OMNES UNA MANET NOX
This summer has seen the end of the lengthiest and most fulfilling gaming experience of my life: five years helping to run the Eve Online corporation, StateCorp. A five year plan? More like five years with no plan, but with endless drama. The corporation is currently in the process of moth-balling and disbanding, and so we took the opportunity to look back at what made those sixty months of Eve so fascinating, why we became so involved, and why it had to come to end. This retrospective comes to your courtesy of everyone who has been a member of StateCorp over the years.In this first episode I want to set the scene and to touch on the most important themes. We’ll move onto some specifics about the game mechanics and how the influenced our play in the next episode. For now though, a beginning…By mid 2004 I had been playing Eve Online on and off for a year. The game had been largely ignored by the PC gaming world up to that time, and yet the ideas it embodied were fascinating. The dynamic nature of player interaction, the intricacy of economics and combat, the emergent politics: it was heady stuff. I decided to write an eight page feature about my experiences for PC Gamer UK, assuming that this would be my final word on the subject. Needless to say, it was just the beginning. Members of the now defunct State gaming forum read the piece and raised the idea of starting up a corporation for its members. A handful of the forumites had already been playing the game, and were keen to team-up. Others would create characters from scratch and join in with the project. I would take the lead.Our early days saw us undertaking typical beginner behaviour: messing about in the friendly areas of Caldari space, running the game’s very basic missions, and practising PvP combat in frigates. We had about a dozen people, and the corporation would never get beyond around twenty five active members in its history. A handful of those who were there at the start are still playing today. In these early days StateCorp trolled the nearby low-security systems for pirates, without much success. It was only when three of the beginners were out and about in their new cruisers that we were to encounter our first real enemy: a battleship pirate called Nekrosis. Having spotted the miscreant in space our newbies pootled about as bait. Myself and another older player, meanwhile, raced to the scene in our battleships, from our basis several systems distant. It was to be a process that we would repeat thousands of times in the following five years: finding a target, offering him a reason to engage, then lasering the crap out of him. He wasn’t happy.Of course the only reason we had any firepower at all was that we’d begin to grasp how to fit ships to do proper damage. Knowing what types of modules to fit, how to fit them, and then what ranges to engage at once we had fitted them, was an arcane art, and one that even I was only beginning to get the hang of. My year headstart had given me money and skills, but my theorycraft was still weak. Early fights such as those against Nekrosis gave us a taste for blood and the confidence to leave the safety of Empire space.Boosted by humble victories we explored nearby regions, rapidly losing our battleships to smarter, more experienced players. At this point the corporation was aimless, with little more to its ambition than allowing the members to have someone friendly to chat to. It was clear that Statecorp needed more of a challenge than this low-profile existence could provide. After a few weeks we migrated into the 0.0 (nullsec) space of Great Wildlands, where I had previously made friends via my player corporations from the from first year of the game. That first year would prove to be extremely useful to us in the five that followed, because success in Eve so often relies on contacts and personal relationships. Again and again the people I’d flown with in the first few months of the game would pop up to help with StateCorp’s evolution.We spent several formative months in the Great Wildlands region, to which we would subsequently return many times. This was our first taste of the alliance game, in which large groups of corporations combined their powers to control, police, and exploit a region of space. Our alliance, the first Foundation, and soon found itself at war with a hostile alliance called Keiretsu. I spent weeks learning about long range battleship combat – one of the staples of Eve’s multi-layered PvP over the years – sniping enemy ships from a hundred kilometres or more distance. Many of the Foundation veterans had been fighting out here for months, and they took the lead in teaching us how it was done.StateCorp found itself dragged into huge fleet fights featuring scores, sometimes hundreds, of ships. We learned the value of speed, and the thrill of interceptor duels. We learned how to take losses gracefully, and how to make money quickly and safely. All good lessons for the future, but we remained inexpert fighters. Months would pass before we would begin to feel confident as a collective.Soon another alliance made a play for the region. As the war unfolded over the course of several weeks, it became clear that Foundation was to be defeated. The fleets began to diminish in size as support ebbed away. Eventually the conflict compelled us to move on from this starter home, and it was the first step in a tour of the galaxy that would last another five years.We used our Foundation connections to find a second home. This time it was The Forsaken Empire, a couple of regions away in an area known as Tribute. The first few weeks were incredibly exciting. The new owners of Great Wildlands, Veritas Immortalis (-V-) Alliance, attacked, along with a series