Lasers and Laziness

If one looks at Sudden Buggery's corp membership history on EVE-who.com, it shows the corp peaking at 56 or 58. Mostly a half of this was alts, it being a wormhole corp after all. Then membership descends abruptly, due to Khanh'rhh running his successful campaign to assfuck the corp. The denoument of that saw us with 38 members, a half of which were alts.

The corp now numbers less than 20 members, and most of those are unsubbed, or alts, or both. Realistically, there's 6 active toons between 4 IRL people, with maybe a fifth guy who plays monthly.

I have considered, again, giving up and moving on. That is a whiny post for another day, and certainly it has been very difficult to recruit even noobs into BUGRY. Partly, I suspect, it is because people see the corp activity tailing off, or corp numbers tailing off. Our pub channel is deserted, which is never a good sign, either.

But I mostly want to talk about the reasons people left after the asset theft.

One guy, who took 6 toons, was out of ISK. Somehow living in a C2 with C3, with decent PI, he was unable to make ISK. This is because he used to dual-box carriers in the C4 we used to inhabit, which had better PI. He claims he wants to PVP, but he's always too busy....running 12 toons of PI now. Its a full time job. He even moved back in to the C4 and bought the exact same caps that we built in there nearly 2 years ago, after they had passed through 2 sets of hands via nefarious means. He now runs C4's again and runs his own corp - but now cant be fucked playing.

Another guy took 3 toons on 3 accounts with him. He was the guy pushing for us to join Minmatar in Faction Warfare, and convinced me to do this despite everyone (aside from him) having ships in Amarr. So we took 2 weeks extra to sort that shit out. He claimed he had connections with guys in FW, he could hook us up. He was keen to do PVP. But, like the other guy, swiftly IRL got the better of him, he was sick of the game, it was too hard to log in for an hour and fly to Auga and shoot some dudes and log off. So now he's joined a wormhole alliance...and I've never seen him log on.

My bro quit the game entirely - handing out 45 billion in BPO's (mostly to the wrong people), ships (to the wrong people, though I got all the pimp BS's and some faction goodies), toons (to the wrong people) and ISK (to the right people, thankfully). He'd had it with the game and got fleeced/lost too much with the heist. He is now doing an MBA and moving on with his life.

Three guys, who are IRL friends, stuck with and joined in FW. But they are carebears. Too much a bunch of carebears, despite being up for roaming when I organise it. So the restrictions of FW, and the oddities like permacamps on Hek undock, didn't do well with guys who wanted to just make ISK and accumulate toys. I tried explaining how plexing was better ISK than level 4's, how lowsec wasn't that scary and they could even mine safely, with Rorq boosts, in lowsec, and make 80M/hr. No dice, they quit corp. We still play World of Tanks together, and I'm not bitter.

So, there you have it. We may see a few come back with Retribution, and a few of the unsubbed will re-sub. But aside from my brother and the carebears, it seems that either the asset heist and dramas associated with it lost them their trust in me, or they unreasonably expect from the game something it cannot give: push-button get-candy excitement.

I spend a fair amount of time trolling/trawling EVE-O. In game I interact with people. I form allegiances, join alliances, talk to people on public channels, join comms, join in fleets, FC, do what the FC says, sort my own shit out, and mentor, mentor, mentor. It all comes back round. The guys in my alliance, who are quite new and carebeary, mope about and when I come back from the bush, I make shit happen. I rattle batphones, turn over stones to find PVP, and shit goes down.

The lesson? You can only get something out of EVE if you put something back in. I would like the spare time to rebuild BUGRY, to get it to 10-20 active players again, FW or WH or both. I hope that I can do it - there's a lot of fun to be had, and I intend to have it.