Brave Newbies, the new player friendly organization that prides itself in allowing people who’ve just begun playing EVE to experience Nullsec life, has been facing something of an internal crisis as of late. Miscommunication and poor decision making has, over the past few months, led to a wide variety of internal dramas and coups. However, just when it appeared that the situation was somewhat under control a new drama emerged and with it, all of the small problems which had been eating away at Brave’s leadership structure appear to have reached a breaking point, risking to tear the Alliance apart.
The first domino to be knocked over in this recent series of dramatic events, occuring after the reinstatement of Lychton Kondur as leader of the Brave Collective was this State of the Alliance which was posted to the Brave Newbies subreddit. In it a few issues were discussed including a statement that official forums for Alliance members were being worked on and a reaffirmation of their insistence on not tracking participation or purging inactive members. While these issues sparked some minor controversy the true problems began to arise when Lychton announced that they would be performing an alliance wide deployment to Duality (One of CCP’s test servers) in order to participate in a competition in relation to the testing of the new entosis sov mechanics due this July. Lychton stated that he wished to take part in this competition as the winning Alliance would have their ticker included in the name of the Entosis Link module and he felt that this was a way to “secure their legacy”
Brave at the time was struggling with the nearby forces of Black Legion taking their sov in Fountain which had been gifted to Brave by The Imperium as both a gesture of goodwill and an attempt to tighten up their borders in preparation for an occupancy based sov system. As you can imagine the thought of going to a different server to play with fake sov while their actual sov was being taken frustrated and confused many members, the tensions which this created became more apparent after it became clear that Brave was very unlikely to actually win, or come close to winning this competition. This collection of internal crises finally reached its boiling point when Lychton pinged for a Duality op over defending one of their r64 moons which had been reinforced by BL. The resulting animosity that was expressed towards Duality filled the front page of the Brave Newbies subreddit within hours, hanging their dirty laundry in plain view for everyone to see.
With Brave’s internal struggles now evident to all, Lychton, along with members of Brave’s CNM (Council of Newbie Management) held an impromptu meeting to discuss the drama and how to control it. However this meeting culminated in little more than this miniature SOTA, in which Lychton (sounding highly inebriated) delivered a sloppy morale speech, acting as though nothing was actually wrong. While many were quick to jump on him for being intoxicated, this recording which was leaked by a CNM member shortly afterwards has him completely sober and coherant, a mere 40 minutes before the SOTA was given. Whether his sudden onset of incoherency was the result of alcohol, allergies or just pure nerves we may never know.
The occurence of all of this Duality drama, and the loss of faith in leadership amongst the average line members, led to yet more fissures opening within the Alliance’s social structure with a significant decline in fleet participation. Notable figures such as KarmaFleet CEO and EX-Brave Spymaster Markonious Porkbutte even began weighing in on how to fix the organization, gaining significant support from line members in the process.
Tensions also appear to be high between Brave’s FC team and the more bureaucratic members of leadership. Recently NegativeLight Light, a Brave strategic FC, was promoted to the position of Military Director and then, in the space of a few hours, demoted once he announced a new doctrine without council approval. During these events a significant portion of the FC team held a secret meeting and released this list of demands, attempting to strong arm their leadership into giving FCs more power and forcing diplomats to work directly with FCs. All of these factors have left a significant number of rumors suggesting yet another coup. However, even if these rumors have weight there seems to be nobody capable or even willing to step up and lead a rebellion.
Brave currently appears to exist in a state of permanent turmoil and over the years many jabs have been made at them for their insistence on having a council structure in a game in which such systems have been deemed woefully ineffectual. However, it seems that now the naysayers claims may be bearing fruit, as line members constantly decry their “afk leadership” and every day brings little more than a new dose of drama to the table. In a world with organizations such as KarmaFleet and Pandemic Horde, who set out to achieve very similar goals to Brave one has to ask the question “What exactly does Brave bring to the table for new players when there’s more than one nullsec corp out there friendly to them?”
This article originally appeared on TheMittani.com, written by Worldshatter.
