Struggling for survival...

As I mentioned, I left EVE after a while of living in null-sec.  When I returned, I found my corporation basically a ghost town.  No one was logging on and it was just me.  Since I play EVE for primarily for social interaction, I had to think about what I should do next in the game.  I decided to pour my efforts into getting involved in Eve University, initially as a guest lecturer and eventually as a faculty member.  I was starting down that path when one of my corp mates showed up in chat.

He and I discussed the sorry state of the corp and what we would like to do.  We discussed leaving, but also talked about sticking around and trying to reinvigorate the corp.  After a bit of back and forth, we felt that abandoning the corporation that we had spent so much time in was not appropriate, so we decided that we would try to resurrect the corp from the ashes.  Apparently, Phoenix wasn't a part of our corp's name for nothing!

We contacted some of the directors by text to get ourselves promoted to director so we could recruit, set tax rates, close offices, etc.  With our new authority, we lowered the tax rate (from 99%), consolidated our operations in a few stations and started a hard recruiting effort.  Much of our recruiting was done in local, chatting with unaffiliated pilots who happened to be in the area.  We also got some interest from our recruitment ad and spamming recruitment chat.  Not having to explain the 99% tax rate made recruiting MUCH easier I can tell you!

We slowly built up the corp until we regularly had 5-8 people on at once.  Not great, but better than the 1 or 2 it had been.  We also got the web site back in working order as well as the forums.  Things were getting better, but were still not good.  And the biggest thing was that while we were being successful at reviving the corp, we still had no idea what we were reviving it for. 

My purpose in the game was simply not to let the corporation die and nothing else.  Once we had used the defibrillator and brought PPL back from the dead, I started to ask myself why I'd gone to all the trouble.  Yes, we had some people logging on at the same time, we had posts going up in the forums, we had a bit of chat in corp, but we were all working independently and really had no shared goals other than making some personal ISK.  It was great that we were able to at least avoid PPL's death, but PPL's life after being saved wasn't that great.

At this point I grew disillusioned again (as so often happens to me in this game) and took yet another break from EVE, although not a very long one.  And what happened next is a story for another blog post.