Hey Duders,
As you may have seen in this post, there was a forceful removal of the Brave Collective’s alliance executor a month back. The story that goes with it is pretty interesting and we’re far enough out from the actual events that I feel comfortable with posting my side of it. I’m the CEO of Kite Co. Space trucking. The Giant Bomb community corporation and that left me with an interesting perspective on the whole thing. As usual, I will try to keep the EVE jargon to a minimum and explain jargon where needed. This is a long story so grab a warm drink and a comfy blanket. With that out of the way…
Setting the Stage
I was sitting in Kite Co. general comms on our mumble server shooting the breeze with some of the Kite Co. members. It was the usual discussion points about videogames, spaceships, and probably some anime sprinkled in. I didn’t really know what drama I was about to be pulled into. Kite Co. mostly keeps to itself and I like to envision my role in the day to day running of the alliance as telling people to stop acting insane from time to time. This is why I was caught off-guard when a corporation CEO messaged me on jabber (A chat client often used by large EVE organizations because it’s easy to integrate 3rd party authentication into and to send out group wide messages) asking how I was doing.
We exchanged a brief set of pleasantries. He asked how Kite Co. was doing and I asked him the same about his corporation. He then asked me if I happened to have skype set up. I didn’t. For the record, I hate skype. I uninstalled it back when it was a memory hog but I was willing to quickly install it and chat with this CEO. Everything still seemed pretty strange. I like this CEO well enough but we just have never talked that much before. This felt completely out of nowhere. Once I get skype up and running he cuts to the chase. He tells me there’s trouble brewing.
He tells me that a number of members in the command structure of Brave Collective (Our alliance. An alliance is a group of corporations and a corporation is like a guild) have become increasingly dissatisfied with the performance of the Alliance Executor(head honcho) Lychton Kondur.
The Fall of Catch
Now we need to take a break from my story to get a little context for what’s been going on for the past half a year in Brave Collective for the rest of this to make sense. I pretty much understand where the dissenters are coming from. Lychton Kondur been pretty absent. Part of it through no fault of his own (Hardware failure) and other parts relating to personal workload and a myriad of things. The end result is what mostly matters here. We’ve had unclear objectives in the region of Catch. Catch is a part of vaguely valuable space that the Brave Collective had lucked into. It was plenty to support our members and had become a home for thousands of players.
Our idyllic paradise changed. Pandemic Legion takes the stage as the main visible antagonist here. They are a collection of high experience players who possess a great number of “Super Capital” ships. These ships have insane amounts of HP and can crank out tons of damage against large structures and stationary objects. Much of the mechanics of owning space in EVE revolve around dumping damage into structures and the only decent counter for super capitals in EVE is a greater number of super capitals. Brave certainly didn’t have that.
Pandemic legion had been toying with Brave for months. They were farming us for content using the things we own as a means to make us come to them like lambs for the slaughter. This was all under the auspices of getting the elusive “good fight”. Sometimes we would “win” or sometimes we would “lose”. Many of the fights were even fun but when you know your enemy has in their back pocket a trump card that is capable of instantly shifting the battle in their favor you can’t help but feel like you are being toyed with.
This was wearing on the average line member to a degree but it was especially tiring for Fleet Commanders. These are people who volunteer to organize groups of players to try to give them content. There’s no reward in it except for a little bit of recognition among the community. These were the people that were the most burned out. Brave had also lost a large number of them a few weeks earlier as a group called Apathy attempted to push Brave in a direction they felt was better (though pretty aggressive means) and were forcefully expelled. Many of those Fleet Commanders joined Pandemic Legion. Unrest had already been stirring. As with all EVE stories there’s nuance to it and 100 different sides to the Apathy incident but the end result of it is pretty clear. Content creators were at an all-time low and those creators were tired.
Pandemic Legion had stepped up its attack. They were tired of brave not fielding their members seriously or they were just bored. So they took out the primary staging system of Brave. This sent much of Brave into a panic as their capital city was falling. As unlikely as it seemed, Brave was able to pull back to another system and evacuate most of its assets. Pandemic Legion smelled blood in the water and was having too much fun with the chaos they had caused to let up now.
Brave also decided to call a "deployment" to a distant part of space. This deployment was meant to be a vacation of sorts where Brave could get away from the stresses of Pandemic Legion and focus on having fun for a while. This was one of the few things Lychton did during this time of inactivity and it was largely unexpected. It put many members of leadership on their heels. It also became a critical stressor on the situation with Pandemic Legion as we had resolved to only defend some of our assets to focus on the deployment. With our forces stretched between a deployment and defending our home, holding the line became even more difficult.
