Upheaval

At the end of last week I had my small POS up in the outpost system in 0.0 space, all my ships and gear in the outpost, and I was finally starting to rat in my Drake (which I love BTW, and I was going to write about it, but that is another post for another day).

And then all hell broke loose.

First off, the space we were living in was not that attractive to some hardcore miners in the corporation who were looking for the rare Arkanor asteroids, are even Bistot or Mercroxit. Best we had access to was Crokite. Secondly the alliance demands of two large towers seemed excessive by we were told we would have two systems to ourselves. Turns out, not really. Sharing systems with other alliance member corps was not attractive as it meant greater competition for the good rats and moons. Thirdly, and the straw that broke the camel's back, our CEO was leading an alliance fleet on an op and he got replaced by another alliance FC (Fleet Commander) and was then berated for his ship choice.

Excuse me? They what? At that point, the corp unanimously voted to vacate the alliance. That was Saturday night. So I proceeded to dismantle the POS and Sunday morning I carrier jumped everything back to Derelik and then freightered it back to Gulfonodi.

But something else came up Saturday night. Three fifths of our corp's leadership (CEO and four directors including myself) came from a corp called Exile which is part of the ATF alliance out near Triumvirate's space. Don't worry if all of that is greek to you, its Eve macro politics and too complicated to cover as an aside in one post; suffice to say its 'over there'. Well the CEO of Exile really missed the guys that left to help form Strife and made some changes and wanted to invite them back along with the rest of us Strife pilots.

Well, there was some serious excitement. The space Exile occupies has great ores, easy access to good moon mining, and some awesome PvPers I'm told. As a bonus, they are on war footing so lots of action was promised in the near future. Sounded like everything we were looking for.

Except they wanted the pilots, not the corp. In other words, we would be absorbed into Exile corp and Strife would be closed.

Last year when we were running with Strife 1.0 we were in a similar situation: looking for 0.0 access. We joined with No Quarter who were based in Venal region and closed down Strife, but it turned out to not be a good time, I personally nearly lost my shirt in the adventure and ended up working for myself in Razor for a couple months to recover. Now I'm not saying joined Exile would be the same experience but it raised some concerns immediately to me, namely that I would have no control over Exile and I would go from being a director of Strife to a foot soldier in Exile.

Well, after sleeping on it I decided that was a deal breaker for me. When the offer was put up for voting on the forums, I was the first to step up and say, No, I'm staying in Strife. The voting turned out that about 2/3 of the corp agreed with that option and unfortunately the few that wanted to join with Exlie and give it a try decided to go without us. We parted amicably and left the door open to their return should Exile not work out.

So we are now at a new crossroads for Strife, time to review options, get input, and decide on a new course of action. Its unfortunate that the Sylph alliance venture did not pan out, but these things happen and I lost nothing but time and some carrier and POS fuel. Peanuts in the grand scheme of things.