For the last few weeks, we have been at war in EVE.

 

As a general rule, we don't go looking for fights.  We're a bunch of miners, traders, and industrialists - fighting a war is bad for our business.  We'd much rather profit from other people's wars by selling them stuff to fight with.  But, when we are attacked, we have to respond.

 
Our enemies seem to have thought that they were going to get an easy fight.  They thought wrong.  Not only did we spend the entire week turning the tables on them to the point where they had no meaningful kills and spent most of their time hiding from us, we took down not one, but TWO towers that they tried to anchor in our territory.

 

As EVE wars go, it wasn't a huge epic battle, but for us it was a great experience, even if we never wanted it to begin with.  Our alliance came together in an awesome way, we kicked ass, and we sent the jerks who tried to invade our space packing.

 

Don't mess with us.  Here's a glimpse of why.

 

Just when you thought EVE couldn't get any prettier.





I really don't know what else to say.  This expansion made EVE about twice as awesome-looking, and it was already pretty stunning.  Plus, other nice things like making my railguns better and adding some new ships... 

  

It has been too long since I did a news post, and so this is me trying to break that bad habit (of not posting).  Especially since the last thing I posted was sort of bad news about how we were scaling back to just one game.

Well, we did that.  We're now solely an EVE Online corporation.  We've got members playing Rift, and LOTR, and all sorts of other games (including TOR coming up), but moving forward we're going to stay focused on EVE as a guild.

So, while we were shutting down our operations in the other games, in EVE we have been quietly growing.  Here's some highlights.

• We've been recruiting more members with a focus on quality.  We've gone from having 6-8 active pilots in the corp to having around 20 as of this morning.  We're still recruiting, by the way, so if you're looking at this and deciding whether to join, please feel free to contact us with any questions.
• We run planned fleet operations once or twice a week, with big mining operations on weekends and smaller operations during the week.
• We've mastered the art of invention and are producing and selling Tech 2 small ammunition on the market.  This is in addition to the Tech 1 ammunition that we were already doing.
• We've got plans in the works to take a fleet into a wormhole for a mining op very soon, and show some of our new folks just how big those rocks can get.

It doesn't stop there, of course.  We have plans to do much more - on the research and manufacturing end, we'll be slowly working our way towards manufacturing all Tech 2 items including ships and modules (and of course, ammo).  We also plan to gradually extend the scope of our fleet operations and in general make EVE as much fun as we can.

Our goal is the same as it has been.  Use our corporation to make EVE as much fun as possible for our members.  There are some things we can't/wan't do - we're not going to go stake a claim in 0.0 and do alliance warfare anytime soon, and we're not going to turn pirate or start on factional warfare.  But this is our game, and EVE is our universe.  We intend to make our mark on it. 

When Shadowfire was first formed, it was a single-game guild.  We had no plans or ambitions outside of Vanguard: Saga of Heroes.  We developed a strong community and over time, as more and more people left that game, we decided to try and become a multi-game organization.  Our goal in doing this was to keep our community together, and to make sure that no matter which game our members wound up in, they had good people to play with.  It was an ambitious goal.

We've been at it a few years now and unfortunately it just hasn't worked as well as we hoped.  You can have the best of intentions and great goals, but without people willing to step forward and really put forth effort towards those goals, they simply won't come to fruition.  The truth about our multi-game focus is that only a few of us were able to devote the time and energy needed to make it work, and it just wasn't enough.

As the demands of real life have pulled more and more of our best and brightest away, and forced the rest of us to cut back, the responsibility of managing multiple games ended up on the shoulders of myself and two or three others.  And it finally has reached the point where we simply didn't have any more to give.  These games are supposed to be about having fun and relaxing with friends.  When the game stress you more than your day job, something has to change.

So, we're changing.  We're going back to being a one-game guild again.

Our Rift chapter was closed this past weekend.  While Rift is and was a great game, we had problems with retention there - people simply didn't play it for long.  In the end, this led us to conclude that the best thing to do was fold the guild entirely.