of pirate gangs, and the Forsaken Empire fleets found themselves embroiled in constant – although not serious – conflict. That was okay by us, because we got to make huge amounts of money from Tribute’s rich assets. Anything that was destroyed could easily be replaced. We began to learn how to scout out our enemies, configure to engage them, and to win fights against formidable foes. The trademark of StateCorp: a specific plan for small-scale combat, rapidly conceived and executed, began to germinate around this time, with some spectacular small engagements taking place – the height of which was probably my rescue from an enemy system by a small team of State pilots. At this point I also began to learn how to command fleets of dozens of players, swallowing intense humiliation as I lead a sixty-man gang to its death at the hands of a disciplined -V- fleet. Everyone knew I had fucked up. I swore not to let it happen again. Understanding how Eve’s solar-systems could be exploited for tactical advantage was something I would spend the coming years mastering.Soon, however, The Forsaken Empire’s leadership was to make the misstep that would define the future of StateCorp. The alliance was dragged into a wider galactic conflict against a fierce PvP alliance known as The Five. Our excitement at being involved in a huge coalition of alliances soon faded into concern as The Five’s most militant corporations moved into stations close to our region. This concern became panic as these new, potent enemies began routine attacks on our systems, decimating the alliance’s less experienced members. By this time The Forsaken Empire was a populous, flabby target, and our enemies revelled in racking up hundreds of kills each day. The leadership was so desperate that they even implemented a “stupid tax” on those players who got killed because they had not paid attention to warnings. Morale was slipping, and our grip on the region was going with it.Eventually the Forsaken Empire commanders pulled together the entire alliance, as well as their local allies, to besiege the enemy corporation in their main base of operations. The “siege of HPA” – a long, painful, series of sniper battles – probably only lasted a couple of weeks, but it seemed like a lifetime. It went on and on, with neither side able to win a convincing victory. Eventually a backroom deal was cut, and The Forsaken Empire’s bosses decided on an armistice with The Five, the terms of which meant we had to attack our former allies. It was a backstab that StateCorp could not stomach, and we decided, again, to move on. Politics was going to be something that we would generally avoid meddling in, but would always feel the influence of. In the years to come it would often be the political decisions of larger powers that often decided how our game played, and where we ended up residing.For now though we wanted to avoid extended conflict with large powers, and had to look for something a little more downbeat. Options at the time were numerous, thanks to the large number of smaller alliances that the game supported. We read up on their agendas and manifestos, and decided that the tiny Frege Alliance sounded like it was aligned with our values. However, we were now ferociously independent, having flown and fought together for months. We elected not to throw our lot in entirely with this new alliance, and based ourselves at the nearby ISS Borealis.This was one of the most fascinating projects of early Eve – a publicly funded space station – for which anyone could purchase shares. ISS had, in what was a huge logistical and security exercise – built their second station near Frege space, and was looking for tenants. As a neutral entity to all ISS allowed us to base there for a fee, and it meant that we were set apart, physically, from the rest of the Frege pilots. This decision had a social effect that would bond the corporation closer together than ever: when we left the surrounds of the station, we did so as a group. Even though we were part of another alliance, the most important thing was the cohesion of StateCorp itself. We became totally self-reliant, within the larger whole.Possibly our finest moment in this theatre was in combating war targets in high-security space – pirates who had formally declared corporate war on Frege – when we once again baited and destroyed a high value target. This time, however, it was a faction battleship, called a machariel, which was equipped with the most expensive items the game had to offer. We could not believe our luck, and the outraged pirate took his rant to the official forums – understandably livid that his prize ship could be destroyed by a small fleet of a fraction of the value. As the years unfolded, the loot dropped by overconfident foes were to come to fund an astonishingly large amount of our activities, and cause bitter enmities.Frege’s time was troubled. They attempted to merge with another alliance, with unhappy outcomes. Soon there was in-fighting, and then a civil war. We took the lead at this point, stomping the dissenters and earning a reputation as some of the most confident members of the small alliance. (One brutal stand-up fight against raiders from far away industrial megaplex Ascendant Frontier sticks in the memory of our pilots to this day, and the battle cry of Frege’s alliance leader was adopted as our own tongue-in-cheek response to ill-considered calls to combat: “Rapid Deployment!”) It was a formative time, although little more than skirmishing next to what the coming years would hold. StateCorp learned the kind of routines that would keep us alive in thousands of battles to come. We also learned to be distrustful of pilots we’d not got the measure of, now matter how friendly they might be: strangers didn’t always follow orders, and that could get you killed.As the civil war sputtered out, and the region lapsed into nothing more than occasional pirate raids, we began to realise that we were rather more experienced than we’d thought. The months of war the Forsaken Empire had hardened and focused us. We decided we wanted another, wealthier region to operate in, while at the same time still working within an alliance that shared our values of fairness and anti-piracy. It turned out that this alliance was The Huzzah Federation, which was occupying a region on the far side of the galaxy. The move to Huzzah was to be the making of StateCorp, and set us on the road to the height of our powers.Next: The “Zoom Zoom” Years, the joy of logistics, and the largest war machine ever assembled.
