This is a piece which will discuss the many struggles, pitfalls and mistakes many CEOs face when creating and maintaining their corp. This is not a theoretical account but rather my own personal experience. I have opted to hide the identity of some of the individuals involved as my goal here is not to press the matter to anyone’s throat, but rather to put certain lessons and facts in writing so that it may be of help to others.
Leading a corp is by far one of the most difficult tasks one can take upon themselves in Eve. Just to start op the corp, you need a list of contacts and individuals that will be willing to join you. One may form the corp itself but without an already established network of contacts, who would join just one individual in his own corp? You need people in corp in order to have more people in corp. It’s a bit of a circular problem the same way some students may complain that their possible job would require them to have experience before they may even apply, yet how does one have experience without first working?
Just as importantly, a corp must have a raison d’etre, a purpose. I remember joining a small corp years ago and when I asked the CEO what our goals were, she said that “we do everything from nulsec roams to high sec mining to lowsec gate camps.” When you try to do “everything” you end up doing nothing. It’s a bit like training your new character to fly all the different ships without having any one focus. As such you fly Caldari and Amarr ships but without any of the required skills to V.
Yet even if you have a network of people and a purpose, difficulties may arise. I am reminded of my grandmother’s Machiavellian words when I was six, “No one cares about you in life and you can trust only yourself” to which my more jovial and light hearted grandfather said “you cannot even trust your own ass. Once I went to pass gas and soiled myself.” This is very true in Eve as well. You may interact with individuals that seem impressive at first, only to be disappointed. It’s also wise not to take yourself too seriously, you’re probably not as good as you think.
Once you get numbers, the majority of people want to be spoon fed content. Everyone wants to be a chief with a big feather hat, but are frustrated when they actually have to put work in it. It’s hard to ascend the ranks of a quality corp because if it is quality it is likely that the good positions are filled by capable people. One needs to do it in a start up organization, but few want to put the work in for it. Most people seem to want to show up for dinner and have a big meal and a nice seat without arranging the chair, cooking or helping prepare anything.
The story of my corp, Hades Effect, was born out of a desire to take my experience further. For the majority of 2012, I had helped develop Bombers Bar through its early phase. I enjoyed covert ops ships. We terrorized systems like M-O, EC-P8R and of course HED-GP with surprising efficiency only using cov ops frigs and a few recons. The “patron corp” of Bombers Bar was Venga, of which I served as a diplomat and recruiter. As the organization’s success grew, so too did the numbers and as such divisions also developed. Without spending more time than necessary for the sake of the topic, we can say that some in the group wanted to continue to do what Venga and Bombers Bar had always done, while another group also wanted to take things further and provide cov ops mercenary services. As always when success is involved, but also the presence of money, distrust and envy rear their ugly heads. Although I attempted to reconcile the differences by starting my own corp but offering to place it in the newly formed “Renegade Alliance” of which Venga was the holder of, the toxic environment unfortunately stayed.
It was during this time that I came into contact with another individual which I will refer to as “Toll.” His manner was calm and thoughtful and he had some fairly good pvp experience. I have a low tolerance for imbecility and as such along with his shared view of the game, he seemed to be a perfect fit. At the time he was part of Noir Mercenary Group, a well known Merc alliance that’s operated within Eve for years. I had had some previous experience within their training academy in the early days of this character’s creation but nothing too in depth. Although he had done extensive FCing for Noir, he lamented that he felt the alliance lacked, in his view, a common goal and bond beyond the few contracts and training ops they did.
Toll and I agreed to combine our resources. I had presence in Bombers Bar and quite a few members wanting to join our group as well as a knack for the political side of things. Toll likewise had numbers to draw in from a previous 0.0 alliance he had been part of, as well as an interest to FC. The understanding was simple, I would act as CEO and he would be the main FC. Our goal raison d’etre and modus operandi was as such:
“During the war between the Olympian Gods and the Titans, the God Hades used his Helm of Invisibility to travel unseen and steal the gift of lightning for his brother Zeus and the trident that commanded the seas for his brother Poseidon and with these artifacts the Olympian Gods won the war. The ability to move invisible and therefore change the tide of war is what we call the Hades Effect.”
And thus Hades Effect was born. We would be politically unaligned and work on two different levels as mercs. The low intensity warfare level would see us hired to harass areas of 0.0 using hit and run tactics such as setting up drag bubbles and torp/webbing targets, cov ups cyno dropping with Blops or simply AFK cloaking areas. The high intensity warfare level would have us acting as a bomber wing for hire so that when the big battles would happen, we’d ship to bomb fit bombers and lay waste to whichever side we were paid to hit. The whole concept was to “do a lot with as little as possible.” An agent of change with a very specialized role.
