Directors and you.

Now, since we have moved to Null... Things have been pretty hectic. I have had a lot to do in a short amount of time. Being the CEO of a corporation, I can appoint directors to help take the workload off my shoulders. Seeing as my brother and my father are probably the two people in the game I can trust the most, I appointed them directors. In this game trust is a big issue. If you were to appoint a director title to someone in your corp, you may find that they have stolen everything that your corporation owns, or you may find that they have damaged your reputation.

Being the paranoid CEO that I am, I have mostly everything in the corporation set to limited access for my members, as time goes on and I get to talk with them more and more I will slowly let them have access to things like the Corp cargo holds, or the Station cargo holds. So far we haven't had anyone steal anything, they have been so far very trusting.

 You do hear a lot of horror stories in this game though, you hear stories of people spending years and years playing with people and gaining trust just to steal billions of isk from a corporation. This started to be a big problem once people figured out that they could do this, and morals started to decline. So, to combat spies and scammers CCP (the creator of the game) created a tool called an API key. And API key lets you see all the mails, contacts and everything you need to know Literally everything you could want to know. This tool is helpful to weed out spy's and pirates looking to steal all your assets. So in a way, I guess being overly paranoid is a good thing.

Our corp doesn't have very much, so losing what we have would be devastating. That is why I appointed my brother and my father into the director positions, they are the two people I can trust 100%. My other two Corporation mining directors look promising, but they have not been online for about two weeks, I was hoping that I could promote them into leadership positions. I mean, Canadians are trustworthy right?

The move to Null

As of May 20th 2015, our small corporation decided to move to Null sec. Null is a low security area where there are no space police to protect you. Try to think of it as the wild wild west of space, you have pirates and random people trying to rob you of all that you own, NPC's (non player entities) that warp in ontop of you and try to pod you. Podding is when someone blows up the ship you are in and all that is left is the space pod you start in.

So we join this Null alliance and everyone is freaked out because all we know is the hi-sec life where the space police reside. We start to move all of our assets over there one by one and get a feeling for the area. Well, on the way down one of my pilots gets destroyed by some random guy and loses a battleship... Everyone is paranoid that they are going to be next... imagine being a leader of twenty small school children trying to convince them that petting a wild bear is totally cool. It's quite stressful. I managed to calm everyone down and explain the ins and outs of how the whole moving process works.

First they needed to contract their goods to a lady in the alliance that makes trips to and from the main trade hub in Jita. First off, contracts in themselves are somewhat fishy people in this game like to scam quite a bit. Getting people you barely know to make a contract with zero collateral is a tough thing to do. It's pretty much saying, hey give this person everything you own, and hope that she does not  run off with it. I decided to make the jump to proove to them that this person wasn't going to take all my stuff, alas...she did not take all my things and we get the majority of our stuff moved to the new system! The other challenge was to set up the Corporation Station. To do this I had to make several trips back and forth from a moon to a station and haul each individual array to the spot we were setting it up. After about two days I got the majority of it set up and had enough fuel to keep the shield up for 24 hours... It was a very tough move... 

After I was the only one left in the corporation I set out to grow our operations, I mean cmon...nobody like to play alone. So I set on a quest to find like minded industrialist players that want to make isk! (the in-game currency) because money is power! I eventually recruited a guy named Kaori and his friend Acheron. We set up a player owd station so we can work out of a place that we own.

We started mining and stockpiling ore for our future conquests. We set up a compression array in our new player owned station so we can compress our ore and make it easier to transport (YEAH LOGISTICS!) We also gathered some new recruits to further our cause. A lot of our new recruits were not familiar with how the game worked as it has a very steep learning curve. With that in mind we spent a great amount of time teaching and mentoring our new corp mates.

After we had a decent number of active pilots, we expanded even more adding more and more things to our home station and getting more players active in PI (Planetary infrastructure) to tax them! Mining, running some missions and helping players is all we did for about a month and get to know each other. All of our players were interacting well and teaching everyone new things as we explored. I convinced  my father to start playing and started to teach him. My father then convinced my two older brothers to give the game a chance and now they too are hooked on my addiction. So not only is this game a huge part of my life, but it opens up more communication channels for me and my family.

The corporation has begun to grow at a faster rate than I had expected. We have gone from one member (me) to 25 members in a very short time. three of those 5 of those members I trust, my family members and my two original members, Kaori and Acheron. Eventually I plan to make these members my directors so I can share the leadership responsibilities and take a fair ammount of weight off my shoulders. the only problem is weeding out the spies. Spies and trading information in this game is a large problem. CCP, the creators of this game encourage scamming and being a prick so you need to go about it as everyone is out to get you.

In conclusion, It has gone well so far. But I have a lot to do...

Eve Online, SPACESHIPS!

The Reason I chose this topic is because it's what I am passionate about. Gaming plays a giant role in my life, it makes me part of who I am. I started playing Eve when I was stationed in South Korea, when I first arrived to my new unit. I didn't know anyone and it was hard to make friends. I spent about two weeks just sitting in my Barracks room after the day was complete playing anything from Starcraft, World of Warcraft, Fable, I even stooped so low that I attempted to play the game the 'Peasants' were playing (Call of Duty). One day in formation at 5:00am, I overhear a fellow soldier in my unit talking about how he was warping to a planet and a pirate chased him down and destroyed his Rifter. At the time I had no idea what a Rifter was, but I soon found out that it was a spaceship. I freaking love spaceships...

I inquired about the game and he was taken aback, he was not aware that I too was a fellow gamer. Asking him about the game was probably one of the best things I could have done. After spending the whole day discussing this awesome new game with my new-found best friend, I finally get out of work and get to trek up the five flights of stairs to my barracks room to download the game. After only five minutes the game was done downloading (Thank you sweet sweet Korean Internet) I make an account and log into the game.

After all day of researching and talking to my new friend I had an idea of what I should expect. From the moment I logged on, I was hooked. The graphics, community, gameplay, the spaceships! I couldn't get enough, and I have been hooked ever since. Eventually I had to leave Korea and my friend behind, and head back to the States. When I was all settled at my new unit stateside, I started up my computer and began to play after a couple months of away from my beloved Eve. This is the point in time when the game really started to get interesting. I met some people that were like minded and wanted to start a Corporation (it's like a guild from World of Warcraft but with more numbers). So we talked it over and decided to call our Corporation 'The Helghan Administration' (HELA) it sounded professional and somewhat dangerous. At the time I was just a director of the Corp with limited ability to make decisions, but we made important decisions together regardless. Our CEO at the time decided that we should set up shop in a system that was quiet and rarely traversed... Little did we know, the system we picked (Kemerk) was right next to a large trading system (that pirates liked to skulk around). After a month of being in the system, and being harassed by a pirate corp that declared war on us our corp slowly started to fall apart and people stopped playing... Everyone but me.

More on what happened after that next time.