1 October 2005

The Arrogance of BoB!

The arrogance of BoB! A subject that many of our enemies will wax lyrical about given half the opportunity but generally they'll do so with less than half knowledge and way less than half understanding. Given my position in Eve and in BoB I would say this but we're woefully misunderstood by the player base at large. We are definitely very confidant in our abilities and we believe rightly so because of our achievements, which I'll go into shortly. If we were truly arrogant though we'd have no respect for any of our enemies and would look down our noses at everyone else in Eve, which I can categorically state is not the case. Part of the issue is that we have a fairly vocal minority who cannot refrain from telling it as they see it on the public forums and we've never discouraged nor censored our members from doing that, well that's a slight misrepresentation, whilst it's not banned in BNC forum posting in the usual smackfests of the Corporations, Alliances and Organisations section of the Eve-O forums is discouraged. Anyway, my point was that because we have a fairly vocal minority who are very confident in our abilities there's more often than not a visible BoB presence which comes across as arrogance, particularly when our enemies try to misrepresent facts.
So why are we so arrogant? I don't want to steal Molle or Galavet's thunder too much by talking about their corporation's histories prior to the formation of BoB although Evolution's escapades are well known and I will touch on a couple of campaigns in RKK's pre-BoB period. Since we established BoB though we have gone from strength to strength and overcome just about every other group of players Eve has been able to throw at us.
Pre-BoB Achievements
Evolution establish Fountain alliance and are pivotal in it's running, have successes fighting up north during the establishment of the Venal Alliance and very publicly split from FA setting the trend for self-sufficient unaffiliated mega-corps with a strong military. I could go on into more exploits and detail but this was before I really knew the Evolution guys and I don't want to misrepresent anything, a high level summary suffices for the purposes of this part of my narrative. They were groundbreaking and successful in so many ways during Eve's first year.
RKK become established as a successful mercenary corp in the days of Kestrels and Blackbirds long before the Mercenary Coalition was a twinkle in Seleene's eye! Defender's of lower venal and pivotal to the NVA's southern fleet presence prior to the demise of the NVA and resurrection as the Phoenix Alliance. Founder members of the Coalition of Deklein that became NSA and today's IRON. Went on to shun alliance ties and go it alone in the times when every pod pilot in Eve wanted to be in an alliance for security and safety in numbers! Successfully fought alongside BNC, Celestial Apocalypse and Huff Technologies to bring down Rising Storm Alliance despite their Forsaken Empire supporters. Went on to spearhead the assault against the failing Forsaken Empire. RKK's pinnacle achievement pre-BoB was having the balls to declare war on the whole Phoenix Alliance on their own, despite odds of 30:1 against them. Ballsy, confident and ground breaking.
BNC formed out of a merger of Black Nova Mining Corp with Kraft, two corporations who had lived in Great Wildlands early in Eve's history before merging and moving to the Outer Ring where they merged with Swedish Vikings and Tranquillity Drinker's Club. Led the rebellion that brought down the corrupt ORS regime in Outer Ring and were a founder member of NORAD. Grew in short order to be, alongside Nemesis, NORAD's main fighting force and led the alliance in terms of it's policy and foreign relations. Secured the Fade region upon the release of player conquerable stations and were amongst the first corporations to own stations and a region in 0.0 space in their own right with no real alliance backing (the rest of NORAD never really supported us in this venture!). Fought the RSA war against the RSA, CoD and FE coalition alongside RKK, Celes and Huff, defeating the aggressors and being central to the creation of the Fade Union alliance.
In their own ways all three BoB corps have rich histories, were groundbreaking or visionary in their peer groups if not in the Eve universe as a whole and brought a successful past with them into the Great Northern War and the creation of BoB.
BoB Achievements
For the purpose of this discussion I'm treating the GNW and defeat of the PA as a BoB achievement, although in truth the three corps didn't come together full time until toward the end of the war. RKK and Evolution worked fairly closely together and with mOo during the siege of BKG "Burger King", whilst BNC did a lot of our early fighting in Pure Blind, lower Venal, Fade and Deklein (partly so BNC and mOo could avoid each other! We had a little bit of a problem in that we were both on the same side but KOS back then!).
