BRAVE SOTA 7 28 2015

Soundcloud Recording

Transcript

Greeting Brave!

A lot has happened in the last 3 weeks. We (mostly) evacuated from Fountain and began regrouping and rebuilding in our new home in Aunsou. Thousands of courier contracts, 100s of millions of m3, and trillions in collaterals was moved in the last 2 weeks. The moving process was a bit slower than I had hoped, but it seems we are starting to finally get settled.

Now that we have cast off the shackles of sov – although it seems like everyone else is really enjoying the new mechanics – we have a lot more ability to create our own content and enjoyment. As an alliance we plan to support this and we already have diplos and mildirs working on setting up some fun content we can participate in. Creating groups to pursue other activities within brave has never been a new things,. Dropbears and Bovril’s origins are in exactly that, a group forming for a specific activity. We also have groups like blops oclock and stahp bears that have regular activities they run. What we lacked was a consistent and straightforward way to support these groups and make them first class Content Centers for Brave. With Kiu’s amazing work in getting us actual forums, we now have a strong set of services that these groups need, and we can enable them to provide content with official alliance tools. So with that said, I am proud to officially open the doors to all line members forming sigs. The exact process is laid out in the forum post I just made, and I’m sure there will be many many questions about them during the Q&A. TL;DR is I plan to try and give folks quite a bit of freedom initially, to help get ideas off the ground and field test ideas to see what resonates. Normal alliance rules will obviously carry, and we expect any groups to actively work with relevant alliance and department leadership (diplos, mildirs, industry, recon, etc.) proactively. The goal is to start getting initial batches set up by this weekend.

With the advent of forums, we are starting a long process of improving our ability as leaders to communicate with the alliance, as well as improving our ability to communicate with each other. The “totally not a council” forum has been quite active, and seems like a very successful replacement to the council subreddit we previously used. Just having the forums seems to have kicked off quite a lot of good discussions (as well as several too many MLP posts), and I will be working with all the departments to improve on the amount and quality of their communication with the alliance.

I’ve been hearing a lot of calls for better definition of our longer term goals. Brave has never been big on long term planning, and I am not personally ready to set goals going more than a few months forward, mainly due to the volatile times we are in, and my newness to the job. However, I will work towards laying groundwork that benefits us no matter where we end up in the next 6 months plus. So here’s my plan for what I will work towards in the next 3 months, and some of the longer term things I want to set us up for.

1. 1. Provide adequate support to getting SIGs off the ground, and focus on getting all players involved and participating in them. Provide whatever tools we can to make sure these are as successful as possible.

 

1. 2. Review, and as necessary, rebuild our department leadership structure as well as make improvements our methods of communication. We need active and competent leaders and managers for all departments, and there are plenty opportunities to get new people involved. I will be starting the process of auditing each department and working with the department leaders to improve things this week, and hope to have worked with everyone within 2 weeks.

 

1. 3. Militarily, we need to adapt and improve our ability to take and defend strategic assets. Expect a big push towards increasing POCO ownership in our immediate area. I’ve been giving the milldirs and FCs quite a bit of freedom to play around with doctrines, and be creative now that we are low sec. I want to improve our ability to support these pursuits (faster market stocking, skill tracking tools to see who can fly what, etc.), I think we need to be careful to avoid pulling newbros in too many directions, and have some well designed core ships and skills we can recommend every work towards.

 

1. 4. I want to see a massive improvement in our ability to train and encourage new players to join us and stick with us. We have been unfairly criticized for actively driving new players away from eve, and I think its time we prove to them exactly how great a thing brave newbies and brave collective has been to this game. This means increasing our recruiting efforts, and improving the process to be as straightforward as possible for new player. It also means we need to increase the quantity of quality classes and wiki guides that we make available to everyone. Finally, we need to improve the variety of options for newbros to participate and involve themselves with all alliance activities.

 

I truly believe that if we can succeed at these goals, we will be in a much better place as an alliance, and we will be ready to go down any path. If we eventually choose to again be active in sov, or we choose to stay in low, or if we become a roaming mercenary alliance farming new player corps trying to take sov, any new goals are helped with these shorter term improvements. Strong, well communicating leadership is always critical. We always need to maintain our newbro friendly culture. We need to be used to being both the small fish and the big fish in fights sometimes. We can rebuild ourselves however we want, but we will only guarantee success if we are able to create a strong foundation. To me, that foundation should be built by a combination of our culture and attitude towards the game, active leadership, and our loyalty to making our own story, our own content.