As far as strategic objectives, you guys were doing markedly better. Every system that you showed up to got saved. Fleet participation was high, more and more people were getting into Tengus, and losses were much lower. But then the drama snake reared its head once more. Apathy got kicked, Test and HONOR decided to leave HERO, and more bureaucratic drama came oozing from some leadership. We just wanted to keep having the fights, and objectively we were getting incredibly good at them. But instead of the exuberance and carefree attitude we saw some months prior – the attitude that led to three super kills – we saw vitriol and sour attitudes. It seems to me that the “narrative” some people tried to craft just got eaten up by the leadership people instead of the line member. A toxic Ouroboros, of sorts. Some have argued that the “average line member” was burning out, but fleet participation was going up. I never really got the impression that the line member hated life in Catch.
This is when I began to notice two very different Braves. The one, excitable players – new and old alike – committed to having fun with a penchant for making drama from nothing. The other, a bloated and over-stressed paper-pushing behemoth sucked into a black hole of its own making. Bickering and in-fighting created this circle of self-pity that started to bleed out of leadership and into the 99% of Brave that just likes to have fun. It’s not a very flattering picture I’m painting, and I’m not necessarily blaming them – leading a coalition is a tricky process – but that is what I feel happened. Nobody was trying to be bad or cause some sort of self-destruction, it was just this petri dish that we inadvertently added heat to.
Our intentions were never to create some cracks or conquer Catch. As I mentioned before, planning more than 6 weeks in advance never actually works. We wanted to pass the time having fun with people we knew could have fun. We never really thought of you as a game preserve, nor did we want to ~meta you~ for some geopolitical end. I found it really hard to deny some of these accusations because the response was – quite unironically – “well that’s what someone who is trying to manipulate us would say”. It was really comical, truth be told, but the average line member seemed to appreciate my presence so I just shook those guys off. Like I said, they are The Other Brave.
Eventually GE happened. I explained what happened in this thread (along with some Dominion Sov Q&A http://www.reddit.com/r/Bravenewbies/comments/2z68do/eli5_ge_reinforced/cpgbvx1) but tl;dr our AUTZ was waiting for fatigue to end and shot GE with your SBUs up. Later we dropped our own SBUs in GE to distract you from another target (CNC-4V – a system we thought we may need later) but hilariously enough you guys kept shooting the CNC SBUs and let the GE ones go up unmolested. You have no idea how frustrated Ron Mexxico was at this. Of course when the GE final timer came up, you guys responded with the single biggest coalition you have ever made. You had more caps than we had people and the system was saved in 5 minutes. Saved as in the station was repped, the SBUs were killed. It was beautiful. Although I got headshot like 3 times and my fleet couldn’t do jack shit, I was still oddly proud. I knew you guys had it in you. It was reminiscent of the fun-loving Brave that dropped caps on our Titan (except it was strangely effective). And you did this while your main FC was at Fanfest. Real talk, you deserve to be proud of that showing. Meanwhile I was raging at my AUTZ for riling you up like this, assuming that every fleet we faced would be 500 strong now and we’d have to think up of new ways to fight you.
With things dying down, we started to plan for our immediate future. I was spitballing some ideas with other FCs and we had a thought: what if we took Brave with us? At Fanfest a few of our FCs were hanging out with Blue Ice and said to me “hey this guy is cool, figure out a way to work with this guy”. The consummate facilitator, I came up with a plan and pitched it to your leadership: we’ll blue one another (and obviously not touch Catch), split the profits 50-50, and go do contract work together. You guys could be as autonomous or integrated as you wanted, and could stop at any time. The figure we were offered at the time was 600b, splitting it 50-50 for 8 weeks. A fair amount of money, but I understood that some people would probably need some motivation to work with the guys that were so vigorously shooting them in the face for a few months. I knew full well we’d get maybe 100-150 dudes to come on fleets with us, but to me that was enough. I was confident people would have fun and numbers would swell. Unfortunately, what I have dubbed The Other Brave apparently didn’t like it. I’m honestly not sure how much of this leadership proper knew of this proposition, but the response I got was – at best- tepid.
I don’t know if it was a trust issue or if your leadership honestly believed this was just a contrived plot to steal away their members. I’ll be honest, you guys have hemorrhaged a lot of talented people and –apart from Apathy guys – none joined PL. I was pretty gutted that we had to shelve the plan, but things happen and I respect that. I told your guys that no matter what you chose we wouldn’t hold the decision against you. This is going to be hard to believe given what happened next (we took GE and HED), but we were quite honest in this. We actually had struck a deal with a member of the Brave Diplomatic team (who was acting on his own) to not take any final timers so long as you guys were actively defending. When you guys announced plans for Brave Mercenaries, this benefactor informed us that the deal was off and we could do whatever.
Since I’ve been rambling for a bit I would be remiss if I didn’t restate a few disclaimers. When I’m saying here is my honest interpretation of events – through the PL lens, of course. If you are of the mind that I’m out to coup attempt #12 or spin you into death, you definitely don’t want to read on. I am doing this purely because you guys asked me for my opinion.
People in Eve are motivated by different things. PL is motivated first and foremost by tears generated from our actions. It’s weird and hard to understand if you’re not part of it, but it’s what we do. Your evacuation/move/deployment thing, whatever it was, is to date the biggest clusterfuck I’ve seen in spaceships. I say this from a place of love, but it was a complete disaster. I can sort of understand how it happened, though. The Other Brave – the management types – figured that they had their bargaining chip. PL wanted to work with Brave, so we wouldn’t dare take HED or GE! Have we met? Capitalizing on chaos is our bread and butter. Specifically when you guys singled out three systems you would defend at all costs, we just ran at them to see what would happen. So that is how we accidentally took Catch.
But we don’t hate you and we don’t want you to fail. Brave do a great service and are largely really cool people. The Other Brave – the 1%- do you a bit of a disservice. But hey! They’re learning. So long as, like Brave members, they’re OK to take criticisms then all is well. I still want to work with you guys on a contract in the future and that offer we had is forever on the table. I can’t promise it’ll be 600b, but you can pick and choose.
In the meantime, HED and GE are both freeported (if they aren’t now they will be shortly – make sure to check with something cheap first), so if you have things in there you can get them out whenever. Be very careful moving things out, we certainly won’t be guarding the path or blue’ing people – but we’re not in the business of trapping the livelihood of anyone; the silent curses are not where our fun comes from
In fact we love Brave so much you have inspired a bunch of people in PL to embrace the new players. Whenever you look at player retention graphs it’s always depressing to see just how many people try the game and just give up. So following your lead we’ve made a newbie group all our own called Pandemic Horde (/r/PandemicHorde). We’re a bit different, but the same underlying idea. I’ll be helping out as will JEFFRAIDER, but the real pillars are: Travis, Lament, Cyberking, Sting, Brood, and Gobbins. All these guys were inspired by you to help new players get sucked into the game with us. People joke that PL has the Stockholm Effect on their allies, but it’s just the opposite this time around. It’s not just a flippant weekend thing, either; we’re fully committed into this project. They’ll be living in HED, too, so when you fly through be sure to teach them what it means to lose a ship in style. Maybe one day soon you will have a Sansha Stronghold in their staging system! So thank you, sincerely, for inspiring us to make the game better.
Everything that I stated in the State of the Coalition is true; you guys are a fantastic group with an amazing potential. Your future is bright, your stuff is not locked in Catch, and I look forward to the day that we can fly together. I hope the read wasn’t too dry and you found it interesting. Of course, I appreciate any feedback or suggestions of topics that you may be interested in.
