When the going gets mean, we burn away

That title really makes sense to me, I promise.

So it's finalized and Black Sail is now a proud member of the Burn Away alliance.  I learned about this alliance from following Rixx's blog over at Evoganda. I respected the way they wouldn't put up with the elitist attitude of one alliance or the blue killing of another.  I also like their style.  They seem like a very fun group of guys that just want to enjoy the game and low sec piracy.  Since I was looking to leave Mean at the same time they were looking for member corps, it seemed like a perfect fit.  I look forward to flying with them.

Now the question has been asked of why I pulled out of Mean Coalition.  I hate to air dirty laundry but I haven't been able to PVP much lately and I think we were treated poorly so I guess I need to blog about something eh?

I was never really happy with Mean.  They always seemed fairly unorganized.  The intel channel was a mess of blues from different alliances.  Some were blue to individual corps, some were just friends of directors, so on and so on.  So I never really felt comfortable with it.  It was also like herding cats to get people to use comms.  I can think of multiple engagements where nobody was on comms and people were typing back and forth in several different channels.  It was also hard to get someone to take charge during spur of the moment engagements.  I remember one time when the FC simply announced that he didn't want to FC anymore and was just going to follow instructions IN THE MIDDLE OF AN ENGAGEMENT.  It was just a mess and we got our asses handed to us several times.  I tried to bring it up a few times but was met with indifference.

Another issue was the blue list.  Because you had individual blues and not whole corps, you sometimes ran into these blues roaming in our area with corpmates who weren't blue.  Fights would happen and then you would have the inevitable blue on blue killmails.  It was a real problem.

Spies was another issue.  Mean seems to be blood enemies of Electus Matari and there were always concerns about EM spies in the corp or the intel channel.  I know I heard of several emails from "anonymous" sources that there were spies in my corp.  I think that this was just a tactic by EM to sow discontent within the alliance and I think it worked.

So these were some reasons I was not really happy with Mean.  Now don't think that Mean didn't have its good side as well.  When they pulled it together and got organized, they could do some amazing things.  I can remember several engagements when people actually got on Vent and there was good FC.  Mean absolutely shined during those times and mopped the floor up with their opponents.

I figured Mean has real potential and there are some good people in it that I enjoyed flying with.  For that reason I planned that we would stick it out and try to make things better.  The thing that really set it off was when one of my corp members tried to get a regular roam started during non-peak hours.  This member wanted to try his hand at FCing small gangs and invited people to fly T1 cruisers and frigs during these roams.  He even offered to provide ships to people that wanted to participate.  In the spirit of cooperation, an email was sent to the alliance inviting anyone to attend.

What followed was ridiculous.  The alliance head sent out an email to everyone saying that the roams were not sponsored by the alliance and discouraged anyone from attending.  He then proceeded to insult the member by saying his kb sucked, he was probably a spy, he was a possible corp thief and should join Eve Uni if he wanted to learn PvP.  It was also implied that we were trying to train our members by using the alliance as "meat shields".  We were then told that we needed to investigate our members better and use better judgement.  It was total loony toons.  This guy only wanted T1 ships and offered to supply them!  Hardly the stuff of epic spies.

I was royally pissed that this type of email would be sent across alliance mail instead of being addressed between CEOs or diplomats.  Several email exchanges between myself and the alliance head were very unsatisfactory so I decided that I did not want to be part of an alliance that was so disrespectful to its members.  Since Burn Away had recently had a similar experience with RK, I thought it would be perfect.

I tried to keep the move quiet but word got out quickly and the director of Mean freaked out again.  Another alliance email was sent out berating us for being sneaky or something.  Then we were kicked from the corp and set as nuets.   I was able to talk to him and get us set blue for a week but then one of my members was still on their vent.  He passed on that they were planning on ganking us despite our blue status.  Pretty classy.

Well luckily we based a couple of jumps from the main alliance members so we were able to avoid them and most of us have moved our stuff out.  We lost a couple of members that didn't want to move across the galaxy but that is to be expected.  In a couple of days everything will be settled in and we will start actively recruiting to get back up to full strength.  I'm glad to be out of Mean and it feels like a weight is off our backs. Now we can get back to the basics of low sec pvp.