Early this morning an announcement was sent out on the SMA internal messaging system that the Space Monkey Alliance was to be mothballed.
Space Monkeys Alliance rose to prominence as a member of the Imperium and positioned itself as one of its main powers living in the Fade Region. SMA’s ranks swelled and put them into the top ranking alliances in EVE in terms of player numbers.
However, SMA became the focal point of World War Bee when, as tensions were already running high between the Imperium and the wider inhabitants of New Eden, they became embroiled in a spat with one of the largest EVE Gambling sites, IWantISK, the owners of which funded a large part of the MBC campaign.
SMA’s home land of Fade played host to some of the most fierce fighting in World War Bee and, despite the MBC’s best efforts, SMA held out longer than any other Imperium Alliance.
Towards the end of the Fade Campaign SMA became embroiled in internal strife and began to lose members from highs of over 4,000 to just over 1,000 in the space of a few months. Eventually, SMA abandoned Fade and announced its departure from the Imperium as it tried to make a home in Outer Ring.
However, numbers continued to dwindle until today where a message was sent from Alliance leader EX River as follows:
My Fellow Monkeys and friends,
I’m afraid that we have reached the end of an era. Our great Empirew, our Nation is no more. When this great war started I stated that I would stay with SMA and that we would ride into oblivion and beyond. And so we have. I am mothballing SMA. As a last act of defiance I will not disband the alliance. Instead I will see to it that the SMA flag flies true until EVE is no more. It was a good ride. I choose to remember the good times. The end of anything that was worth fighting for is an ugly business. Those that road to the end with me did so with class. It was a 7 year long adventure and it’s sad to see it end.
SMA services will be re-branded DmG, remaining online and will be moved to operate in a public capacity. Miranda and Teamspeak will stay online for all to use and we will relaunch the DMG community as a non ‘EVE alliance’ related, for all those that wish to continue to play games or converse with friends. There will be no ranks, officers, just people who share a love for online gaming. The Trello boards will be closed. The channels in Miranda will be sorted to reflect the above and I will set auto account activation allowing anyone to join. We will continue to moderate the services to ensure that its users stay classy and respect each [other].
Thank you all for some of the best times I have ever had. It has been truly an honor. Watch for the relaunch of the DMG site and for those still playing EVE wherever you are, give an ook in local for me.
Link to Miranda DmG – Rocket Chat Client (now public)
http://chat.eve-sma.com:3000/
Riv
Of course, a post was made on reddit not long after the announcements, and the post is full of both positive and negative comments. A poignant message was posted by reddit used Caurannus Decks, one of the leaders of X-COM Navy who were a part of SMA up until 11th of this month. He writes:
I am a corp director of one of the very last active SMA corps and I couldn’t agree more. The events that happened after the loss of Fade and SMA leaving the Imperium, ultimately lead to the final failscade that culminated in this final moment.
The truth is, SMA died because the leadership, except for Elsemus (Elsemus is the best), quit logging in. River was dealing with a tragic RL even that kept him AFK, but the rest of the directors simply abandoned what was left. The corps that remained did what we could to bootstrap logistics and infrastructure to keep things going, but it was clear that there was no support from the alliance. This bought us (the corps) some time to plan for the next innevitable step of moving on.
A rough sequence of events after the Fade evac looked something like this:
1) SMA lands in Outer Ring on orders to abandon assets in Saranen to immediately begin distancing from CONDI.
2) Outer Ring became a slog, fleet numbers were rough, doctrine contracts weren’t being seeded sufficiently or with any regularity, and there were no alliance objectives. Doctrine seeding improved over time, but a mass exodus had already begun. The notion of rebuilding the alliance in outer ring was false, as no offices had been recruited for, despite the gaping vacancies. Corporate recruited simply stopped because there weren’t any active recruiters remaining. Had things continued this way, I feel that River would have lost all of the remaining corps within a matter of weeks.
3) During Outer Ring, this happened: https://zkillboard.com/kill/53386966/ revealing that not only that Winet had not quit the game (one of the things made remaining with SMA tolerable), but that truth was viewed as a luxury and that the corporations mattered little to SMA identity.
4) RANE reached out and offered to let us crash on their couch in Wicked Creek to help raise ADMs in exchange for Sov if we decided to stay. River ordered a deployment to Wicked Creek. Most of the corps took this as a full evac, regardless if things worked out with RANE or not, because returning to Outer Ring was not an option. Success in Wicked Creek was the last hope for SMA to rebuild.
5) Those of us corporations that remained went all in while deployed in Wicked Creek; moons were dropped on, logistics chains were built, factory PI resumed after months of hiatus. The thinking was that if SMA tanked, most of us would gladly bolster RANE’s ranks. Fleet numbers were a bit week, but the things were alright. SMA ended up with a random station and system while defending RANE space, but we were doing a fairly decent job of defending those timers, and helping RANE play Whack-a-mole with their timers against increasingly heavy Vanguard provocation. However, it had become clear that without more numbers from RANE or new corps from SMA (which none had been recruited during the Wicked Creek deployment), that this was unsustainable.
6) River, after being afk for about a month or more (see above), announced that SMA was returning to NPC Pure Blind. The only thing worse than this idea was how it was disclosed to corporation leadership. We (XC0M) were only told after it had been leaked to and discussed by RANE line members. This served as slap in the face to those of us (five remaining active corps at this time) that stuck with SMA for so long, without any effort to rebuild by the alliance. Further, Outer Ring was a total disaster, the very idea that moving to Pure Blind with just a handful of small corps to be farmed by MBC was simply ridiculous. Over the course of the subsequent two weeks, those five remaining corps obeyed River’s evac order, but only to position ourselves to leave SMA for good.
I have made a lot of good friends in SMA and will remain friends with until CCP turns off the lights. I feel that those of us that remained until the very end had done so out of loyalty to each other and our mutual respect to each other’s time and commitment. That being said, SMA leadership is just as toxic as KyleAparthos has implied (but has been too gracious to fully indulge). SMA died because of it. SMA died because the leadership didn’t care about the corps that wanted to help put the past in the past and rebuild anew, however idealistic (and unrealistic) that goal might have been.
Good fight MBC. This kill mark was well earned.
Ex-SMA leader and CSM member Kyle Aparthos also followed up with comments of his own:
Visiting a friend or I’d respond to this in more detail. Still might later.
Towards the onset of WWB, and especially as it progressed, arrogance, hubris, and questionable competence among some parts of upper leadership was taken to serious extremes. While there were definitely people in SMA that I counted among my friends, the majority of them left SMA with me during my exodus three months ago. Out of respect for those friends that remained, I have mostly maintained decorum and attempted to be respectful to my former alliance.
That said, upon reading this image, I have to admit that after three months of freedom to think, my gut reaction was “honestly, after their arrogance and occasional toxicity, they deserved what has happened.”
Maybe it’s time to write that memoir of my time in SMA after all….
