I hate to be facetious as I was once there myself, a rookie who was so nervous to travel down a pipe or just try to exist at all in low and null security at any given moment that I feared for my ship constantly, as were many if not all others, but sometimes I find it hard to be patient with people who expect everything to be handed to them. Why pay money to play a game online only to constantly expect your entertainment experience to be foisted onto you or spoon fed?
We recently had a dramatic turn of events concerning a newly joined group of European players who came on board at the AU-F to try and stake their claim on the game as it were. They were brash, energetic, full of questions, and sometimes subtle demands, but everyone gets their fair chance in player groups led by me, so I let them in. Much as I initially suspected, they soon grew into a fairly substantial problem, as they lacked training, failed to attend training events, read the forums, join the mailer with guides, or in general put forth an honest effort to acclimate to their new environment out in Domain and Providence.
Sure, some of them they had been playing the game off and on for a year or more, but let's be honest, these guys are amateurs with extreme expectations and high maintenance. From demanding that there be mandatory yet random operations every night, yet not actually joining these operations as they were ongoing, to repeatedly questioning or asking about every little detail of corporate business, I knew from the first few days that these guys were eventually going to pull just the wrong string, giving me the perfect reason to hold a majority no-confidence vote at the leadership level to remove all of them in one fell swoop.
I believe actions speak louder than words insofar as words are an action. From the moment I logged on the evening of Tuesday the 9th of June I knew that the situation was coming to a head as news spread of one of their group losing a Drake in an attempt to shoot down the Yong pipe by himself. This attempt as it were, ended rather predictably, with the utter humiliation of the pilot, and his own discontent coming to a head concerning what he perceived as some sort of lack of action on our part.
When asked whether he scouted the pipe, checked the starmap, asked for a status report in the Citadel, viewed the Citadel for five to ten minutes, or had fit warp and inertia stabilizers on his Drake, he responded, and bear in mind that I am expanding on his thoughts by making them coherent, he responded simply, "I asked in Citadel for status and received no response after five minutes then I took a shuttle into Yong, but then due to my own laziness and lack of planning, I had to go grab my Drake from Mista which took ten minutes, so by the time I went to go down the pipe a gang of pirates had started camping the gate and I died in a fiery ball of shame."
I'm sorry, but if you spend more than four or five hours accumulating 100,000,000.00 ISK for a Drake and even go and buy a faction hardener for it, yet you are too lazy to spend more than fifteen minutes (sloppily at that) preparing to take it down a low security pipe or expect others to drop what they are doing at any given moment to do it for you so you do not have to learn how yourself, then you deserve to lose it.
So, after few harsh words traded back and forth, mostly in a courteous but heated discussion, a no-confidence vote was taken by the leadership present at the time to remove all related individuals from the corporation. The reason for this is because during the discussion, the topic of protection came about, with such questions as (with satire included), "Why can't the Alliance mop up these pirates for us so I do not have to learn how to play the game?" or my favorite, "Why can't CVA immediately repel a fleet of +100 hostiles the moment they enter Providence, don't they just sit around all night long in circle jerks waiting for a hostile fleet that size to jump into Providence once every two to three months?" You can see me shaking my head right now with my face in my palm, I know you can, because it is one of those slow facepalms where you just wanna punch a puppy as it makes you so frustrated at how insanely lazy some people are.
What does this all mean? Well, suffice it to say, the leadership at the AU-F is here to help those who help themselves, and that is the bottom line for me. We work tirelessly to provide players every opportunity to excel at the game and further their entertainment interests, but we will not hand hold you to the finish line. We provide the means, you provide the way. I never hesitate nor fail to do whatever I can to assist those who are assisting themselves by putting forth their best efforts but need assistance, be it survival training, fitting advice, tutelage on game mechanics, social dynamics, political power structures, or just anything in general. But when I catch a whiff of people who would rather be lazy and sit back while others do their work for them, those people earn every bit of the kick in the ass I give them as I shove them out the door.
Needless to say, after Ghastous pulled a Holier-Than-Thou attitude with me both in the public channel and in a private chat, accusing me in private of being an oppressor, he took his merry band of failtards and camped our mining crew in Warouh. So much for taking the high road, as it were, eh? After a failed attempt to suicide gank Vhero Min, who I remind you had almost no interaction at any point with our European friends, in his Retriever, they all logged in humiliation and we have not seen hide nor hair of them since.
Good riddance. Give me more Nlors and less bastages!
And, as a shot to the face with a creamy finish, I contracted their loot back to them from the smoldering wrecks CONCORD left of their ships. Chivalry is dead? I think not.