In this, the second part of my series looking back on five years of Eve Online, I tell the tale of two lost Empires, and the solo-corporation that emerged far stronger from their ashes. Part one is here.In truth, there was one thing that kept us hooked for five years: the thrill of combat.While any number of games have exciting combat dynamics, only Eve’s seem to induce genuine highs, due to its risks. People regularly reported adrenaline shakes after the most intense fights, and I’m fairly sure that the inherent risks of the game were the only reason I kept on pushing.Eve, of course, is a time-sink of an MMO, and that effect is exacerbated because assets you create can be destroyed. PvP generally means that someone’s ship is going to be exploded, possibly their pilot in his escape pod too. Replacing both of these can be costly. While you reappear in a clone vat and don’t “die”, the loss, thanks to the time it took to make the money, can be very real. Big losses hurt. The risks, therefore, are exciting in a way that a more traditional WoW clone can’t match.In some ways, I think the excess of money in Eve is one of the reasons why we lost interest by the end of the five years. It became too easy to make the millions and billions required to buy our ships, and the sense of risk began to diminish. At the time we joined Huzzah, however, making money was becoming a new challenge, because we were moving out of the cheap tech 1 era ships and into tech 2: better, faster, tougher, and radically more expensive. This wasn’t just an issue for us, it also made our enemies more interesting: kill a pricey command ship or heavy assault cruiser and you knew you were hurting your enemy more than you were if he was in a cheap ship. Kill him with a cheap ship, when he was in an expensive one, well, that was just the sweetest thing.Huzzah were living in Catch, a fairly wealthy region with a number of capturable stations. They were, along with their local allies, to go to war with FIX and capture the rest of Catch from them. Victory was to be short lived, as we’ll see, but during that time StateCorp’s attendance and commitment levels rocketed. We were really getting a kick out of this game: tearing around the local regions in small gangs, fighting in huge sovereignty contests, and intercepting raiders night after night.The Catch stations sat at the end of a “pipe” of solar systems that led from the safety of Empire into various 0.0, player alliance regions. StateCorp had scouts stationed throughout the pipe whenever anyone was awake. When I was at my desk there was usually a cloaked scout ship sat watching an important junction system in the pipe. I left it on my laptop for hours on end, just watching, waiting for targets. If I wanted to play with my main account I could just potter about making money or doing logistical tasks, waiting for the fight. Others did the same, as well as keeping an eye on the intel channels into which Huzzah and their allies reported. When enemies were spotted nearby, we would move to engage them. Where the enemy gang was of a size that could be tackled by StateCorp alone, we mobilised quickly. We probably annoyed our allies. In the words of one of them: “Statecorp are like all Zoom Zoom Zoom and we’re all like ”In fact, I’d often already be floating quietly a couple of jumps up the pipe when an enemy gang was spotted. StateCorp would rally from the more distant station systems, or from our “POS” – a player owned structure, which is a rudimentary space station deployed by individual corporations.The POS, as I shall discuss later, was something we had a difficult relationship with over the years, but as a home away from home, and a forward base in the obscurer corners of 0.0 space, it was perfect.Blockading the pipe, quickly judging the situation and either barrelling headlong into a fight, or setting up a bait trap, we got a fight on a regular basis. We won a fair number of times, too. During the Huzzah period we earned respect from a number of enemies. The pirates of Mortis Angelus visited, and were obliterated, while numerous cruiser gangs from Lokta Volterra and the dubiously named Stain Empire (Stain is a region in Eve) made life interesting whenever things got too quiet. Our victories were almost always down to good intel and good equipment. We scouted the enemy and then quickly fitted to be optimal against them in a fight. Usually we’d appear at face value to be killable – a small gang, with small ships – but we’d often have tanked ourselves against their specific damage output, or fitted jamming ships with full racks of jammers designed to lock their damage dealers out of the fight.We didn’t always win, of course, and found our entire gang murdered by the famed solo-pirate Heikki, who used a high-spec battleship and a long range jamming ship with deadly effect at range. He was to become legend: able to kill multiple foe that fell, willingly into his trap. We also find ourselves