Toll also brought in an old contact which I will refer to as “Ape.” He too was part of Noir, who at the time would join Black Legion. He lacked the interest to be a “nullsec grunt” as he put it and instead wished to be the third in our group. He too promised to offer his services as an FC but also had a curious notion that he would be co-CEO with me. Supposedly he had extensive contacts within Noir and Black Legion and spoke about drawing more numbers in. I decided early on I would not involve myself with recruitment and place my attentions elsewhere but I wasn’t exactly thrilled about his intentions either. Over all Ape was a fairly incompetent FC and placed some staggeringly embarrassing lossmails on the KB, something that can be damaging for a new small start up corp. Thankfully his contribution over all was minimal to the corp. He would run a few fits, lose some recons and log in once in a while asking me about giving him director roles and corp shares, requests I ignored for the most part.
Our true third in the group was actually a newer member in Bombers Bar which I will refer to as “Doughboy.” I was pretty impressed with him at the time because he had ran a campaign in Querious not unlike my own against Li3 Federation. Results were decent but the initiative he took is what appealed to me the most. He was also well spoken, intelligent, although not as much as he would imagine himself, and although he seemed to lose his nerve at times, seemed like a decent over all addition to the group.
My initial plan was to continue to reinforce Bombers Bar but specifically operating in Providence using the region as a training area. Early on we had some very good success. A high concentration of Blops pilots in the corp saw us leading some of the deeper strike ops. Comms discipline was maintained and a sense of organization that was previously unseen was common place when a Hades Effect FC was present. Unfortunately the contribution to Bombers Bar only reinforced some of the notions some people held about some attempt to “take over” the channel. In truth I wanted Hades Effect to get away from Bombers Bar as soon as possible as to avoid the pitfall of simply stagnating.
The problem was in choosing what we should do next. Doing the same thing again would lead into stagnation yet at the same time “the same thing” still generated content so it was still a somewhat attractive option on some level. However, the longer we stayed in one place, the lazier we also had our members become. It’s easy to live in high sec and pop one system over into Provi for kills, but at the end of the day such game play doesn’t really matter to the over all purpose of Hades Effect. I didn’t have the confidence in many of our members that they would “survive” a move away from the comfortable sensation Bbar offered. We numbered about 50 characters in corp over all and could muster 8 to 15 or so members in a fleet in our strong time zone. We had the credentials to join a 0.0 alliance but that was one of the things I wanted to avoid doing. I wanted us to have a sense of identity rather than simply falling in line as “0.0 grunt corp # 897332.” Looking back on it now, I would have moved us to NPC 0.0 up north or in the west or perhaps Curse, and let it live or die on the quality we had then.
I staggered in my role as CEO. I should have been more decisive even if such a move would have been difficult. Not wanting to alienate my directors, I would often ask their advice and listen to their council. What the corp needed wasn’t meetings however, it was goals, tasks, content. As a mercenary corp we were not limited by any politics, yet at the same time politics give purpose. Contract offers didn’t come easy for a new corp and those that did often asked us for Herculean tasks in exchange for meager wages. At times Toll would tell me he had contracts “in the works” but nothing ever materialized.
Due to my desire to be a sort of leader that always listened to his council, I logged on one day to find that Toll had made the call for Hades Effect to deploy to Black Rise and to fly conventional non cloaky ships. I imagine this had something to do with his borderline roleplay tendency concerning the Caldari and his goal to train up the corp in flying non cloaky ships as well. His theory was in part correct, we needed to get away from the same old routine. Unfortunately the practice was extremely damaging to the line members. They had joined a cov ops corp to fly cov ops, specifically in 0.0. Suddenly they were told to forget about their bombers, recons and blops, and instead to fit out Stabbers, Vagabonds and Tornados for lowsec. Toll was a decent FC but his plans were often over complicated for the newly formed group we had, he was easily frustrated and seemed to have burned himself out before we had had a chance to do too much of anything. He was also fairly unpopular with the rank and file for his nature was blunt and his patience thin. In one ear I would hear Toll tell me how incompetent and stupid our line members were, while in the other, the rank and file would tell me how much of a bad FC Toll was.
After time wasted, energy spent and morale beaten, Toll became inactive for the most part. The cited reason varied and I’m not sure which story was true. Either his fiance broke up with him, or a friend in Afghanistan had died, or it had been a car crash of another close individual to him. I wasn’t going to push the matter further as I couldn’t force him to his corp duties regardless. I let him be regardless of how true or false any of the stories were. I would be lying if I said that I didn’t find his presence on TS frustrating as he played other games.