Our LOTRO chapter will be merging with its ally.  LOTRO has longevity, unlike Rift - it's not uncommon to meet people who have been playing for 2-3 years and who don't feel "done".  LOTRO also has a great role-playing environment.  Our efforts in LOTRO were hurt primarily by a lack of good officers, and having those of us that were there focused on multiple games compounded the problem.  Rather than go through a year-long ritual of recruiting and hoping to grow some more officers, we concluded that we could better meet the needs of our members by merging with our friends and allies, Remnant.  This will insure that our former members have a healthy, viable guild for the new expansion - one with strong officers, and enough people to insure that groups and raids can happen when desired.  It will also allow most of our former officers to take a sorely-needed break, and just play.

When this is done, our EVE chapter will be the only Shadowfire remaining, and moving forward, Shadowfire will be solely an EVE Online corporation.  The reason for choosing EVE over the others is that unlike the other games, our EVE corporation has been growing steadily since the release of the Incarna expansion.  While there are certainly challenges we will face there, the most notable being that we will need to add more officers soon, the EVE chapter had in a few short months become the healthiest and most positive chapter that we had.

You will be seeing changes in this website over the next month as we finish making the transition to a one-game focus.  We will still maintain discussion areas for our members to talk about and make plans for any game that they wish - but there will no longer be any pretense that there will be a Shadowfire guild in any of those games.

I am sure that this news may disappoint some people for one reason or another.  Believe me, it's something that I personally wrestled with for a long time before finally making the decision.  But in the end, this seems like the best way to insure that the most people can continue to enjoy the games they're playing and be part of a good guild while doing it.

There are a lot of people out there who look at guilds as tools - ways to enable raiding or grouping.  And this is somewhat true - guilds *are* tools designed to make the game easier for their members.  However, there's far more to a good guild than that.  A good guild is a community, a place where you feel comfortable being yourself and talking.  A place where you meet new friends that transcend the game you're playing.  A good guild enhances the entire experience of the game, and gives you the memories that you talk about for years afterward.

Whether it's one game or many, that remains our goal.

Fathalon, Talvaran and I spelunked the caverns beneath the Forsaken Inn last night. It's a very fun instance, and I highly recommend it. There are loads of booby-traps, bones and bounty!

Our resident hobbit hero, Brint recently had quite an adventure.  Here's a sneak peek at his tale!

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Alcohol may have been involved. I'll just say that up front, so we don't have any misunderstandings. It almost goes without saying that a gathering with my kin involves the free flow of all breed of fermented beverage, but that night was - how do I say this diplomatically?

Special. That night was somehow special.

It started with a letter. Jolliam needed help of an unspecified nature. How he found me all the way out on the shores of Evendim I'll never know, but it's surely a testament to the improved state of the Shire's Quick Post service. I also briefly considered that he had the Palantír I was looking for. It would've been convenient.

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Click here to read the rest of the story!

So, you may have heard about this new game that comes out in a week or so.

 

You might even be playing in the open beta right now.

Amongst our members, we have quite a few folks interested in Rift.  And while we're still working out the details, it's a safe bet that there will be a Shadowfire presence on one or more servers in Rift.

If you're a member and you're interested in helping us get started there, now's the time.  Hit the forums to get involved.  If you're not a member yet, but you've been thinking about playing Rift and are looking for a good community, feel free to visit the forums as well and say hello.

Rift isn't the only new game we're probably expanding into, but it's the closest.  Perhaps we'll see you there!

 

(Yes, I'll update our website banner at some point too, I promise.)

It's been a long time coming (nearly a year and a half!) but we have finally done it.

Tonight, we anchored our first tower.  Behold, the first step in the next phase of our plan for galacic domination!

 

This tower will host a research facility where we will be doing....well, that's classified.  Suffice to say the R&D effort will allow us to produce much more powerful (and valuable) things than we have been doing, and hopefully make all of us very very rich.  You see, we don't really want to rule the galaxy, so much as we just want to own it.

That ship you see in the foreground is Eva's Legion, which is a strategic cruiser - a Tech 3 ship.  Here's a close up:

 

These things are amazing because of the built in versatility.  Unlike other ships, strategic cruisers can be refit for different roles on the fly.

Anyway, this weekend we'll be quite busy in EVE getting our research labs up and running.  I imagine there will be more news in the coming weeks, however!