wrongfooted by clever raiders with unusual loadouts: Muninn snipers, or “blasterthron” battleship gangs were particular problems.Perhaps our favourite small skirmish at the time was with a Sleipnir command ship, the pilot of which had been a little aggressive in his smacktalk. On entering the fight I somehow disconnected, and my client went blank. I assumed I’d died, of course, but the mechanics of Eve meant that because he had scrambled me I stayed in the fight. Because I’d set my orbit and weapons cycling, he died under my disconnected guns. Logged back in, floating next to wreckage, with my friends laughing on voice comms. The ship was fitted with rare faction items, and once again filled our coffers with hundreds of millions of ISK.One of our members, D’Jannek, began to specialise in humiliating such solo players. Many would often fly the Vagabond heavy assault ship, which was especially tough to catch. While fast and durable, the ship had to come in close to its target to really deal a killing blow. D’Jannek exploited this by coming up with builds for much weaker ships – clear targets for a roving vagabond – which would destroy them at close range. It was classic StateCorp: exploiting the overconfidence of enemies to send them tumbling into a trap. We watched it happen again and again, time after time.Huzzah Federation were a brilliant crowd of friendly, fun pilots. It was the best of times. However, as a fleet force it relied on its allies in nearby regions. When bigger boys came Huzzah wasn’t quite up to the job. First Band Of Brothers (at the time the most powerful entity in the game) came to capture our stations, just because they could, and then ferocious pirates Against All Authorities (AAA) made their move. Led by our local nemeses Rage & Terror, AAA had become a formidable force, and when the finally made a territorial assault on Catch, there was little we could do. The fight when on for several weeks, but when a dreadnought fleet intended to assault their starbases fell apart, leading to the handful that arrived being slaughtered by AAA, we were done for. We lobbied mercenaries to come and fight for us, but they would not. AAA was too tough a nut, even then. Huzzah splintered, and began to dissipate. StateCorp got in touch with friends in Great Wildlands, and began to talk to former enemies Veritas Immortalis. They had taken Scalding Pass, and were now pushing back the Russians of Red Alliance into a single system. It seemed like a golden opportunity.Although we didn’t quite realise it at the time, we arrived on the weekend where the tide turned. We logged into a war-machine of several thousand pilots, who had battered the Russians back into a single system, C-J6MT. We joined a teamspeak server with hundreds of people on it. There were other voice servers, all full to capacity, hosting entire alliances. All of them were being co-ordinated in one gigantic military operation. We watched giant fleets of capital ships undocking from V stations and jumping to the assault. Thousands of ships streamed through the region, each one controlled by a real player. It was a wondrous taste of the epic possibility of this kind of game.But it was in vain. The lag from the battle was too much, and the capital ship losses against the fiercely combatant Russians were huge. Finally the coalition elected to call off its attack. They would concentrate on infrastructure and money. Lokta Volterra, Veritas Immortalis, and the other super-powers of the East let Red Alliance hold on to their bastion. The coalition would, consequently, lose everything.Our time in -V- was hugely entertaining, but it was the tale of a steady decline. Having pushed back Red Alliance and built several outposts (the huge, player constructed “proper” space stations) the alliance was rich and potent. But it was to face an unrelenting assault from Red Alliance and GoonSwarm, whose alliance and tactics is meticulously detailed here. These strange allies would not relent, and night after night of fleet warfare collapsed into non-stop struggles for sovereignty. Those POS towers that made such convenient bases, became sources of ire as they had to be repeatedly attacked and defended at awkward times of day. The POS were fundamental to control of a region, and their long battles to destroy them were achingly dull. Despite the colossal power fielded by LV and V itself – often amount to hundreds of sniper battleships in a single fleet – there was nothing we could do against the sheer commitment of the Russians, and the manpower of the Goons. Our crucial POS were being torn down.Oddly, this was also the point at which logistics were still relatively exciting. Nowadays, with the advent of jumpfreighters and the massive proliferation of other capital ships, it’s remarkably safe and easy to move massive amounts of material around the galaxy. At the time when V was fighting we had to bring freighters in manually, making dozens of jumps to get to the places where fuel was needed. Using a 150-man battleship fleet to block enemy gangs trying to hit the freighters was a thrilling exercise that no longer really exists in Eve. Again, the risks were enormous, and the high was unforgettable.The road with V was long, and we fought across a huge theatre – brawling with Imperium and Red Alliance in the Empire space lanes, and fighting epic running battles across Great Wildlands and Scalding Pass. I dread to think how many ships we lost, or how many we killed.Ultimately, however, V was to be broken. StateCorp, frustrated and dismayed, wanted to leave Great Wildlands. We also wanted to make some of our own decisions. For now at least we’d be leaving the territory-claiming alliance game. We were going to strike our on our own and become an independent alliance. The time of The State was upon us.Next: Fountain, Celestial Apocalypse, and the Golden Age of The State.