Defeat of the Phoenix Alliance, victory in the Great Northern War and the annexing of Venal, Tenal and Branch as BoB territory.
Defeat of the Fade Union Alliance, who no matter what anyone else tries to tell you definitely started it(!), annexing of Fade and Pure Blind.
Defeat of Northern Star Alliance, annexing of Deklein.
Control and defense of 6 regions (everything from Cloud Ring to Tribute!) for several months against everyone else who lived in the north.
Total relocation of the whole alliance to the south of Eve practically overnight to commence a new campaign at the other end of the map.
First alliance in Eve to voluntarily give up 6 whole regions to go off and start a new campaign in order to challenge ourselves and prove that we could!
Fought FIX to a position of mutual respect and signing of an NAP.
Annexed Delve and Period Basis following the eviction of first Fountain Alliance (from both regions) and then Vertigo Coalition (from Period Basis).
Assault on Fountain and total demolition of the remnants of Fountain Alliance, annexed Fountain.
Negotiation of a deal with Blood Raiders regarding Delve.
Re-population of Delve and Period Basis.
Orchestrated the creation of a southern hegemony with the signing of an agreement between BoB, FIX, SE, ASCN and [5], a fundamental stepping stone necessary for our next campaign.
Assault on Outer Ring, removal of Imperium from 0.0 space and annexing of Outer Ring as BoB Territory.
Always outnumbered, at times with up to 5000-6000 enemy pilots against our 700-800. Huge tracts of 0.0 space controlled as effectively as any other 0.0 alliance, often more so and more securely. We have conquered and taken ownership of 10 regions of 0.0 space from under an occupying force's nose during the last 18 months. Tenacious and determined like no other force in Eve, we have proven time and time again that when we go after something we get it.
All three corps have hugely positive kill to death ratios despite not pirating, not going for easy targets and almost always being outnumbered (if our enemies can organise themselves!).
.....and people wonder why we come across as arrogant? If you'd achieved the things we've achieved against the odds time and again, wouldn't you feel pretty confident in yourself and your team mates? Wouldn't you be proud of your achievements and not be afraid to say so in public? We come across as arrogant sometimes because our members are proud of what we have achieved, have confidence in our ability and know that experience tells us we can achieve even more.
However, and this is a big 'however', we have a lot of respect for our enemies if they put up a fight and try. Funnily enough you don't have to be uber, you don't have to beat us, you don't have to be as tenacious as a bulldog, you don't have to do anything other than 'try' to get our respect. FIX fought us long and hard and always tried, that garnered them a huge amount of respect from BoB. We have a lot of respect for G because they are so disciplined, so determined and will stand up to be counted, they are 'tryers'. We're also not so niaive as to think that we can rest on our laurels and stay on top forever. We're actually looking for (and planning for) that nemesis of ours to find us some day and give us the ultimate challenge.
The people who most often consider us arrogant are in my opinion usually those who we consider to not be 'tryers'. We will look at you and think you're a waste of space if you won't stand up to be counted when the time comes, especially if you talk the talk on the forums but then fail to deliver in game. If you tell us that we're arrogant smacktalkers and that you're going to hand it to us you had sure as hell better try as hard as you can to make good on that promise because we will think you're a joke if you don't. Most of the people who probably feel like we look down our noses at them forget the fact that they put themselves in that position by shouting loudly and publicly on the forums that they were going to own us and then spectacularly failed to do so in game.
A saying I am particularly fond of in real life is "you're all mouth and no trousers". If you come at us with nothing but mouth then why on earth are you surprised when we tell you you're hopeless? If you come at us with spirit and determination then win or lose we'll respect you for it.
I don't believe this is arrogance, I believe it's the warrior's confidence in his abilities and the expectation of a hard working man that other men will be equally hard working.
The most important point to remember is that we are ALWAYS ready for any one of you to prove us wrong, we'll relish the challenge in proving ourselves right!

(DISCLAIMER: Tongue in cheek circuits activated!)

1 comment:

Blacklight said...

Gonna delete those 'tarded posts in a few.