Posted 24 October 2015 - 09:40 PM

RvB 2.0 - has it really been 6 years? We've come a long way since then. Podding was allowed, then discouraged and finally outright banned. What started as a simple place to skip the bullshit, undock - shoot - repeat, became that plus a whole wide world of other things, but throughout it all we stuck true to that as best we could.

When I got shoved head first into the Blue CEO position for the first time in 2010 I was graduating college and RvB was hovering around 5-10 people active in the US TZ (Delvechio, myself, Mathias, Tim Pest, Morphe Orlorin (red CEO) and a few others I sadly cannot name). We weren't sure it was going to make it much further than that point. RvB 1.0 hadn't lasted too long either. I bailed out to go backpack through Australia (while training Battleship 5's and Advanced Weapon Upgrades 5 hehe) and for the first time RvB truly unified as Delvechio took the reins of both corps. For those of you who don't know/can't remember, RvB was VERY MUCH Red versus Blue back then. We would actively scheme to one up each other in fights, hide cruisers in other systems and bring them in late, kicked off an arms race on actually rigging ships (fucking merlins!) and in general just simply adversarial. Delvechio changed that and over the next few years, through highs and lows and a metric shit tone of work, grew RvB. The purple spirit came into being, events started being held, free ships, all sorts of fun an exciting things came to be. Hell, we got someone elected to the CSM, a few times, captured an entire POCO empire, added a LP store to reward FC’s who over time became more and more critical to the content of RvB. Along the way we shifted more and more of the content driving onto fewer and fewer people and sadly many of us burned out and burned out hard.

It is that last part I want to focus on, over the years we’ve had some amazing command members and FC’s who selflessly gave themselves to drive content for the general membership, too many to name, too few to sustain indefinitely. Now we are where we are today, caught between catering to an increasing number of newbros while at the same time trying to keep the bitter vet, who truly defined RvB’s culture, entertained. Sadly those two things, we now know are mutually exclusive in our current environment. Once the summer doldrums hit we dropped to an activity level I hadn’t seen since 2010 when I reluctantly woke up to have the title of CEO dropped on my lap the first time. Unfortunately, with Eve’s activity in general on the decline, combined with the straddling strategy of keeping the two camps happy, we just couldn’t recover in the early fall. Sadly many of you will never know how much work really goes into providing all the services and content that you so enjoy. I look back at the last two months and 80% of my game time has been spent doing admin work, and it is similar across the board for the core of command. That right there sums up RvB Command members throughout the years. Selflessly working behind the scenes to maximize the fun for the other 99% of the organization.

It is that tremendous mountain of work that would need to be scaled again that forces us to make the hard decision that every predecessor has toiled with over the years, shut it down or keep on plugging away. With so few people left in command and even fewer really working hard. It is with a heavy heart that I must say we have decided to shut formal RvB operations down, it wasn’t easy, believe me. So much time and love has been poured into it over the years but there are so few of us left willing and capable of carrying that burden, and because of that, we must bring it to an end. There will be people who are going to scream and yell, but I have to ask, where have you been the past six months?

Thank you to every single person who has ever undocked and shot someone without having to be told, those who took it a step further and FC’ed your brothers and sisters into the grinder, the even fewer who volunteered to deal with the backend leadership and logistics shit that is oohh so much fun. From the bottom of my heart, thank you so much for providing an absolutely amazing gaming experience over the last 6 years, it was a fucking blast, even the low times were pretty damn good and it was because of every last person who became part of our community. I also want to thank Del Delvechio, we would have never made it this far without him and he has poured god knows how much time, isk and $$$ into this grand experiment. Thank you to Delucian, Jiny and all the others dumb enough to step up and run this shit show over the years.

I’ll still be out there flying around and I’d fly with just about every last one of you again so if you see me toss a wave and ask for a fleet invite. Otherwise, turn those hardeners on because all things must die in a fire!!!

-Shen