The Defias Blog

A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumour.

Aldous Huxley, “Variations on a Baroque Tomb,” Themes and Variations.

¶ A series of events has taken place in the last month that has changed the way I look at things, and in doing so, has nearly completely changed the way The Defias Brotherhood is administered. I have thought deeply about why this is the case; DFIAS has experienced hardships in the past but I did not change and so DFIAS did not change. The simple answer is ambition.
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¶ Over the last two weeks, The Defias Brotherhood has been on a mad dash to raise ISK. Why? Well, because last month when I first arrived in Omist as a new member of VENOM Alliance, the first thing I did was check the region’s contracts. I’d seen tons of great bargains on the contract market before, but they’d always been in deep-space 0.0 somewhere where I couldn’t dock even if I could get there, and I damn sure wouldn’t have been able to fly out with my goods. So now that I would have no problems, I wanted to see what was there to be had. A quick glance at the market details for the region showed that buying 5 Caracal-class cruisers for 20M ISK was a great bargain, so I scooped those up for the corporation. Then I found a contract auctioning off a Domination Control Tower Medium with a starting bid of 220M and no buyout.

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¶ I think that by the time you’ve got 5 hours of flight time in EVE-Online, every capsuleer knows that there’s a war going on. Everybody knows that the tens of thousands of pilots involved in this struggle, and the sheer vastness of the territory being held and contested by the four main powerblocs (The Southern Coalition, The Northern Coalition, The Alliance, and Superfriends), means that even if you’re not fighting in this war yourself, you are affected by it. This war, and the territory (and therefor resources) being fought over have a universal effect on the EVE-Online in-game market. Issuesin gameplay and balance that arise during this conflict lead to nerfs that effect all players (drone nerf, nos nerf, nanonerf, what else?).
¶ Last night, I flew for my first time in a large fleet op that was organized with the sole intent of doing a little damage in the Great War in the name of VENOM Alliance and the Southern Coalition.

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¶ Right, then, so when we incorporated The Defias Brotherhood within EVE-Online, we did so with the intention of pursuing careers in piracy. [DFIAS] has existed for about a month, now, and we’ve found that perhaps having such a strong PvP focus is more complicated and expensive than it first appeared, especially as we’re still in the growing stage. Add to that the fact that we are now a part of VENOM Alliance, and it takes away one of the pirate’s largest sources of income - the griefers’ wardec.
¶ So we have decided that, while we will not discourage any of our pilots from engaging in activities CONCORD would frown upon individually or in gangs, we will not make corporate-sponsored ops out of such activities. We have also determined that, for the interest of self-reliance, it would be in our best interests to try to develop an industrial core within the corporation and grow that alongside the combat/PvP core.

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