As I was sitting in station, the Amarr Emperor Family Academy, I decided it was time to end my bleak existence flying solo, mining, and running exploration sites in every type of space. My wallet was thin, but I was not broke by any means. I fired up the recruitment chat and began discussing with other pilots the best way to start a corporation and begin my own venture in the game of thrones of New Eden. I would like to say that I found the man who would lead me to greatness in Eve, but he found me. Mycan was looking for like-minded leaders who shared a vision of building am empire. When we initially spoke, I was skeptical of his intentions, but i took a risk and joined up with him and The Blackguards Templar. It was a small corporation that had only been I existence for a few weeks so i knew we had our workcut out for us.
At first there was Mycan the CEO and two directors including myself, Cleonard. Mycan would hold weekly leadership meetings that i and the other director would attend. As we grew in members, we moved from gallente high sec to amarr high sec due to the lower population in the neighboring star systems. Our other director was young and naieve. Mycan and i had a meeting and decided to strip him of his director position. We based this decision on the person's inability to make rational decisions as a leader. When he came online he became verbally abusive and left the corporation in a fit, but all of our assets remained intact so Mycan and i brushed it off as a success.
We continued to grow in numbers, with 50 total members and 10 or so active at any given time. We discussed and put together a doctrine and we began delegating tasks to other members who were deemed trustworthy. We were very careful and never have access of storage to a member who didn't need it for their role. We were running roams at least 2 times a week and even had a pve group that would welcome anyone while they blitzed c3 wormholes. When there was nothing to kill we would come together and run low sec mining ops with 10+ members. The times were good and the routine of being a leader was very welcoming to myself.
Through the next couple of months we had recruited a member base of over 100 players. We joined and left a couple different alliances and eventually started one where we were the executor. By this time we were supporting 20 to 30 members online at any given time. We decided it was time to move into low sec permanently. It offered a lot of pve content but it was not as difficult as some of the sites in null and we were not sure if our members could handle null. We had pos's in high sec for refining and we wanted top continue using them so we ended up with a large portion of our members staying in high sec which in turn forced the leadership to be there a lot of the time.
After speaking to a few contacts, mycan decided the next step would be to secure some pocos in high sec. We had some disagreements with another alliance I the area, Darwanism, so we decided to attack a poco owned by one of their sister corporations, Gaznarok. I was offline at during the attack but from what was reported to me, we did not being enough firepower and only drove the poco down to 75% before they retreated. At this point real life started to become a little to busy and i was not spending enough time worth the corporation that i helped build. It wasn't long after our attack on Gaznarocs poco that they decided to counter attack. We suffered a few heavy losses and never netted a kill in this skirmish. Eventually Gaznaroc employed another corp to station camp us at our home in Neesher. Eventually our members got sick of it and dropped corp to escape the war. In one week we went from 20 to 30 active members to 0 to 3.
We were defeated. Half a year of friendships gone. It was a sad realization but I did come to learn that if you begin building something, you can never quit or it will vanish. This story only touches the surface of my Blackguards career and there are many stories that all of us as blackguards shared with one another. For anyone reading, i hope that you enjoyed this little short. Also, accepting defeat and giving up is the only sure fire way to lose. Persistence and consitency will see you asking the road to success.
