As you might know, I'm in the largest corporation in EVE Online. No, not Dreddit you silly, it's Science and Trade Institute with 461K members, 100x bigger than Dreddit. OK, some inactive cleansing might be in order, but still, at prime time 1000+ members are often on, much more than in Dreddit. This glorious corp is in an alliance "NPC" that holds around 20 regions. Like all alliances, its members are not shooting each other (mostly) and can dock in the alliance stations.
Now can you imagine the administrative load on this corp?! How many hours are spent planning and leading fleets, organizing the logistics to get the ships and modules where they need to be? If we consider 3-4 leaders for a 100-men corp and 50K active members for STI, we must have 1500-2000 altruists doing nothing but the hard work of herding cats.
STI is an NPC corp and has exactly zero managers. The "NPC alliance" living in highsec has exactly zero management either. Yet ships are right where they need to be, mining and ratting fleets go out without delay, station slots are full, everything runs like a well-oiled machine. What is the secret of STI?
Simply the size. The huge amount of people create enough demand for your work. If you are a miner, you don't need some mining co-ceo who organizes you a fleet, makes sure that a Mackinaw is imported or produced and then takes your ore and pays you some form. No, you buy a ship in the nearest hub, go out to the rocks and sell the ore to buy orders in the same hub or even to regional orders (if you are lazy and dumb).
Who would set up a regional buy order for ice in Period Basis or Detroid? Only an altruist as it's not profitable. Due to small size everything needs to be micro-managed. If you want to buy something you need to find the person who sells it, without that there is little chance that anyone even checks for buy orders. The smaller you are the more work you need to do for tasks like getting ships, ammo, fuel.
TEST deployment stations are always seeded. While it's done by a specialist group, it's not an altruistic action that you must organize and make effort to. They get profit for importing. K6, the "civilian" home of TEST is free-for-all market where you can buy practically everything you need (fancy stuff might be missing, but you can always find something as replacement). Who organizes K6 imports? Nobody! Profit-oriented haulers fill it using capital of profit-oriented traders. They need no boss, no schedule, no groups, they do it on their own for their own good, simply because there are enough buyers.
With size comes profit, with profit comes a "volunteer" who does the job properly and without organization. Without profit you need to find altruists, organize them, lead them, motivate them. The smaller your corp is, the higher the management/player cost is. If you are a leader already on the edge, believing that you can't do more work, just merge with another corp and see how the workload shrinks.
Sugar wrote a great introduction to ship construction for newbies.
Wednesday did not pass without more retarded freighter kills: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Please don't be idiots and don't put more than 1.5B into a freighter.
Also, driving , purple smartbombing tankless battleships to lowsec is bad.
In the meantime in Esoteria, the Navy Apocalypse fleet was out again to destroy cyno jammers to let capitals grind down the region:
While the locals never show up in ships, they set the timers to alarm clock range, have cyno jammers and even POS gunners. POS gunners have the ability to choose weak tanked ships, like an instacane, which caused my next "first time in EVE" moments: gun overheat. Instacane saved at 20% hull, CCP should really put in hull repper drones. Tip: have nanite paste to repair the overheated items:
After about 2 hours, we headed home with trivial losses and several systems reinforced. Esoteria will fall!
Now can you imagine the administrative load on this corp?! How many hours are spent planning and leading fleets, organizing the logistics to get the ships and modules where they need to be? If we consider 3-4 leaders for a 100-men corp and 50K active members for STI, we must have 1500-2000 altruists doing nothing but the hard work of herding cats.
STI is an NPC corp and has exactly zero managers. The "NPC alliance" living in highsec has exactly zero management either. Yet ships are right where they need to be, mining and ratting fleets go out without delay, station slots are full, everything runs like a well-oiled machine. What is the secret of STI?
Simply the size. The huge amount of people create enough demand for your work. If you are a miner, you don't need some mining co-ceo who organizes you a fleet, makes sure that a Mackinaw is imported or produced and then takes your ore and pays you some form. No, you buy a ship in the nearest hub, go out to the rocks and sell the ore to buy orders in the same hub or even to regional orders (if you are lazy and dumb).
Who would set up a regional buy order for ice in Period Basis or Detroid? Only an altruist as it's not profitable. Due to small size everything needs to be micro-managed. If you want to buy something you need to find the person who sells it, without that there is little chance that anyone even checks for buy orders. The smaller you are the more work you need to do for tasks like getting ships, ammo, fuel.
TEST deployment stations are always seeded. While it's done by a specialist group, it's not an altruistic action that you must organize and make effort to. They get profit for importing. K6, the "civilian" home of TEST is free-for-all market where you can buy practically everything you need (fancy stuff might be missing, but you can always find something as replacement). Who organizes K6 imports? Nobody! Profit-oriented haulers fill it using capital of profit-oriented traders. They need no boss, no schedule, no groups, they do it on their own for their own good, simply because there are enough buyers.
With size comes profit, with profit comes a "volunteer" who does the job properly and without organization. Without profit you need to find altruists, organize them, lead them, motivate them. The smaller your corp is, the higher the management/player cost is. If you are a leader already on the edge, believing that you can't do more work, just merge with another corp and see how the workload shrinks.
Sugar wrote a great introduction to ship construction for newbies.
Wednesday did not pass without more retarded freighter kills: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Please don't be idiots and don't put more than 1.5B into a freighter.
Also, driving , purple smartbombing tankless battleships to lowsec is bad.
In the meantime in Esoteria, the Navy Apocalypse fleet was out again to destroy cyno jammers to let capitals grind down the region:
While the locals never show up in ships, they set the timers to alarm clock range, have cyno jammers and even POS gunners. POS gunners have the ability to choose weak tanked ships, like an instacane, which caused my next "first time in EVE" moments: gun overheat. Instacane saved at 20% hull, CCP should really put in hull repper drones. Tip: have nanite paste to repair the overheated items:
After about 2 hours, we headed home with trivial losses and several systems reinforced. Esoteria will fall!