In this, the third part of my retrospective on five years of an Eve Online corporation, I discuss our guerrilla war, a heroic evacuation mission, and the few weeks of play that will, I fear, diminish all game experiences to follow. For the story so far: Part 1, Part 2.Having fled the collapse of Veritas Immortalis and the unstoppable march of the RedSwarm Federation in the East of the galaxy, we looked around for a new home. What might be interesting, we thought, was to contribute to one of the free-trade zones, those areas of idealism which pop up occasionally across Eve’s map. The notion, in these areas, is that you don’t shoot anything that moves, and help to defend against pirates and raiders. Such agreements seldom work out, but something along these lines was being attempted by a potent player corporation called Celestial Apocalypse. Only in this particular case it was like a kind of casual guerrilla club.Celestial Apocalypse, a large, PvP-skilled corporation, had moved into a region called Fountain. The Fountain region is unusual in that it has a mix of uncapturable NPC stations in its “core”, and a number of outposts and stations around its edge. These outposts at the time were run by Band Of Brothers (BoB), who were arguably the most fearsome military alliance in the game at that time. As such, the region was relatively quiet, free of territory war and was being exploited by BoB allies, such as Xelas Alliance and The Horde. Celestial Apocalypse had moved into the uncapturable NPC stations and declared that they would provide “blue” or non-aggression status with anyone who wanted to move up there and fight BoB’s local minions with them. A few small alliances and corporations had taken up that offer, and were making the most of Fountain’s core as a base, while Celestial Apocalypse rampaged around the region.The situation was close to unique, and I would spend a large stretch of the following years attempting to recapture it. BoB’s military was engaged elsewhere at the time, or was alternately secured in Delve and Querious, their other two regions. The BoB community in Fountain, therefore, was largely left to fend for itself. While no one was particularly interested in messing with BoB territorially the stations remained unscathed, so Xelas and The Horde got on with making money, and that left them open to attack by Celestial Apocalypse’s rag-tag free-trade posse.When we arrived Celestial Apocalypse had begun to get bored and while they were would be around for many weeks following, it seemed that they had begun to lose interest in the project. Now though, there were a whole bunch of neutrals, all allied to each other, living in Fountain core. After savaging Xelas and The Horde time after time, and having several huge fights with roving BoB fleets, Celestial Apocalypse were beginning to look for other targets. But where they left off, The State – our newly formed alliance – began to gain momentum.The first on the scene was Thesper, one of our solo aces. Flying a physics-tricked absurdo-ship, the nanophoon (now impossible in the game), he introduced himself to the locals with a week of non-stop slaughter. He’d earned perhaps a hundred solo kills by the time the rest of StateCorp jumped its carriers in to our base, the dead-end system of WY-9LL.WY-9LL instantly captured my imagination: a remote bastion of space-faring civilisation. Only one jumpgate in and out, which meant we could always see trouble coming. The locals at the time were Celestial Apocalypse blues, which meant they were blue to us, too. We arrived to mild, friendly chatter, and I noticed one of the stations sat atop an asteroid, an unusual design, and just the kind of thing I loved seeing in eve.There were around twenty people in The State at this time, and we were soon to be seeing peak attendance, with everyone showing up to our scheduled ops, and perhaps half a dozen people available at almost any time of day for impromptu skirmishes around the Fountain core. Having introduced ourselves to Celestial Apocalypse and their local friendlies, we began to attack nearby outpost systems. We weren’t interested in any kind of territorial gain, we were just there to keep the BoB allies out of the core, and to earn as many kills as possible. I chalked up around 500 kills on my own, raiding against Xelas and The Horde the nearest outpost. I took great joy in loading up a disposable battlecruiser, scouting with my second account (a cloaked ship) and then ploughing into their wobbly defences. It became a daily routine in which we’d regular catch our enemy unawares. My cloaker silently watched them for weeks on end, and they’d never quite know when I was active, and when I was off at the pub, or asleep. It provided constant amusement.In the core itself there were numerous factions using the neutral NPC stations. Greatest of all of these was Norman Protector, a kind of one man army who would fight us almost no matter the odds. He’d often win improbably fights with his crazily equipped cruisers and battleships. He’d see you and demand PvP in broken English. He usually got it. He was the greatest.Slightly later came the mysterious and erratic “Cors”, at least some of whom seemed to be multiple alts of the same person, usually all in battleships. We’d regularly engage them throughout Fountain, once taking them on in a running battle lasting nearly an hour, in which I lost my ship, and was able to do a thirty jump round trip to get another and return for the end of the fight. They always seemed keen for a brawl, and would often sit on jumpgates or stations just waiting for us to wake up and engage.So