I'm going to be a little serious for a few minutes, I'll try to keep serious things to this thread.

All of this is just my perspective, it's not 100% guaranteed to be true, just my interpretation. It's also not a complete account, just stuff I want to say.

I should also throw this out there at the beginning - Leading TEST was one of the most difficult things I have ever done, emotionally and psychologically (if there is such a thing), and I think I will forever be a better person for the experience.

I originally never wanted to lead TEST. though I was offered the job on more than 3 occasions over the past few years. I was happy with relatively simple responsibilities, and I enjoy being in Dreddit above all else that I do in EVE. I've got a lot of friends in Dreddit, and I liked where we were heading back then.

Montolio decided to give up on his plans for EVE and shed his responsibilities as the longest-standing CEO TEST has ever had. This left Ingen and Fras in a strange position - scrambling to handle a job that neither of them wanted to put in the time to handle. When both of them agreed at the same time to leave, Fras threw me the Upvote corp shares - the keys to the alliance, if I so chose - and a vote of confidence in my dream to cut TEST in half at least, and find something exciting without stuffing our Mumble full of pubskis. Well, unfortunately, I didn't want to do it. I just shut up for a few days and waited for someone else to step up. Within a few days, I pretty much decided that no one else was quite right for the job. The two frontrunners for the job were Viktor and Beffah - who I felt were too unknown/aggressive and inconsistent (respectively). I'm sure either of them might have done a good enough job, but at the last minute I used my in-EVE access to wrest control of Upvote and declare myself SUPREME KOREA of all of TEST.

I didn't do it because I wanted to, I did it because I thought it was the best course of action we could take at the time.

I knew from the start that we were relatively weak, especially after meeting with HBC leadership. I'm not going to go into detail, but basically Sort was given control of the HBC because previous leadership expected him to be a mongoloid and blow it all up. Heh.

As planned, Sort came on really strong, talking about how if necessary he would do shit like take TEST's corporations for his own, and have me replaced because he doesn't know enough about me and shit, but whatever. After an hour long meeting where Sort Dragon screamed at another alliance leader to convince him to help attack Nulli Secunda, I ultimately made the decision to break it off. TEST was the largest remaining (after PL) alliance in the HBC, and our departure guaranteed the coalition's quick death. Which rocked and was hilarious. But this served only to alienate all of TEST's existing allies - which brings me back to the 'being weak' part.

Montolio's attitude towards the end of his reign was very anti-goon, and rightly so in my opinion (for the record, being in the CFC completely turned me off of working with Goon leadership at all, and I don't know why they expected otherwise). When The Mittromney first got in touch with me, it may have been an effect of my poop tinted glasses, but the main thing I got from our skype chat was that the Goons would want submission or our destruction. In fact, I immediately told the entirety of shortbus about our chat and what I got out of it. Raiden and Tribe were our only remaining HBC blues - Tribe because we helped make them, and Raiden. because they lived in Querious and didn't hate us - and the CFC immediately wanted us to turn our backs on Raiden. This is sort of a catch-22, we could either help Raiden and war with goons, or we could side with the CFC and ruin any credibility we had as a diplomatic entity. Either way, I felt the intent was to shoot TEST as much as Raiden, and I offered the 100% unacceptable option of resetting Raiden if the CFC would blue up with us which was of course refused. I also refused to give or sell them back a station to base out of.

Nonetheless, if you look at shortbus chatlogs from around that time, you'll see a record of me saying something like "the goons are deploying to NPC Delve and we won't be interfering with each others strat ops... but I expect them to manufacture some TEST rulebreaking and shoot us." Which happened, especially once we started fighting with NCdot for 1-SMEB and the CFC disregarded any loose agreements to shoot our structures (and then SBU NOL) in a blatant disregard for any previously established diplomacy. It was at this time that Endie, a goon diplomat with TEST forum access, tried to play Alliance Discussion like the O'Endie Factor (something he later somewhat admitted to, which could be true or could be just a shot at taking credit after-the-fact). In retaliation, and because I really really didn't like goons at all, I basically used DHD to publicize every detail about my discussion with The Martini - something that seemed to infuriate him. I asked our diplomatic corps to only lie when discussing things with goon diplomats, and eventually ordered them to stop responding altogether. Yet the goons claimed wild falsehoods, like that this was just Vik Villiance trying to make a power play, or blaming Vik for breaking us apart or starting the Fountain war. Some of TEST even bought that one, but in reality Vik and The Mittoni were doing exactly as I wanted.

After all, I promised our space would be the most exciting in all of EVE, and I promised that I would lead TEST into the ground.

The Fountain war was a mess. Initially with Black Legion/N3 on our side, the CFC were almost afraid to use caps at all, I think DBRB even lost two nyx to TEST tackle and NCdot support. Something like that. I was target calling for that fight for a bit. Then there was the 3 or 4 fleets where we managed to take down fistfulls of goon Dreads/Carriers, including that one joint op with the unexpected downtime... anyway.

