It's Lonely at the Top

One of the things that greatly amuses me in Eve is the elitism I see. I see it in corporate recruitment…I see it in some of the blogs I read…I see it in fleets…I see it on the forums…and I hear it sometimes coming out of my mouth which annoys me greatly. Been there, done that, never going back!

I was in your chair once. I thrived under CTAs and ‘official’ FCs and plans. I felt that to be truly good at Eve meant fleets of total discipline, high KDR, tight recruitment standards, and solid goals.

Then, I joined this little no named corporation in faction war named Locus Industries and it completely blew everything I thought out of the water. These were guys who yacked on fleet coms like there was no tomorrow. These were guys who didn’t even look at my api, or ask what ship I flew before letting me in. They had no goals except to kill stuff and have fun and their recruitment filter was 100% natural—those who didn’t fit in or couldn’t keep up left on their own, eventually. Heck, their corp ticker was [LOSER]. How more unserious can you be?


These were also the guys who flew effective, lol, remote-rep punisher gangs making people scratch their heads, then cry when their ships blew up. They were also the guys who took a small gang of BSes and one triage archon up against a Minmatar armada, effectively blowing away four hostile dreads and a carrier while losing only a handful of sub caps themselves.

They didn’t care, and therefor they were willing to take risks that most leaders and FCs would cringe at.

Ahhh elitism. The one thing that holds people back in Eve.

Prior to joining Ka Pow Pow, I was frequently looking for a new corporation. I was quickly baffled and frustrated. I talked to corporations who required detailed applications answering questions about what I would do in certain situations, to corporations who required a huge filtering process with apis and interviews and yadda yadda yadda.

I think I even asked one corp…”can’t I just fly with you a while so you can see if you like me and I can see if you’re cool or not?” That wouldn’t work because it’s a security risk. (….Because if you’re a spy…getting into a corp that’s actively recruiting would be sooo hard…*end sarcasm*)

Internet spaceships are important business.

To be honest, corp searching was extremely exhausting. (I feel bad for anyone currently undergoing that process!) I started talking to Gald who was an old Locus corpmate who had defected to the Minmatar when Locus mostly closed up shop. I don’t have our chat logs but I think it went something like this:

(Me) “So, what do you guys do?”

(Gald) “Uh…we pvp.”

(Me) “Cool, can I join?”

(Gald) “Sure.”

I put in an ap, and five minutes later the ceo, Manos (someone I’d never flown with, never hardly ever spoken to, and actually flew against in the Amarr militia) gives me director roles.

“So you can do whatever the heck you want.” He said. Well, I don’t remember if those were his exact words, but that’s exactly what he meant.

Sweet. “So where’s the corp office so I can steal from you?”

He told me where it was. “Be sure to put a note in there so I know who took it all.”

“Right-ee-oh. Sure thing.”

Of course, I didn’t steal anything. Not even one thing from the huge hangar full of faction mods.

But you get the picture. I’d finally found a corporation that spent more time pvping and playing the game then pushing paperwork on people, or spouting their elite ideals on their soapboxes of arrogance, while spinning their ships in a station. (Now they spout their elite ideals from their ships while leroying into near death situations…guns a blazing….lol)

So, yeah, I laugh at people. I laugh when an old friend flies by and opens a private chat because he’s not ‘aloud’ to talk in local. I laugh when I look at a corp’s recruitment standards and see that they require people to answer a novel of ‘what if’s and document 100 solo kills in order to be ‘worthy.’ I laugh when people talk about the superiority of their ‘disciplined’ fleets, their ‘strict’ coms, or boast about how their corporation analyzes kill mails after each fight to see how they could do better.

I laugh when people say “those guys are the best pvpers” or “those guys are elite.” Because there’s a hundred people out there who have a completely different opinion of them. Elitism is an illusion. An illusion supported by illusory killbard stats, and the illusary hopes of egotistical men who make up the Eve universe.


Keep your chains—your crutches of self worth and importance.

No amount of elitism can make up for having pure, uninhibited fun