Well, i've always tried to avoid having my corp join an alliance especially after a rather spectacular failsauce episode where the executor corp thought that it was okay to "copy cat" what i was doing without letting me know before hand. "Stuff" being go about plunking down tower(s) in a low sec system i'd worked my ass off to secure rights to exist in. I guess talking to me about it to see if it was 'okay' was probably the last thing on these happy-go-lucky-high-sec-missioning-anti-pirate mindsets. I suspect the first thing on their minds, if they happened to think at all, was "gee, if muffy can do it all on his own, it must be easy as pie *plunk*"
Yeah, was a bit sore about that. got really uhm...grrrr about it. Up until the time they decided to do the above, they'd hardly participated. And this was the era of exploration at it's finest (when gneiss was an isk-machine, and radar sites just dumped tonnes)...i hadn't been considering player owned stations in low sec until about 2 months after joining this alliance (cuz my friend in the corp had some mates he'd met who wanted to form an alliance) and it took about a month till the episode above happened, after i'd set up my first tower.
Life was pretty good back then, before the alliance thing with Mercury Rising (DASIC executor) i was primarily mining in high sec on the weekends and sneaking into low sec during the weekdays when the pirates of the time (Alcohol Fueled Brutality/Shadowed Souls/DarkTwilightSolutions) were in bed sleeping. Electronic Parts from aliastra stations in fua constellation could be hauled to Ishukone stations in sasen constellation (and polytextiles for the reverse run) would net me a tidy sum. At the time i was running only one client on a 1999 computer - bought a new computer before xmas of 2007 because [TORY] corp shot me down coming to a jumpgate in kourmonen system, with extreme lag getting both my shuttle and my pod killed. What a crazy reason to upgrade. only cost me about $500 USD.
Looking back now, i can't believe i played this game with lag each system the equivalent of jita on a bad day. lol. Not to mention doing lowsec runs without a scout and no warpcorestabs. sheesh. lol. no wonder i'm good at intel now.
Course, as soon as i could run 3 clients on a single computer i started thinking about bigger and better things...First thing i did was probe the moons in fua constellation and noticed a few decent moons that were unoccupied. Second thing i did was think, "wait a minute. there's probably another reason why someone just packed up and left this moon...maybe i should ask around" (which, sadly, is an intelligent but altogether rare mindset in eve-online) ...Just after xmas'07 I ended up meeting the person who is the local 'presence' in fua, and luckily for me was able to secure diplomatic standings for a very small fee.
really crappy vid quality. i learned a bit more about compression after that attempt. Sorry about the volume of the sound. ick.
By the time i was introduced to ACE-- corp, i'd pretty much gotten a real good handle on the political landscape in fua constellation. Lots of pirates on my buddylist, after being shot up alot while hauling and mining in low sec. Fua wasn't ruled by the flavour of the week transient gang, nor was it guarded by any semblance of 'antipirate' group (being as rare as bounty hunters)...i came to realize those who controlled low sec were long time residents and extremely experienced pvpers. Most of the time naguton station tended to turn most of the 'pirates' into fat and lazy campers, which suited me fine as a hauler/miner. Now that i was into POS management way out in deepest darkest low sec, things took on a different flavour as i noticed other pos owners blind to politics, hyperparanoid and unwilling to share even a modicum of intel. To me, Fua constellation is home (it's right smack where my trade route begins; it's got kernite roids in abundance; it's next to sarum family stations in Hoosa constellation; it's got numerous lvl3 locate agents in a big ring; there's lots of cadmium and chromium moons here; solid friends and enemies that keep the stability of the region around us)
I'd just gotten comfortable with actually being 'blue' to the local presence in low sec when my ex-alliance mates shoved into the picture, right out of the blue. The probability of offending the CEO of ACE-- corp was going to be 99.99%, so i did a judicious temper tantrum on alliance chat until the powers that be backed the hell off. Unfortunately, the attitude from my alliance was so non-contrite that i realized i'd made a mistake joining an alliance and decided to avoid such...i saw nullsec politics as far as alliance stuff to be fraught with the same bullshit and decided to continue avoiding that stuff - besides, if i was going into null sec on a full time basis i'd have talked up Evolution corp and joined my old friends. So there you go.
So what made me change my mind about alliances, null-sec, piracy and the rest of it? Well, ACE-- corp has the same outlook on fua constellation as i do and i've actually been wanting to join an alliance of theirs for quite a while. The opportunity came up and i'm willing to give the whole alliance/nullsec stuff a go.
I'm not being asked to rip up roots, because i trust the executor corp to consider fua as their home, as i do. Traveling all over the universe is fun when you have a place to call home.