Pandemic Legion doubled down and attacked the position that Brave fell back to. With no real direction from Lychton Kondur, the standard Brave line member was worried about their assets. If you lose control of a station your assets can stay locked inside of it forever. Because of this, there was a great deal of fear surrounding the future of Brave and many people felt like their fun was on the line. These ships and modules were not easily replaced for some. In Lychton’s absence, his second in command, Lquid Dressig called for a full scale evacuation of Catch. That is how Catch fell. It fell with a demoralizing whimper and a hurried retreat. The final battles for our last foothold went uncontested and we retreated to our low security deployment system to lick our wounds and figure out what was next.
Back to the Topic at Hand
I was certainly dissatisfied. Lychton was still barely present or not present at all. But it went farther than that. This group wanted to oust him as the leader and install new ones. That's too much drama for me. We both agreed that a forced removal might be a bit too much. I thanked him for the heads up and resolved myself to keep my head low.
No more than five minutes later, I’m approached in our voice comms by another guy whom I’ve talked to a few times in the past but again have had nothing to do with him recently. He asks to go to a private channel to talk and I oblige. Now this guy is not a part of any leadership structure but he does have deep deep pockets. He summarizes many of the events that I summarized above. Adds in a few of his own stories to strengthen his case. Then he lets me know that many of the other corporations are thinking of using their CEO vote to change the executor corporation from Brave Holdings to Nerd Panic. The executor corporation is the corporation whose leadership is responsible for Alliance Level policies and activities within the game. It is decided by majority vote of all the member corporations.
Usually, use of this mechanic is not possible. Alliance leadership usually floods the alliance with dummy corporations to make getting a majority vote excessively difficult or even impossible. This was not the case with Brave. It had not thought that far ahead. That left use of this mechanic wide open. I politely declined his offer. I’m really not one to ruffle feathers. This sounded big and I didn’t want any part of it. I just wanted to be able to provide a fun time for Kite Co. members. He told me it was no big deal and that they hoped they wouldn't need my vote anyway.
Nothing good happens after 2 AM
Now onto my critical mistake. I stayed up too late. 2 am rolls around and I’m about to head to bed when another corporation CEO approaches me. Again, he’s not someone that I’ve had a long rapport with. He opens the same way the man with the deep pockets did. He tells me about everything that’s happened and adds even more of his own personal stories and personal misgivings with Lychton. Here’s where the story changes. They don’t have enough votes and I’m a critical swing.
Suddenly the pressure drops on me like a rock. Where I didn't care before I suddenly felt like I had to. If this fails, many of the corporations who were a part of why I liked being in the Brave Collective would be purged. In a lot of ways, the personality of the Brave Collective is not defined by its biggest corporation (BNI, of which Lychton Kondur is also the leader) but in the interactions with the smaller corporations that have grown to have their own personalities. The combination of all of the people makes for the personality.
My mind went towards mitigating damage for me, Kite Co, and everyone I could. This coup was happening with or without me but it might not have been succeeding without me. I conferred with one of my directors. The people they wanted to put in charge were crappy. But in the end I hedged my bets that the success of the coup would be more stable. At least if it were stable I could keep trying to figure out where to go next. Depending on Lychton’s actions it may or may not all come crumbling down but we were already perilously close to that. I changed my vote to Nerd Panic and went to an uneasy sleep.
When I woke up to find that the executor had changed I first wrote a mail to Kite Co. explaining what I did, why I did it, and hoping that they understand. They came through in all regards. Lychton Kondur was out. He civilly announced he would be transferring alliance control to the new players but wanted to stay in charge of Brave Newbies Incorporated as it has the largest raw number of members of any corporation in the Brave Collective. The coup had succeeded better than anyone had imagined.
This set the stage for the new leadership:
Lquid Drisseg - Former 2nd In command of the Brave Collective and the director of IT services.
Malanek Askelus - A charismatic FC with a silken voice who had stepped up in the absence of Lychton to provide some stability.
Anna niedostepny - The current Brave Military director, appointed only a week or two prior. Also a member of brave who has been deep at the heart of every dramatic occurrence that had ever happened.
It was a motley crew. All eyes were on them and looking to see what would happen next. They had gotten what they wanted but it was far from over.
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