Elsebeth Rhiannon
Gradient Electus Matari
296
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Posted - 2013.01.17 21:23:00 -
[1] - Quote
This is becoming a FAQ, so here goes.
Gradient corporation has for eight years in the game ferried slaves from the Empire to the Republic as part of our RP. That is, not just said we do, but actually moved the ingame items. We are at at least tens of millions moved by now (possibly hundreds of millions, but as we have lost records twice during the time, I am not sure). One thing making this stuff pesky is that transporting slaves happens to be illegal in the Republic, meaning we've done a lot of smuggling against our own customs. No worries, we've gotten hell of a lot of quality roleplay and almost as much pewpew type fun of running gatecamps in the Amamake area out of it.
When CCP announced the factional contact representatives some time back (see thread on this forum), some of our members involved in that contacted them (in-character) and asked whether anything could be done about this customs thing. After some mails flew around, they offered us a one-time freighter convoy for as many slaves as we could scramble together to a pick-up point. We at that point had about 500,000 slaves waiting to be transported to the Republic at one location and managed to little over double the number in the timeframe.
They told us the time of this and the basic rules, we provided the escort and decided who heard of it. As the first rule of safe convoys is the less people know about it the better, and as the first rule of live events is that if you advertise it EVERYONE AND THEIR COUSIN will come and it will turn into a frigging free-for-all shoot-out, we decided to keep the information very need-to-know. Most people in Gradient and some in the alliance probably knew that something out of ordinary was up with that pre-announced Tuesday operation. Our FC also contacted a handful of allied FCs (both RPers and not) so that if it did turn into a shootout, we'd have an escalation possibility. However, the idea was not that they gather a fleet to GO TO AN OMGLIVE-EVENT - but that if we get opposition, they could possibly turn a fleet doing something else to our aid.
In short: - we provided the live events team something they could help with, not the other way round - that something was not made up for the purpose of coaxing CCP involvement, but was something we had in place before we even thought of contacting them, and would have done without the help too (at a slower schedule) - we ran the convoy the exact same manner we would have if the pilots of the freighters would have been other players, instead of event staff.
The first rule of EVE RP (and PvP and politics): never count on CCP. They might do something fun for you, but most of the time they won't, so you have to be able to make your own events. ;) |