Taking Responsibility for the Gameplay of Others

When you step up in Eve, and decide to take responsibility for a game that people both pay for, and really take seriously, you take a large amount of responsibility that cannot be taken lightly. On any level, be it as an FC, a leader of your fellows, or in speaking toward anything you feel like your friends should try out, you are taking a risks.

The most basic level of 'Hey I'm having fun at this you should come do it with me.' Is almost the most dangerous, and I am extremely apprehensive about saying anything of the sort anymore. From my very first eve friend I learned this lesson, as I tried to drag him into factional warfare with me when we were both new players. We had been having fun doing exploration and as is true of so many things in Eve, fw didnt work out to be as easy to get into as was talked about by more veteran players. We bounced around between some very bad corps for a while, and this process burned him out on the game all together.

I have recently been hanging out in nullsec in a small corp within Co2. I came out here to get involved in the Winter War and kill some goons and crazy Russians. I like Co2 for the most part. They are not as organized, or as large as some of the big block groups I have tried out in the past, but I think that helps their overall likability. It's easier to get involved in a group like this over larger and more elite alliance, it is simply much less clicky. In my first week I was unexpectedly FCing, and I have been leading roams for my little corp. It is nice to be involved in a social circle again, even if I'm not quite sure if I'm a fit.

I don't have a ton of Eve friends, probably because I was a solo pilot for so long, but I do have two other pilots who I do share a channel with and chat with when I get the chance. Friends also outside the game, we came up learning pvp together, and won the warzone together once upon a time.

One of these friends had started to seem like he was picking up those Eve doldrums that you will know about, if you have played for a length of time. It happens to us all. Many times you will see someone take a break from eve, step away from the virtual universe and everything associated with it. Sometimes our fellows return from this, but sometimes not.

When I have found myself facing these feelings about Eve, I have tried to radically switch everything up. In fact this is what brought me to my recent adventure to nullsec, just feeling down about Eve and making it brand new again. You may have noticed I haven't posted in a few weeks, it's just because I'm really using my gaming time to the fullest right now, and breaking away to blog has become less convenient. I'm not spending long amounts of time waiting for a fight, or chasing content. Bad news for readers of my blog I suppose, but I will make it up to you with new stories and insights.

Anyway, back to my friend, I went ahead and spoke up about the fun I was having, and said that I thought he should come out here and join me. I told him he would feel better if he shook things up, and he decided to go ahead and come on out. I have learned some harsh lessons in the past speaking up for things like this to my friends, and I have a fair bit of apprehension that things may not work out. Things so very often do not work out in this game of ours. When it doesn't it could all be my fault. In my case at least, friendships aren't easy to come by, and by taking this responsibility I am risking that.

The cherry on the top of that experience is that the very day that my friend joined the corp with me, it cascaded into some extremely silly drama and broke up. It had been a strong group of close-knit, active pilots for years, and by a stoke of bad luck, that was the last day of it. Exactly what I was worried about happened.

While we settled through the breakup and remained in C02 together, it was a lackluster experience to start off with so much drama, but the drama itself was just another example of the responsibility you actually step into when you decide to take the lead on a game (hobby) that people pay for.

Without going into too much of the silly details, the CEO of the corp decided that he thought that the corp discord was too immature for him to be a part of, he didn't like the 'adult' content of it, and decided to move the corp to the Drone Walkers coalition. He didn't discuss any of this with his directors, and the meeting in which he announced the impending move was not open for discussion. Within the same meeting, a new corp was announced, and almost everyone left to be a part of it. The CEO realized that he was losing the bulk of his corp, and reversed his decision, but the damage had been done, and the corp split apart.

By imposing his morals on the people who had elected to follow and fight for him, and by not respecting the process in which organizations come to decisions like this, he lost what he had worked years to accomplish all with one impulsive act. You simply can't take responsibility for others, let them put their trust in you, and then do something that puts a strain on that. It doesn't matter if it's in Eve, or in real life, you are always setting yourself up to fail.

You wouldn't willingly take a fight you know you had no chance of winning, and if you are a good FC, you won't welp into an overwhelming force, because you respect your fellows and they are trusting you to keep the fleet alive as best you can. This ethos expands to most faucets of this game we love and forgetting it leads to loss, be it in shiny ships or good friends.