despite the lack of huge fleets and territorial war which had characterised our last couple of years of play, Fountain was never quiet. If it wasn’t the BoB community providing us with targets, then there were raiders from other regions or, occasionally, huge gangs of Chinese currency farmers. For reasons unknown these guys would occasionally band up in large groups of battleships and provide us with a fight. Most of the time, however, the sat quietly in side-systems, harvesting the game for money. We stalked them mercilessly, and they complained bitterly about the “boat violence”.Possibly the most interesting event in this early Fountain period, at least from our perspective, was when a rift occurred between BoB’s vassal group, The Horde, and the rest of the BoB community. Xelas turned up to attack The Horde pilots as they attempted to evacuate from the outpost in which – until that afternoon – I had been routinely battering them. Now the Horde pilots turned to me for help, asking whether The State and the other denizens of the core would help them get out alive. We agreed, and rallied the locals to trounce Xelas and get our former enemies to safety. Arriving in small, well-armed gangs, we surrounded the station and nearby gates, forcing the BoB minions to dock or flee, before escorting the exiled Horde fleet to their new Empire home. It was a glorious day.Almost as glorious as the time the ultimate BoB leader, SirMolle, narrowly missed doomsdaying us with his titan (smartbomb effect of the most powerful ship in the game) and then somehow flew an alt carrying a billion-isk in recyclables into our gatecamp. That kept us going for weeks.But it probably wouldn’t have kept us going if it hadn’t been for the tireless work of occasional RPS contributor RoBurky, who spent the many months in Fountain constructing a corporate hangar that had come to be know as the Hop. The Hangar Of Plenty.Using corporate assets, and plenty of his own elbow grease, Rob gathered blueprints to manufacture almost the entire range of tech 1 equipment, and many ships besides. He kept the hangar well stocked so that we could equip and launch a ship for almost any eventuality at a moment’s notice. I know that we didn’t thank Rob adequately for his work, but I suspect The Shop Of Death was thanks enough.The Shop Of Death, aka RoBurky’s Emporium of Certain Doom, was something of a fluke. The station we had moved into had some peculiar physics bug which meant it was enormously difficult to align and leave once you had undocked. This meant that enemy pilots, arriving to buy the reasonably priced goods that Rob had placed on the market, seldom got out alive. For our allies it was a cheap, consistent source of equipment. For our enemies it was a deathtrap. We could even see what it was that they had bought, and would often loot it from their wreckage and then put it back in the market after the gank.What if it was a ship that we couldn’t kill before it redocked into the station? No matter, we’d simply wait in the direction he’d have to take when we left, and kill him then. We always got our mark.So, back on the timeline: Fountain was far from over when The Horde moved. We had two more waves of BoB-friendly enemies to contend with. The first was Aftermath Alliance, a small splinter group of Xelas’ competent PvP players, and the second was Coreli Corporation, a small alliance around the same size and skill level as The State. When they first burst through our jumpgate and into WY-9LL we knew the fight was on. It was beautiful.The best thing about fighting people who are roughly as competent as you are: your own skill level increases. On the one hand you’re not being slapped about by a greater force, and losing the will to continue, but nor are your enemies simply victims to be slaughtered. Coreli were perfect sparring partners, always ready to innovate their own tactics, and often keen to spring one of our elaborate traps. I began to spend less time raiding outposts as Coreli and Aftermath brought combat within just a couple of jumps of WY-9LL. We engaged all day, every day. The killboards – websites maintained to keep track of ship-destructions – sprawled with kills and losses.One memorable night we rolled out of our base with a full gang and wracked up twenty battleship kills, along with multiple smaller craft, without suffering a single loss. Nor was it the usual trickle of random kills: we had three gang vs gang brawls, including one stand-up fight on a hostile station. It was a credit to how efficient Statecorp had become that everyone knew how to stay alive, even without the kind of “nano” setups that people would use to make speed their protector.I like to think it was a measure of Coreli’s leader’s respect for The State that he added us to his territorial map – a hand-drawn map of region influence and conflicts, that he updated for several years. We were probably the smallest entity ever to make it onto that map, thanks to our continual efforts in the Fountain core. I think back on the fights with Coreli and Aftermath with great affection: it was one of the best gaming experiences I have ever known. The few months in which we fought, toe to toe, is something I’d love to be able to recreate or recapture, but I know it’s lost. A singularity in the history of gaming. It was so valuable: a time when the kind of game I’d always dreamed of had come to pass: carving out our niche in a living universe, protecting the weak, working as a team to make money and bring down enemies.Yet it had to come to an end. Eve is change. Eventually, after months of scintillating small-scale combat, things began to falter. Once again the larger alliance politics would push The State to the sidelines. D2 and their immense northern coalition