Now with Toll inactive, and Ape never really being active or contributing much of anything, I was left to lead mostly alone with Doughboy. Although there were posts on our forums made, theory crafting discussed and we had a lot of things in common, he too found the task frustrating. His goals seemed to continue to circle around Bombers Bar and the internal politics at the time. He had also placed an alt of his in AAA when they had been pushed out of Catch by TEST and their allies. Most of his time was spent between AAA, DUST and eventually I had found out, passing off intel to certain parties in Bbar.
At the time I had major life concerns to deal with. To anyone who has ever planned a wedding, they will tell you the difficulties of such a task. I was also finishing up my undergrad and working toward applying to a grad program. Between those things and work I had little in the way of running the corp by myself. Eventually Toll made a post about leaving in the coming weeks citing his interest in flying in big 0.0 fleets, a stark contrast to our small gang goals only months earlier. If I didn’t know it earlier, by then I was sure Hades Effect would soon fall. I had lost the energy, or time to focus on Eve as a primary matter when so many other things were part of my life. The only question was, how would this small corp fall?
While Toll was mostly inactive, he did take up the role of recruiter of sorts. One of the things he did was to follow the Noir forum and asked a couple of people that had either left their training alliance, or were dropped out for whatever frivolous reason, if they wanted a chance to join Hades Effect. One of the individuals asked was suppose to have joined the training program about 4 or 5 months before Toll had contacted them. Supposedly they had gone inactive. None of those things were important to Noir however which sent mails to the merc contract moderators complaining about “poaching.” My opinion on the matter is that if someone can offer someone else a better opportunity, so be it. But over all I had nothing to do with recruitment. Even so I defended Toll’s actions more out of a sense of loyalty than anything else. The issue seemed to have died down but would have been brought up again later.
During our existence, we had recruited a particular individual we’ll comically refer to Sgt Tryhard. Now he earns this name because he was the sort of individual that was all piss and vinegar talking disrespectfully to other members on comms and acting like a general asshat any chance he got. He was painfully oblivious to any sort of pvp outside of dueling people in trade hubs with his max linked, high end implant clone “fights.” He’d usually log on to comms with the wonderful greeting of “oh look it’s a bunch of shitty bads. Have you lost any ships again today?” And that sort of attitude continued on and on exhausting everyone’s patience. Coupled with his expensive “dueling ship” losses any time we went out on a roam, nobody cared to have him around.
In one instance we came upon a insta pop arty Loki that liked to camp a particular system every day. I thought it would be a fun goal to go after said Loki. I spoke with a few of the corp members and wished to devise a plan for it. The next day, Sgt Tryhard had written up his own stated goal to take out the Loki which included daft limitations such as “no Falcons because ECM is dishonorable.” Everyone promptly told him to be quiet and we went with my plan. However this time the Loki did not log on that day. Sgt Tryhard took this to mean that “opsec had been broken” and that I had “stolen his op.” He was unpleasant, loud, and most of all just plain stupid, an individual of little worth, one of the few I’d venture to say so in his personal life as well. Perhaps the one good thing Doughboy actually did was to AWOX him after he asked him to dock up so that he could boot him from corp.
Toward the start of the Spring, we had managed to pull myself and the other 3 directors in a meeting. Clearly there were issues in the corp with activity and general contribution from members that had signed up to do certain tasks but had failed to do so. The suggestion was made to have us move to Bei, a highsec system right in the middle of Empire space that in theory would allow us to deploy to any region with equal ease… or hardship depending upon how you look at it. Again I listened to my council rather than to go with my “gut feeling” and again the corp was left mostly alienated and spread out. Some moved to Bei to find little content there from directors that rarely logged on, and some remained in Bombers Bar at the edge of Provi or Catch. It seemed Hades Effect would die a quiet death, a background sound in the midst of my class papers and wedding plans. It would not be so.
Sgt Tryhard took to the forums with all his sperging might to tell the world of the evils of Hades Effect and its devious CEO. Frustrated and annoyed, myself and a few other members wasted our time and argued back. This was an opening for a few Noir members to chime in and bring up the recruitment issue. I even had my former CEO write up a twenty seven point list of why I was a sociopath. To any who care to search for the nonsense on the forum, it’s a perfect example of how futile reason is when combating madness.
This prompted Toll, Ape and Doughboy to have a meeting about the future of the corp. The three decided that a leadership change was needed in order to wash away past sins etc. Past sins more specifically being the issue with Noir and the supposed member poaching. Ironically enough, Ape and Toll, both former Noir members, were told that they were the ones that had burned their bridges to Noir as Ape was heard on a leaked corp meeting that he would “recruit from Noir” while Toll himself was the individual that did the action. My fault in the matter was telling Noir to get over it and defending my corp mates which the unappreciative Toll and Ape saw as reason to replace me. Should I have burned them instead? Probably, but loyalty is unfortunately one of my enduring weaknesses even to those who clearly have no interest to return the act.
