My old corp, Future Corps, perhaps better known by the alliance it flew under - Sleeper Social Club - has shut down. It came as a bit of a shock to me. One week we were having fun, getting fights and the next week I'm pulled into a private conversation on TeamSpeak and asked if I'm interested in joining a new corp - a splinter cell. After that conversation I took a little closer look at my surroundings and noticed the fractures appearing as I noticed people starting to get their ships ready to leave.
As it turned out, a good number of the people that I knew and enjoyed flying with were planning on breaking off into this group and I decided to go along with them. Other people that I enjoyed flying with ended up in different places, some in another new corporation and others grabbing spots in the various established w-space corporations. The one "good" thing about SSC shutting down was that it ended up spawning two additional w-space corporations. That's a net gain of one new corp in w-space, which I consider good for the space we love so much.
Even though I had agreed to join this new corp, for a while I was having some doubts as to whether or not it would be the best place for me right now. I considered joining Waffles to work on improving my PvP skills and FCing ability. I went back and forth on this and eventually ended up applying. As it turned out, I was "deferred" because of my killboard and told to go join Pandemic Horde to "get some dank kills" and "prove" my interest in PvP. I laughed a bit at this because my killboard stats were almost identical to my recruiter's killboard prior to joining Waffles - and he mentioned at one point that he didn't believe my kills would go from what they were to something higher. The irony of his statement after I had researched him probably as much as he had researched me wasn't lost on me, but it is what it is. This is not to mention that I had one quarter of the number of kills that he had in terms of ISK value while having significantly less kills in terms of raw numbers.
I'll admit that I wasn't expecting to get turned away from Waffles. I figured my skills and willingness to fly support roles like scout, logi, ewar plus a heavy interest in improving my FCing would look good to them but they were too focused on killboard metrics. As someone who is always the first to jump into a support role, I've missed out on kills more times than not. Sometimes there are no whore drones in your bay because the last person didn't refill them. Sometimes there are smart bombs on field and your drones get eaten alive before they can get on a target that dies. Sometimes you're told to bring non-whore drones so you don't have the capacity to whore at all. And other times, you're the one relaying intel to the FC from your position, in a cloaky non-combat ship - an effort that is required to get kills but also an effort that doesn't reward you with killmails. Or, in an example I pointed out to my recruiter, I've been the scout sitting on the other side of the gate watching for reinforcements or standing by to tackle should the person on the other side of the gate being killed by my friends deaggress and try to get away. All of these things don't get picked up by killboard metrics yet they were used to judge my application.
At the very least, the rejection or "deferral" from Waffles was enough to put that idea to rest in my mind. I would have happily joined them if I was accepted, but now that I've been turned away it's easier to move on with my Eve life and not think about "well what if I had applied to Waffles". This gave me renewed drive to focus on this new corp.
Getting started in a new corp is no easy task. There's tons of logistics to do (after we spent tons of time and energy moving out of our old home). Plus, you're no longer the big kids on the block. We're all used to being able to ping and have a flood of people show up. We're all used to having back up waiting just on the other side of the hole. Now, we're a much smaller group and chances are there's not very many people just a ping away.
That's okay though, this is a new experience for all of us and the fact that we're small guys means that we need to start thinking like small guys and not big guys like we used to be. That leaves tons of new and interesting options for us to pick when we're going to fight someone. I personally believe we need to be smarter, quicker and sneakier than these other guys to compensate for the fact that everyone else probably outnumbers us. Maybe we need to rely more on ewar and less on the pure numbers of DPS to break through other people's tanks. This is a work in progress and it will take time for us to get to that point.
I ended up being promoted to Director for this new corp, which I can only feel is a major vote of confidence in myself as a pilot. Director roles are never given out easily and especially not in a wormhole corporation where none of your assets are tied down in personal hangers. My focus is doing what I do best: recruitment and propaganda for our corporation. So, if you're looking to join a small, primarily USTZ C5 PvP corporation, come talk to me! Or, you can check out the corporation Noble Sentiments in-game and pop into our public channel "T0RAH Public".