In typical TEST fashion, we were carried through the war for the first few weeks. BL decided that winning easily wasn't fun enough, and took a goon contract to stop choosing a side against them, putting a little additional stress on our alliance. At the request of our allies, we shifted our efforts to shitty terrible AU/downtime timezone. We could have fought at Downtime and relied entirely on the strength of our allies and come out about even, or we could have fought in US/EU largely on our own and lose - not to shift blame, but the fabled 1000 n3 pilots didn't materialize as advertised.

Then the N3 had to make a quick trip home to fight off some Ruskis... and never really return. Essentially, TEST was not strong enough internally to handle a war of this scale on our own. We made many mistakes, we had many people playing off-timezone, and we had a few critical weakpoints in our organization. Again, while they are in no way at fault, around this time we had a Mildir with too many things going on IRL to devote her entire life to a video game. I want to address this specifically, because I thought I had handled it appropriately, but ended up offending her and driving her away instead of supplying her with the much-needed support she was unable to wrangle up on her own.

Regarless, TEST was done with the war and unable to come back. Even joking about how PL would save us in August weren't enough to get enough people to log in and actually try and stop the loss. It had been a few months by this point, and we were all tired of warring - though our last hurrah in 6VDT was an absolutely immense display of number-strength for us, and a truly awe-inspiring event. It's cheesy, but I'm really proud to have fought with everyone there, and I can't imagine a better last hurrah.

After Fountain, we pulled back south for preparation/quick jew breaks/evacuation purposes. We fled to Somalia once credible rumors of CFC-aligned attackers started popping up, to try and save whatever we could. In the end, we lost more to traitors than we managed to move, but most people expected us to die in Aridia. I'll admit that constant betrayal, daily ultimatums from corp leaderships, and utter lack of motivation across the board sapped out any energy I had left for TEST. I still worked way too much to try and set up a solid leadership core, but even today we're seeing very critical and very dedicated people leaving for other alliances with their corps. Curse may be a hotbed for PVP in EVE - in fact, everyone who is worth a shit is down in G-0, but it's somewhat pointless and has no tangible goal. That's not how you inspire thousands of pilots to play, but ultimately I stepped down because I'm exhausted with leading, with politics, with diplomacy, and with relying on people I cannot trust to stay and cannot trust to do the right thing.

Gomoso and our military directorate have put in an amazing amount of work over the past few weeks in my absence, without them we would definitely have disbanded more than two weeks ago. Together we've looked into who may want us to align with them, or where else we may want to go next - but before I stepped down, we hadn't made any decisions.

So I did something that I don't think I've ever done in EVE. I did something that I stopped doing in my personal life many years ago.

I quit.

I quit the TEST CEO position, something I wanted to do for a week or two before SkierX magically volunteered/demanded that I give control over to him last night.

I quit leading an alliance that has taken up 100% of my free (and not free) time since June.

I quit trying to reinspire myself to play EVE again.

I hate quitting, and I hate giving up. I hate feeling like I gave anything less than absolutely everything to the rare efforts I have a true passion for.

I didn't do it because I wanted to, I did it because I thought it was the best course of action we could take at the time.

I've come back to a job that I really did enjoy doing, a job with far fewer responsibilities and significantly more "hanging out with people for fun" than being an alliance executor.

Tonight was the first night of my return to Dreddit CEO. Immediately I enlisted Slug Hard, Courtjester and Herp McDerpinstan to help clean out over 1000 inactive Dredditors (anyone who hasn't played since May 1st, so anyone who didn't participate in the war - minus some celebrities who deserve the respect of keeping their join date). Not only did we lop off 25% of the corporation and much of our dead weight, but we made a spectacle of it. We streamed the kicking on tinychat with 8 other Dredditors' webcams, we talked to the Dreddit public n a mumble channel - more than 100 strong! for no reason! - and we just hung out as a community again. DertyDan even decided that we should, though I hate the term, troll the shit out of EVE and tell everyone that I was drunk with power and disbanding everything. I think most of us actually had fun again.

Not too bad for my first night.

I've always truly loved the community we have here in Dreddit, and coming back to the corporation really has started to reinspire my affair with EVE and EVE leadership. I'm even a little excited to see what TEST decides to do, and to see how we can best make it happen together.

Dreddit, I want to bring back our old school, pre-war attitudes like we did tonight. I want to make EVE and Dreddit fun again for as many of us as possible. I want to recruit and train pilots and start from the ground up if we have to.

Dreddit, I want us to become a corporation that people choose to be a part of, not a stepping stone between Internet and Spaceships for hundreds of pilots.

It's time to finally start the next leg of our adventure through EVE, with a largely cleaned-out alliance rebuilding around us as we rebuild ourselves in kind.

Let's see what this game still has to offer.