I remember a quote from Scipio Africanus come to mind at the time: “You, ingrate nation, deserve not even my ashes.”
When the three approached me after their meeting, they asked that I step down and allow Ape to lead. Ape was someone who never held up his end of the bargain when we first formed the corp. He had been a mediocre FC at best, painfully incompetent at worst, and now delusional enough to imagine his absence, which in contrast to his incompetent presence, suddenly deserved to run the corp. I would gladly let it die over that option.
The other possibility was to allow Toll to run it, but he was unpopular with the rank, had no mind for politics and his FCing, while better than Ape’s lacked some key points. Lastly there was Doughboy, who by now I knew he was playing political games in Bbar and passing information from Hades Effect to them. He perhaps had more political sense than the other two, but his plans always fell apart moving from theory to action. Obviously his actions were of questionable loyalty to begin with which should shed some light on how great by two other options were if I even still considered Doughboy.
It must have been a week or two before my finals and wedding and while I didn’t want to deal with video game drama in such a situation, I’m too stubborn and determined to simply give up on the corp either. I attempted a compromise for the time being. I told them that Ape could be listed as the corp CEO and he could act as CEO while I would be inactive for an indefinite amount of time and would not interfere with his rule. This was in order to protect myself as I was sure the first thing that would happen when the shares were given up and the CEO position given to Ape, that I would be removed as well. I opted out of that possibility. Of course the three disliked that idea and each threw out their own corp mail trying to entice the handful remnant of active people to join their side.
Ape tried to get people to join him for a dying no name alliance in 0.0 where the few people that did follow him did mostly nothing and soon quit. He’s currently in Caldari FW doing I have no idea nor any inclination to care.
Doughboy kicked a large portion of the corp before he left at first claiming it was to “get rid of inactives.” He now tells himself it was all actually a brilliant coup and I somehow harbor ill will against him for it. (Insert eye rolling here) I suppose everyone needs a narrative. He went back to Bombers Bar where he incited enough drama and poison in the community that the group split in two. Currently he runs some public fleets of mixed success, never quite reaching that cult following that he so coveted from Bombers Bar FC Tempelman N, not for the lack of trying.
Toll left for Black Legion where he more or less just did the F1 thing for a few months. I remember writing a piece and in one section it talked about Black Legion. He posted about how I didn’t know what I was talking about and I didn’t understand Black Legion. Funny enough a few weeks later, what I had written became reality, to the letter. He parted with BL and has since settled down into Shadow Cartel with pretty much the same role as before. He also runs a small alt corp bizarro version of Hades Effect where they role play “pyrates” complete with a “pyrates code.” We still speak time to time and he’s always polite albeit with an extremely passive aggressive tone. The last time we spoke, he was nice enough to inform me that I wasn’t important enough for someone to interview me and that Q-Fox should have interviewed someone of higher importance. Years later and the bitterness is still thick I suppose.
And myself? I took Hades Effect and whatever remained of it and put it in a 0.0 alliance in the east. I ran a couple intel ops participating in the take over against the Russian alliances and their allies in the Drone lands but for the most part let everyone know I was unsubbing for a while and to spend their time doing as they pleased. When I returned to the game I stayed with Hades Effect, even until today. The corp is little more than a name and an idea. I joined Surely You’re Joking, a major wormhole merc alliance turned lowsec powerbloc with our allies Easily Excited. I serve to the best of my capacity as diplomat although life has kept me from enjoying the game more fully. I still look to recruit but being part of an alliance allows me to really hand pick who I want to join. Even so I still remember the lessons learned and apply them throughout.
1. Never put too much trust in any one person. Man is fallible and it is only a matter of time before your trust is failed.
2. If you’re going to lead, lead. Detractors and enemies will find fault in whatever you do. Do not let fear of criticism stop you from taking decisive action.
3. Don’t be too harsh, but being too lenient is even worse. I tried giving people like Sgt Tryhard chances to change their ways but ultimately it was for nothing.
4. It’s not that serious. If ever you are in a situation where you must decide between your real life and Eve…go with life. It’s all really just a game and games are meant to be played. Don’t let it play you.
I am sure my detractors will descend upon me with accusations and fanciful fantasies but it’s to be expected. I’ve kept the names of the individuals involved anonymous so there’s no reason they can say I am writing this to sully their reputations. That was never my interest but I will point out that while I gladly admit my mistakes, none of the three would do more than make a token offering for their failures. My 5th and final point of advice is to say that lying to yourself is truly the worst thing you can do, both in Eve and out of it.
I hope everyone enjoyed a very open piece concerning my little corp and I hope that my mistakes and short comings, as well as the other issues discussed can help someone else that may be looking to make a corp or looking to save their own.
– Seraph IX Basarab
