Comment by tinfoilman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tinfoilman | Hacker News Reader

These are just the latest breed of these types of people for eve.

My eve history is beta, and on and off for years. I have 2 chars, my baby she was born on release day just shy of 90milion now(yes yes i un-subbed for years at a time) and a secondary of 40 million who is the transport/mining hauling alt.

Now I was lucky, like really lucky. I found a group in beta, there was 10 of us, by release we were 8 but within 6 weeks we had our own BPOs and running a high sec manufacturing chain. We did alright but it was dull so we moved to Fountain, and were part of the group that originally found FA. Funny the original corp ended up being a front for BoB for years ran by the bob manufacturing team.

Anyway FA at the start, m0o invaded, FA defended as best we could, my corp got invited to merge with Evol (who never recruited) and so started what I like to think of as the first step towards bob.

The organizational involved to get BoB up and running and running for 3-4 years was massive. Never under estimate what molly and co were able to pull off. They were the first big alliance for me personally. Not that i am taking away from the people in this news bit, but i do think they are just redoing what we did originally in the day. The difference is they saw how we did it and done it better, we had to do it from scratch, and by doing so we made some amazing bonds and were the force for years. Also remember BoB did the BoB BBQ which is where they would rent a camp site somewhere in EU and everyone from BoB was invited, really bob was all about building a close team and i was sad when it got removed from the game like it did but meh a game is a game.

Anyway I is off, Eve is awesome but only play if you have time to play, it will eat years off you

ex-TEST director reporting in. It is, indeed, supremely impressive when looking at the infrastructure required to support an alliance of 5000 people; in TEST, for example, we have our own software developers and an ops team that keeps systems like voice chat, forums, wikis, killboards, and more running 24/7.

And then there's the management / organizational side - juggling 20+ corporations, each with their own cultures, leadership, and focuses, and herding the cats towards battles. (BoB forced members to join battles, TEST incentivized battles, two methods with the same end goal.) In my tenure as Director of Training, we set up systems where brand-new characters could get free ships, equipment, and skill books and a channel for asking questions. It was nearly a full time job just managing the influx of new players. Ultimately, it fell to the wayside once I moved across the country, and come to think of it, I've been paying for a subscription I haven't actually used in many months...

Heh, I've most likely played with you (Dreddit member since day 1 - for non-Eve players, TEST was started by Reddit players and is now one of the largest alliances in the game). I haven't played in almost two years, but watching a single corp grow from nothing to an entity that changed an entire game universe has been incredible.

The truly fascinating part was seeing first-hand which forms of organization and motivation work, and which ones don't. Specifically, how a laissez-faire organization with relatively few rules in a very hostile game world managed not only to avoid falling apart, but rise to be a superpower against established entities with much more defined and rigid structures.

I think TEST's biggest advantages were a shared identity and relatively strong culture (for better or worse) that emphasizes fun over winning , and practically non-existant standards for accepting new players combined with very strong training and bootstrapping (as opposed to more picky corps who either didn't want to bother with newbies or were afraid of spies). And maybe a bit of manifest destiny. Throw in support from a very similar but much more experienced and established ally, a lot of propaganda, and you have something that's very tough to beat in the long term.

I can ramble forever about it, I really am fascinated by how much complexity Eve allows. That game has to be a sociologist's or organizational behaviourist's dream come true.

Wow this really takes me back. Another beta vet here, I was the CEO of the corp that was suppling m0o with ships and weaponry back in the early game. We were a small corp with a large footprint in the game at the time so we were able to keep our arrangements m0o under wraps most of the time.

One of the reasons they were down there in FA was to secure some nullsec mining areas so we could produce battleships for them. This was before any battleships existed in the game. Our primary manufacturing system at that time was in a Gallente system Gisleres. When we built the first battleship for m0o it caused a bit of an uproar in our neck of the woods since j0rt was hanging out for a couple days, we had to move the transaction away from the station to avoid the ties from becoming known. We do know however that we handed over the first battleship in the game to them.

M0o was only a handful of pilots, but they had a huge impact on the game, holding entire regions hostage and they caused the only ever rollback in the game's history, as well as direct GM intervention with in game ships. I am quite proud to be apart of some of those historical events in EVE's distant past even if it was from the shadows.

I remember the early days, I left the FA and ended up joining M0o - fun times. Then as M0o was part of the early BOB along with evol ended up in RKK for many years, then moved onto PL years before they became FOTM, now just mess with low sec corp/alliance mostly counting my SP during skill changes (190m ;).

But reason it is fun is it is diverce, more open than other open games and it involves spaceships.

I also played Elite when it was out, so with that the only thing that will pull me away from eve will be death, or David Brabens new mulitplayer Elite game maybe.

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