had decided to use the Fountain core as a base for an assault on BoB’s empire. Our quietly embattled region was suddenly heaving with 500-man fleets. While we were allied to D2, as anti-BoB locals, we had little reason to want to support them. BoB actually being removed from the region was not in our favour. After twiddling our thumbs for a couple of weeks, we decided to take a roadtrip to Syndicate. It was a rough, messy time for the corporation, in which we battled with Syndicate locals and saw attendance drop off. Eventually we arranged a return to Fountain, but things weren’t quite the same. WY-9LL had new friendlies move in – BULG – who would later become Sons Of Tangra, a major power that would hold territory in Fountain.The balance of power in Fountain was changing, and the fight dynamics were no longer ripe for raiders like The State. In retrospect we should probably have adjusted and come to work with our new allies, but I’d had enough. Bored, I looked elsewhere for conflict. We would hit the road once again, heading for the last great war that StateCorp would play a role in, and, ultimately, the end of our journey.Next: Bullies in Geminate, Insurgency, old friends.
tl;dr
In this, the final part of my look back on five years of the Eve Online corporation, Statecorp, we see our plucky heroes wander Eve, struggle for survival, and ultimately burn out in the long search for a home. Previously: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.With the changes in Fountain giving us ample reason to move on, we looked around for another similar locale. This was probably a mistake, but I was keen to persuade the gang to find actions elsewhere, and I would spend the following year trying to recreate the same scenarios we’d tasted in Fountain. The closest we were able to identify was a system called FDZ4-A in the region of Geminate. This seemed to be to provide similar opportunities: there were multiple alliance regions to be raided in the surrounding area, while FDZ itself was distant and obscure enough to be relatively quiet. We packed up our best toys – leaving a huge amount of assets in WY-9LL, which I believe remain there even now – and headed, once again, across the galaxy.Initially Geminate was quiet, because the only people using FDZ were a small alliance called Fang. We began to engage them fairly regularly, and run missions out to the nearby alliance-owned outposts. Large conglomerations such as Roadkill and Hydra provided ample entertainment, not least when we piled straight into Roadkill’s core system and killed the faction battleship they put out as bait.However, it wasn’t long before Fang had company in FDZ. Another alliance called Ground Zer0 turned up, providing us with regular (smack-talking) combatants in the same system. Now experts in this sort of warfare, we harassed them daily, culminating in the kill of a carrier which – for reasons unclear – had warped to an asteroid belt, and in a stand-up fight on one of the FDZ stations. This fight remains clear in my memory because it was such a beautiful turn of events. Fang and Ground Zer0 had brought together their largest gang in several weeks, causing StateCorp to dock at the station. The enemy gang surrounded the station at close range, hoping to kill one of our ships when the undocked. They outnumbered us at least two-to-one. Needless to say, we all jumped into very high damage ships and undocked all at once. I think we lost a battleship.Once the locals were properly trounced we began to lose interest in Geminate. It was nothing like as rich or dynamic as Fountain, and the lack of sparring partners made things dull. We decided it might, after years of of independence, be a good idea to join up with old alliance friends and see how things would work out. The first foray in this direction was to return, for the final time, to Great Wildlands and to Veritas Immortalis.The old names were still fun to fly with, but the -V- we found in Great Wildlands at that time were a shadow of their former selves, being harassed by the new Foundation, and battered by formidable Red Alliance and Tau Ceti fleets. We used the opportunity to raid old haunts in Scalding Pass, Wicked Creek and Curse, but it was clear the magic was gone. After a couple of months we moved back to Geminate, beating on some more transient locals, before looking north to what Celestial Apocalypse – the corporation who had enticed us to Fountain in the first place – were doing now. Again, what they were doing was a bold project.Celestial Apocalypse, by then the lead in a larger alliance known as Insurgency, had moved into Venal, a neutral NPC region in the midst of the North. It was a giant version of what had been going on in Fountain. While Fountain’s core provided a good place to attack alliance assets in the region, Venal provided a base to attack assets in the whole of the north. The north of Eve, or The Northern Coalition, is a huge power-bloc, where many different alliances are in a non-aggression pact with each other. Insurgency was hitting some of the weaker members of this coalition, Stella Polar and Phoenix Allianz, and the rest of the coalition was doing little to intervene. StateCorp decided the tales of 100-ship heavy assault gangs rampaging around were too good to miss out on, and we moved on up.As we arrived, however, bigger things were in motion. Insurgency were in the process of attacking a small arm of a region called Branch. It was a dead end section of space which could easily be blockaded, cleared out, and captured. Insurgency was, unbeknownst to us, and even the rest of the North, going to use this backwater assault as a trial run for claiming the entire Branch region.When the assault kicked off it was the biggest collection of capital