No cute graphical support. And no names.
Writing about what happens in Eve is always a two-edged sword. On the one hand I've been doing it for five years and it is, after all, what this blog's primary purpose is. Anything, anything at all, that happens in-game or out, is potential subject matter. That is the reality of it. On the other hand, there are real people behind all of those things that happen. And, as virtual as this all tends to be, I am keenly aware of that reality at all times.
Ten months ago Stay Frosty was an unknown and untested idea. That is all it was - an idea. There was plenty of drama surrounding it, most of which was self-generated by me in order to drum up business. A few daring souls made the leap of faith and joined us early on, and among those, a few bright lights emerged. Two of those, for no other reason than the spark of potential I saw in them, I made Directors.
Many people don't understand our open recruitment policy. It scares them, or they think it foolish. They scoff and say, well you are going to get AWOX'd, or you'll have spais, or it'll never work, or whatever. They are missing the point. I appointed two wet-behind-the-ears players to the role of Director for the same reason we have an open door policy to begin with. It is sink or swim. Yes we've been AWOX'd a few times, and yes we have spais, and yes a contract or two gets stolen.
The thing is. I don't care.
We don't have a lot of assets to steal. And they can be replaced, those responsible kicked from corp. Yes we have spais, good. Spais bring conflict and oportunities, bring it on. We have safeguards in place and we're adding more every day. Most of that is secret, so enough said.
I saw potential and I rewarded that potential with opportunity. Either they take it, own it and make it their own, or they don't.
Over the past two weeks we've experienced a lot of stress in the Corp. The FFA was a huge event and on top of that we had some unusual situations brewing under the surface that added a lot of new stress to the situation. This is all normal growth stuff, but in hindsight it was also a cauldron. And sometimes, when you have a fire, someone is going to get burned.
So a blue pilot gets killed by another blue. There is some confusion over the incident and a Stay Frosty Director is involved. So, while I try to figure out what happened, both parties have their roles removed and an investigation is under-taken. One pilot is a trusted Director of SF and one is a new member who sadly decided then was the time to 'borrow' some corp funds. And while something doesn't add up, the new member is removed and the Director's roles are restored.
While the corp is distracted by the FFA the Director suggests, rather publicly, that we should give some major assets to an adversary. Without gain on our part. Obviously this is met with some confusion, as this person is well aware of the history between us. In addition, this person who admittedly spent "hours" talking to our adversary, suggests publicly that we should start flying with them.
And then the incident with Dred happens. Our forums are being updated to new software and for about 30 minutes permissions get wonked and the entire works is open to the public. No one would notice, unless they were looking. And so Dred and this Director make our forums available on paste-bins, Twitter and various other outlets. Including sharing them with our neighbors.
And then it is two days of drama.
Indignant refusals, out-right lies, channel sabatoge, rights violations, invitations to known alts, public tirades, and various other forms of dragging corp mates names thru the mud. It all gets rather ugly.
And still, we make one last attempt. One last effort to pull this back from the edge. Yes, it was foolish. But I do a lot of foolish things, so why stop now? And no, it didn't work. Because someone had already gone to far. Bridges had been burned and the self-righteous indignation was already out on the sleeve.
This morning I ended it. Despite my personal feelings, despite opportunities given to the other party to take the noble way out, I was left with no other choice than to kick them from the Corporation.
I will say this, Sully was right about many things. And one of those was his hatred of drama. And while we will always disagree that I was the initial instigator of that drama, the fact remains that it is tiresome, pointless and rather immature. Especially when it serves no purpose. At least my drama, mostly after the fact, was used to build a Corporation. This drama? Pointless and it achieved nothing.
Which, in the end, is the saddest legacy of all. You achieved nothing.
Congratulations.
PS: I do want to add one more thing. Something happened ages ago for which I took considerable heat over. In fact, this incident directly led to another Corporation declaring war on Stay Frosty. It is interesting, in hindsight, that the Director mentioned in the above post -
was also the pilot dishonored on that day.
I went to bat for them then, both publicly and in-game. Our entire Corporation endured months of war, station camping, podding and aggravation as a direct result of that incident. At the time, I went to bat for a fellow corp member and assumed they were in the right. As CEO, defending my own pilots is part of my job. But now, in the light of history, recent events do tend to shed new light. Don't they?
