EVE General Discussion

Before you read this, I'll let you know what it's all about. I'd like to tell you a story about my experiences. I'm telling this out of character, which I try not to do. and I'm going to end with what I think it means to run a corporation. Also, I'm sorry about bad spelling and grammar. I wrote this once already and lost it because of the IGB lol.

Here it goes.

I don't know if I'm starting off wrong by saying but it's how I feel so I'm sticking with it. I love Eve, I really do. I love it for the complexity. I love it for how dynamic it is, and for how many situation can arise. They are frustration some times, and sometimes I feel they're unfair, but it's a challenge that I love. When I started playing Eve, I was about 16 or so. I guess it couldn't have been that long because I'm 28 now however, it was a long while ago. When I started, it was with a friend from Texas. I'm from Canada. We were internet business friends and he told me that there was a lot of gaming business potential.

I became his wormhole space scanner and station manager in wormhole space. This was very lucrative and awesome for me at this age. I played for a year or so and moved on.

I came back later on as a trial with my current character doll face and just couldn't get back into it. I had started a more pvp oriented character for electronic warfare but it wasn't my cup of tea.

This was a few years ago. Recently, I got back on with a local friend not too long ago and we wanted to run a business in eve. The idea was to have a place for high security players to live and learn. This corporation was called Eridium Technologies.

The idea was to merge that business aspect with the family atmosphere where our members were protected and provided for to grow.

We were doing well to start. Grabbed up some new players and started teaching and learning. We were making headway and all of a sudden we got hit with two wars.

Both were just griefers but they hit us pretty hard. The first I tried talking our way out of but that wasn't going to happen. We managed to get some rules of engagement established, which were not followed.. but things could have been a lot worse!

After the first war we were all very demoralized but it was our job to keep something together, and we did. Our members were ready to move on and we took some valuable lessons from the experience.

We needed more structure, more training and more preparation. Just as we were starting on developing this, we were hit by our second war.

This was nothing but pain, and lots of it. There were a lot of deaths and losses, and at the end of the whole ordeal, there was less to learn from.

At the time, we told our members that they could leave Eridium and keep in touch in our public channel, and then come back in once the war was complete.

After the second war, I knew it was time to get our stuff together and prepare our members to learn how to defend themselves, get some cash flow, and make the corporation look less appealing to griefers.

This is what we did. I built a website, started talking about products and services, started putting a PVP partnership into place inside Eridium and began all the preparations to grow through our pain.

Between this time and now, we've got two player owned stations, three offices, a website, a teamspeak server, have had a peak of almost 40 members, and have started selling ammunition, minerals and ore on the corporations behalf.

Also between this time, our founder and my local friend, gave over the corporation to me because of the work I was putting in to running the business. He was also losing interest after not being able to simply "log in and mine".

I worked at hard as I could, protected my members, and made decisions that were RP oriented, consultative and stuck with our core values of safety and family. All of this passing through a voting structure where members would choose what they want.

The problem is that in the middle was also mutiny. Members wanted, members whined and complained, and voted for these stations. Doing our best to work through all the game mechanics of something we don't quite understand and all the other hardships of how to fund the station and protect it, it was decided by many that Eridium was not only responsible for doing all the work, but also for the upkeep... And to top it off, many became angry when the station wasn't a free for all for safety reasons.

Over the last two to three weeks I've tried my best to work every angle I can to balance safety and family, and now Eridium has lost half of it's members as a chain reaction of players who felt that the corporation asset should belong to them.

At this moment, I'm recruiting to find more members who share my vision. One where Eridium conducts business in roleplaying as a real business but treats all of it's members with the respect they deserve and provides to them first before the rest of New Eden. The issue we've run into is nothing more than the balance between what should be free as in free beer, and what should be a corporation asset that produced free beer for members. A difference in opinion.

What is running a corporation like.. It's hell.. But I love it.

Some advise:

1) make sure you get people to help you run things, that makes a huge difference. When all you do is log in and feed 30 crying pos's a day its a pita.

2) make it crystal clear that the pos' are corp property. I'm harsh on this. Every pos belongs to the corp. Anyone who deploys a personal pos. and does;t feed it 3 times loses said pos (i.e. it becomes mine) I state all pos' are corp property because if they get blown up, or stuff gets stolen, too bad so sad. I do not reimbursed. in my corp if anyone bitched that they should own the pos i would of kicked them in a heart beat.

3) You can only really do an effective corp if its a quasi or complete dictatorship. Other ways are hard. If people don;t like your play style, they can leave.

Anyway, corp ops are pita, but yea its what i do.

there is not many independent country without good army or some bigger entity securing their independence.

Running a corp is like herding cats. Cats that have ADD.

I'd like to take a second and thank everyone for posting any replies. I'm glad to see that there are some who agree that running a corp is not exactly easy, and in many cases requires you to take responsibility and authority in the same hand.

I do understand that this was like a light beacon for more griefers and such. And yeah, my memory is crap. I'm almost certain I was scanning before 2009. Either that or I've forgotten how old I am lol

None the less, I wanted to share something with the community. I love the depth that Eve offers when stories and events are turned into "real" happenings, and this was mine.

this is general discussion's thirty thousandth thread, if anyone was interested

1) No. This is just untrue. Try mining Thorium in Venture Co. on a busy Saturday night and see how much Tauren **** you have to ****

2) Don't fight people near a station. That is teh dumb.

As was previously stated, if you run a corporation as a democracy you will have a disaster. People vote for what is best for THEM, not for what is best for the corporation.

As CEO you really need to set the direction. It sounds like you already have a vision. Now set some goals. A two year goal, a one year goal, ect.

I use "projects" that are focused on for 8-10 weeks followed by a couple weeks of down time before the next project. All of these are aligned with the "vision".

Members are asked for input into how "it" gets done, but the CEO should provide what the "it" is. The CEO also makes the decision, sometimes the members just come up with wrong ideas.

Bottom line is that it is your corporation. If you want it to be a "family" that is fine, but you have to be the father.

People... Always those damn people man!

Nice story. I hope your corp manages to replace its members with guys and galls more in sync with how you want it to go.

I have never lived in WH space.

Can I join your lovely WH corporation?

I bring much to the table.