ships we had ever seen. Insurgency had swollen to around 1500 pilots, which was easily enough to produce the kind of fleets needed for the attack. It was also the size needed to produce massive capital ship action. While StateCorp had been off skirmishing and raiding we had also been buying capital ships, which were seldom used outside of logistics. Of course we weren’t alone: all the large PvP alliances of Eve had begun to amass gigantic capital ship assets, and Insurgency was no different. The sight of the massed capital ship fleet during the Branch assault was astonishing.RoBurky made a video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqxsS_T91bYInsurgency crushed the far weaker alliances in a sudden blitzkrieg: they had taken Branch. This, however, woke the slumbering enormity of the rest of the North: a power-bloc that could field four of five fleets the size of Insurgency’s own. They begun to circle for the kill.Roburky made another video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ax53Mnpr5RIAnd soon Insurgency would be crushed, and the north was lost.But so too was the regular high attendance of StateCorp. The long, arduous attrition of the war for Branch was simply not the StateCorp way. As thrilling as 100-ship capital jumps were, it was our small, tightly organised gangs that had really kept us interested in the game, and now we were waning. By the time Eve’s northern powers rolled in to retake Branch, we were already making plans. We evacuated to a backwater system in Pure Blind, and spent a few weeks beating up a random Russian alliance who were picking on local mission runners. It was a brief flicker of the past, and of what StateCorp did best. Our numbers, however, were not enough to sustain interest on a regular basis. We were going to need to recruit, or to join up with larger, more active Eve entity.We got in touch with the resurrected Huzzah Federation, which had been living in Syndicate since our own roadtrip out there. We would join up with them again and fight a few more campaigns with our old Huzzah friends. First we’d boot Red Skull, Thorn, and Controlled Chaos out of their pocket of Syndicate, and then we messed around in Cloud Ring, making of a nuisance of ourselves as the region’s sovereignty changed hands. Fun escapades indeed, but a potent mixture of real life and Eve-fatigue was going to end my run, and that of most of our other pilots. StateCorp’s run had been long, and glorious, but our most active players had begun to fizzle out. One by one we just weren’t turning up for the ops.Finally, last week, we realised it had come to an end.Even without the fact that we were growing tired, and finding ourselves busy with other responsibilities, I think we had grown apart from Eve. We idealised small scale ship combat in 0.0 space. Neither the new generation of faction warfare nor the proliferation of capital ship combat really appealed, certainly to me, and possibly to other members of StateCorp. I think we existed during a sweet spot for both the game, and for the time our pilots could commit to it. Some of us will stay and play on – I’m certainly taking a break – but it’s clear that the singular joy of StateCorp had run its course. Insurgency was our last taste of what it meant to play the alliance game at a high level, and once again we decided we didn’t want it. We’d mastered small scale skirmishing, and so that no longer held challenge either. We’d done the lot.Of course that should not diminish how incredible the journey had been up to this point, or how it could be for others in the future. All this stuff could only ever have happened in Eve. No other game or virtual world has the same vast potentials, or the intricate amalgam of sandbox freedom and ludic constraint. While StateCorp played out its many battles I wrote a book containing detailed ruminations on the subject of Eve, and many other essays and features besides. It’s been the most fertile source of story-telling and game design discussion I’ve ever come across. And most of those stories don’t belong to me, or to StateCorp. From the vast political intrigues, to the Great War, through the scams and the scandals, the pirates, the traders, the moon-miners, the explorers, the idiots, the savants: there are billions of stories within Eve. StateCorp has generated countless vignettes and takes of spacewar on its own, and there are hundreds if not thousands of corporations who have also lived through the past years of the game. Their stories, perhaps, can be told elsewhere, and will continue to unfold in the future.Eve Online has been profoundly significant in the landscape of gaming. It saddens me still when I interview MMO developers who can’t say why Eve is interesting or unique. It’s so special that no other game can replace it. There will be another shooter, another RTS, another clever puzzle game, but it’s not clear whether there will ever be another Eve. For that reason alone, I can’t see myself ever stopping being interested in CCP’s amazing project.Nor, ultimately, will I want to lose contact with the friends I’ve made. Thanks to the lot of you – you all know who you are.Ultimately, though, I’m thankful it turned out like it did. I know our adventures might not have gone that way. I might not have written that feature for PC Gamer. I might have genuinely lost interest in that patchy first year of the game. Hell, Eve might never have happened at all.Way back, when I first saw screenshots of Eve in 2002, an editor of the time leaned over and looked at them: “Pff,” he said, “an MMO by a little Icelandic studio? That’ll never even get released.”I’m glad he was wrong. And how wrong he was.Eve Online, StateCorp, I salute you.
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