was, it got lost in my mass of mail. I can say with 100% certainty, nobody has convo'd me
[ 2006.10.23 00:28:41 ] sonicram > ok pull in erasor and testywolf
[ 2006.10.23 00:30:21 ] Avernus > erasor is in CAS?
[ 2006.10.23 00:30:30 ] sonicram > erasor spells it funny
[ 2006.10.23 00:30:47 ] Avernus > testy is in UTTF?
[ 2006.10.23 00:31:15 ] sonicram > u cuaght me in the midst of a corp meeting
[ 2006.10.23 00:31:35 ] Avernus > trust me, unless you want some serious trouble coming your and your friends way, you'll make time for this.
[ 2006.10.23 00:32:12 ] sonicram > hold 2
[ 2006.10.23 00:32:14 ] Avernus > I'm not going to waste time doing the leg work to pull you and your allies into this convo

Sil is talking to me as I'm flying up, it's fairly obvious we aren't dealing with dreads after all.

I arrive on the scene.... where the hell is the POS I wonder... it doesn't say in the damn mail! I check and see that there are a ton of moons as well. Quick scan.... everybody has Gallente POS up, same as our own in this system.. doh. Time to do it the hard way, fortunately I completely luck out and on my 3rd try I find our POS as I warp right into the shields and get uncloaked.

Right... 30 ships attacking... no dreads... POS lasers are firing, but they appear to be tanking them... even the frigates! (Turned out there were no crystals in the damn lasers) They have 1 carrier in system.

Once I get there, I find out it's actually 5 corps immediately involved.

I speak in local:
[ 2006.10.23 01:04:20 ] Avernus > get out your shield rechargers folks.

In the space of 5 minutes, I'm in a channel with their leadership. Turns out I'm dealing with an unofficial alliance based around Alachene for common defense against pirates. At least 6 corps. This is their leadership channel, they have their friendly list in the motd... over 30 corps I notice. I copy down the list.

The attackers scatter from the POS. I'm a little peeved... fucking empire noobie pukes shooting at my corps POS!! FUCK THAT!

Conversation starts off a little belligerent on both sides for the first couple of minutes... time to get this shit moving. Turns out they had some incredibly ass intel on my corp, that FIX are pirates, and a hostile entity to them. That since we're friends with BoB, we must be evil. Just before I lay into them I lay down some cards.

Bouncing between a few different conversations, a message to the gist of the below was delievered.

'Let's cut to the chase shall we?'

'This gets sorted now. I have 7 Dreads, 4 Carriers and 25 support ready to jump in 30 minutes. When they get here question and answer time is over. We will lay waste to everything in system, and then we'll get serious and start putting down war dec's. That is my corp alone, my alliance will have numberous volunteers who get their jollies from the slaughter of those who offend them.'

'I can muster over 100 experienced pvp pilots from my own alliance on short notice. I can further muster an additional 50 pilots from immediate friends that we work with closely. I can then see fit to call in some favors and increase my total force by 50% beyond that if I feel it is justified. If I went all out and called in every favor owed me, I have the ability to bring over 250 pilots down on you with a few days notice. I figure my corp alone will be sufficient for the task.'

'You have two options:''
1. You keep shooting our POS, you put it into reinforced and have your fun. You'll be meeting us real soon.''
2. You start recharging our POS shields. I may forget this incident.'

two. we'll take two.
'Option 2 then?'
yes.

Man... somebody was getting a total ass reaming on their end for screwing up.

Best part of the whole convo....
'Avernus - are you a dev?'
Oh yes... and they also asked us to join their alliance (common defense for the area).

Turns out they are alright people, just a little green. I may just go back for visits once in a while (perhaps scoop a few of the brighter stars for my corp), I ended being in chat with them all night, while we got the shields charged (I ended up helping them, along with Alain who flew up in an Osprey to join in on the fun).

Best person in their alliance....
Their diplomat... 18 yr old female from Tennessee... and oh so dirty
_______________________________________________

Turned out I did end up grabbing at least one of their members, their diplomat will be joining my corp this weekend. Man I'm gonna get an earful from her on this as well ;) For the record, I bluffed in the above encounter. I only had 10 guys online at the time, and it was a very odd hour for us. We'd have carried out my threats the following day of course, but the situation called for something a little more sudden in order to impact things in the manner I intended. It was just one of those days.