Thursday 9 August 2007

The birth pains of The Kaminjosvig

Ok so the Corp started over 2 months ago (the first 3 weeks were spent on concept, website design and general faffing around).

It has not been plain sailing by any shot of the imagination. One of the guys I recruited 5 weeks ago (ucntkilme) wanted to run the corp in a different way. He wanted us down in CVA space fighting against Pirates. I am not totally sure what bit of Mercenary he didn't get but there you go. Coupled with this was the fact that I had trusted him way too soon and allowed him access to the corp wallet. I thought he was going to be really good at getting us started.

Over the next few weeks he would keep taking around 7-15million from the corp wallet. Not regular just now and then. I started to get a bit alarmed by this but had other things to worry about like recruitment. Then we got a really good PvP'er into the corp the kind of guy with huge balls who liked to talk about his exploits. He was really funny loads of character. This rubbed ucntkilme up the wrong way and one night he really went off at this other (very experienced PvPer) in corp. I revoked ucntkilme's roles and set him back to ordinary member.

This was a relief and initially ucntkilme took it very badly and was going to leave. After a mail suggesting that he had been a bit cookie and that he should give it another go maybe work his way back to the position he was in. He agreed to stay. At least I had him away from the corp wallet!

Steersman
So we hold elections for Steersman and ucntkilme got voted in. This means that he is one of the political leaders of the corp with myself and the PvPer.

Steersmen get a budget to spend on the players buying them ships and modules. I only put a niminal fee into the wallet for I did not trust ucntkilme. Sure enough he took 7million within two days of getting access. This time I asked him to put it back. He was a bit bitchy about it in corp chat but the money went back over the next day or two.

Then I find out he is bitching about the direction of the corp and that some of the others are agreeing with him (he is a US player and we have a contingent of US players in the corporation). I took him to task about this on the forums and basically said get behind us or leave. He then resigned his roles and prepared to leave. I outlined in a Corp mail that anyone else who identified with Ucntkilme should go. We lost one other member.

Ucntkilme took the 20million isk from the steersman's budget when he left and a few days later declared war on us.

The war
The war is due to start 12.30am Sunday morning. Ucntkilme talked to some of our members like Hugg and Wellsy (old timers) saying this was my fault and that none of them had to engage and he would just kill me a couple of times and be done. He was trying to get people to leave but his war declaration got everyone behind the corp. People moved location to our home system and members started saying that they would fight even if they didn't have the skills. Which was really cool - in other words his war dec was counter productive.

The first engagement of the war was when he decided to engage our member Lord Warpy who was mining in Abagawa. The war dec was not operational and he lost his ship to concord. Sadly we were left without any serious engagement and simply had to go and loot his wreck. At least we got back some of the ISK back that he took (the total isk he took over time was 108million).

As the evening passed and he bitched at Warpy in a convo we discovered that we had sold a new Drake to guess who?

Then later that evening Ucntkilme is definitely sore and two of our industrial characters decide to have a bit of fun.

Nabaron and Warpy waited till the war went into effect, and as soon as the war became active Ucnt showed. The guys ganged up undocked and went to buisness, after 5-10 minutes of fighting, they got him down to 70% (tech one and two frigates versus a heavily tanked Drake). The two players were industrialists and just didn't have the training to break his tank. But they had great fun. They lost a couple of small ships and had real fun fighting someone for that long (which is exactly the point of the Corp!).

So Ucntkilme got two kills.

He then dissappeared for about 3-4 days and eventually arrived back in Abagawa last night. We waited all night until he undocked and warpy set a bait trap for him. LTLT (Raven) and I (Megathron) warped in and less than a minute later Ucntkilme's ship was in pieces and I got my first pod kill in The Kaminjosvig.

http://www.kaminjosvig.com/killboard/

What you don't know is this guy set the killboard up - Ironic that he was the first kill on it. No? ;)

Tuesday 7 August 2007

OK so now what?

Well I haven't finished telling you about Dark Age of Camelot. I will in time get back to that. What have I been doing since?

My last post spurred me on to putting into action some of the ideas and analysis I have had. Its been quite some time since I posted for a number of reasons. I have moved into Eve online mostly because my brother and other people I have known for a very long time are playing there. I am going to assume you know what eve is.

What did I do?
Ok the first thing was to start a new corporation. This time the idea was to do more than open a corp and just take people who fancied playing. Rather the idea I had was to follow the principles I have been outlining here because I think they are a good guide and they can help create a good framework with wich to enjoy the game and hopefully get back what I lost from Dark Age of Camelot. Essentially what I was seeking to do was set a framework for my 'intentionality'. To try and get a feeling for goals in the game and identify with a corporation ethos and see what it would mean for us to play to that pattern.

This took a lot of time. I felt the most flexible ethos was going to be a mercenary corporation and so I had a hunt around for information on historical Mercenary societies. I struck on the notion of the Jomsvikings and started to work out a few anagrams of the term. It was proving quite difficult because we only had one vowel, and then of course we found that Jomsvikinga which is another words for the same thing and which has a very useful 'a'. Having messed around (my wife helped me find the right term) we decided that the term with the best ring to is was Kaminjosvig. The next stage was to set out the rules and ethos to decide on some of the detail but not too much (the players should decide the real deatils in the end).

So what happened? It took ages - 3 weeks in fact to get the whole thing together we got a website together and started recruiting. One of the first people into the corporation was Commander Warpy he was delighted with the idea and loved the term and ethos. In fact I found that having worked out the details it was quite easy finding people who would sign up to it. All in all it started to work quite well. The problems of course come afterwords when you want people to actually play like that. The corporation numbers had swollen to 34 signed up and about 20 active members which is not bad in four to five weeks.

Whilst the story is only 5 weeks old already we have had some drama. I won't go into details but of all the players who were recruited one did not take any interest in the ethos of the corporation. He felt we should follow what he wanted, that we should settle in 0.0 space and become like any other corporation. He was quite forceful about this and it was not long (he was in four weeks) until he left and tried to take half the corporation with him. One person followed him so it was no big disaster for us. The point about this is that it demonstrates the issue of intentionality is crucial. It only take one person to not identify with the intention of a corporation or guild or whatever and then friction starts.

So on the one hand trying to frame players intentions is a good thing and clearly it works for me and others. A lot of us feel like our time spent in the game is for a higher purpose. That we are achieving something that is good and feels great even if it is very slow to develop. Not only this when someone comes along who does not identify with that ethos it is very clear that they are in the wrong place. I know this because the reaction of the corp members has been emphatic to fall behind the corp and work together. Two of them immediately went out and were happy to lose their ships just to prove that we are the Kaminjosvig and we do not back down! This is exactly what we intend to be like and we will not change.

In time as the corp develops I will let you know whats happening. For now I am already feeling like the corporation has started to take shape. We have a long way to go but the general sense of achievment is starting to take root for many of us and its a good feeling.

Sharkith/Nat