It was doomed from the beginning. That's what almost everyone told me. I kept getting messages. Some were threats. Some were worried. Some just wanted me to know the futility of what I was planning. Stay Frosty was born a decade ago on the back of some very hard lessons. Lessons learned from my very first Alliance, Burn Away, and my very first pirate corporation Lucifer's Hammer. I'd been down this road before. I knew it was impossible. That the odds of success were against me. But out of that chaos, the threats, the wars, the station camping, the drama (both unintended and intentional) - I knew one thing for certain. It would work.
My goal was insanely simple. To create an old-school pirate corporation founded purposefully to express a casual game-play style built around a Code of Conduct whose roots reached back to the very beginnings of Eve Online. All the way back to Lord Zap and the mOo Corporation and the very first gate camps and stolen loot in the history of Eve. A long tradition that I wanted to codify into a set of principles that we would adhere to without fail. We would never stray. We would not follow the "way things worked". We would stay true to our Code, stay true to our nature - and Stay Frosty no matter what the odds were.
Wanting something and then making it happen is one thing. Staying true to that for a decade is quite another. I had no idea on May 6th, 2013 that ten years from then I would be sitting down to write this post. That idea would have seemed foreign to me then. All I knew on that day was that I had two members, myself and my Son Angor, the rest seemed almost impossible to imagine. I said from day one that it would go on even if it never grew beyond the two of us. And yet, somehow, amazingly, it did grow. In hindsight it grew too fast and too much.
Over the last decade we've survived so many things. Betrayals, stalkers, thieves, imposters, wars, threats, and much, much more. We survived the constant push and pull from members who wanted more from their own experience - a constant and never ceasing pressure to build a cap fleet, move to null, move into a wormhole, make friends with a null-sec alliance, actually take sov, be on comms all the time, create doctrines, win tournaments, run fleets, leave low sec, join a faction - you name it and someone at some point has wanted us to do it. And many times these are friends. People I respect. And to each one I've had to say no. That isn't for us. And while we often have fun trying some of these things out for the YARRR and the fun - we are not changing. We are pirates. Forever.
That doesn't mean we haven't evolved. Because we have. We have to constantly evolve, literally with every single patch. With every update. Eve doesn't care about us. We are the fringe. The extremely small and almost insignificant percentage of paying customers, pursuing a fringe activity. We are not mainstream. This is why I so often stand on my soapbox and preach the gospel to those that will hear me, not for my own personal gain, but to represent my people. My pirates. Someone has to stand up for us and make our voices heard.
Do I imagine that in May of 2033 I will be sitting down at my computer to write a blog post about the twenty year anniversary of Stay Frosty? Can I herd cats for another decade? Will Eve still be here then? Will I even be here then? Who the Hell knows.
All I know for certain is that we are here today. And that somehow, through determination, hard work, sweat, and an insane refusal to quit - that Stay Frosty remains the old-school pirate corporation it started out to be. A decade later. We are still here.
You tried to kill us. You failed.
Pirates Forever. YARRR!