My evemail box is brimming with messages when I log in, and for a few seconds I get excited; after talking it over with Gor and CB last night, I wrote up an official application to the wormhole alliance I’ve been talking with, and I was hoping that the the messages might be from them.
No such luck. Instead, my inbox is overstuffed with panicked, partially-spelled, partially-complete, partially-intelligible messages from the folks in our current alliance…
… who are mostly working out of nullsec space in the Catch region as ‘pets’ of the Against All Authorities alliance.
… which region has been under attack almost since the day our alliance moved in by “the Russians”, a collective and fairly accurate tag for the multiple alliances that hold most of the reaches of nullsec to the immediate east of Catch.
… which systems are currently falling like dominoes to said Russions while AAA flees… err, that is, “retreats” to the charmingly named “Stain” region, leaving their renters to fend for themselves.
“I am so glad we never moved out there with everyone else,” I say for what feels like the fifth or sixth time this week.
I’d feel worse about applying to another alliance if the situation were different, I suppose. If we were actually sharing in the dangers of the Catch region, if we had even met any of our alliance mates in any meaningful way, or if we had benefited in even the smallest way from membership in said alliance.
As it is, none of those things are true, so it feels a bit like breaking up with a penpal you never really corresponded with, just so you can take their name out of your address book.
“Nothing personal. No, seriously. Nothing.”
It’s exciting (at least to me) to potentially be joining up with a group that actually has similar interests to our own — their public channel has already been a wealth of information in less than a day of listening in — and it mostly balances out the potential downsides, like the possibility that we’ll have to leave our current home to move into one of the (20 or so) wormholes that will bring us into direct contact with the alliance during a trial period.
Still, there’s so much potential upside that even the prospect of disassembling our whole operation, moving it back to our home system, moving it again, then reassembling it all isn’t enough to sap my interest.
Though I certainly can’t speak for everyone; CB has misgivings about a major move, especially if it means another move after the ‘trial period’, but admits that there are some good things mixed in with the bad. We’ll just have to see if it’s even something we have to worry about, and that’s a concern for another night.
In the meantime there are Sleepers aplenty to shoot right where we are, so that is how we conclude the evening.