Here you can find the speech part for our meeting. A voice recording is available in here:
State Of The Community Speech
Past year
In may 2020 we relocated our HQ to Ronne moving all of our active operations there. The main reason for moving at the time was CCP ruining moon mining which we were completely relying on. We decided to move to ronne which had plenty of asteroid belts nearby but very few moon mining options.
Ronne has served us well during the past year. It is a bit off the map and off the main travel routes making it nice and quiet. The high security level of the mining system Jarkkolen has allowed us to mine with very little ganking and interruptions for mining.
A lot has happened since we move to Ronne. There has been massive triglavian invasion events during which we lost gammel our only close by moon mining system to triglavians.
During 2021 we made the decision to open up our community more for also players not part of our corporations. This was and still is parts of our attempts to make content available for all players. We have successfully ran multiple public fleets and keep on running them in the future. We have formed some partnerships and are seeing more and more outside players join our public fleets. A big thank about this goes to our FC team.
Part of opening our content to the public we also renamed our MQP flets to GRIP fleets and seek to expand the idea of GRIP fleets also outside the fleet pvp GRIPS.
Once CCP made moons again worth to mine we also opened moon mining next to Ronne in 2021. However as the system is invaded by triglavians mining there requires fixing you standings as trigs roam the mining belts.
We also merged our entry corporations into a single corporation to make it easier to manage and make it easier for players to understand our structure. Our goal has been and still is in the future to get as many players as possible into entry corporation so that we can ensure that they are connected to other players when playing EVE. We then furthermore hope that these players will find a new home from either within our community or from some other corporation in EVE. As long as they keep on playing we have done our part.
During 2021 we have had some war deployments with SLTRN but over all nothing major has happened in the war front for the best part of the year. Ronne has lived up to its name to be a secure and quiet place.
Finances
As a community when we speak about finances we mainly speak about the money we have inside the SEADC wallet. As we are a non profit seeking organization we do not require any financial supports from our partner corporations this making their own finances their own business and we wont be covering those in here.
When it comes to our finances during 2021 we have managed to remain fairly stable on the money we have made back in 2016 when we lived in null sec space. Over all during the year we have maybe had a net loss of 10B isk or so.
Our main income has been and still will continue to be the buyback program. We seek to keep the taxes on the program to minimum so that it will only cover our urgent operational expenses such as fueling our stations and SRPing our fleets. Some income has been gained from SLTRN war operations but this is rather irrelevant.
We will continue to go into 2021 with the zero tax policy and keep all of our taxes to minimal and all of our systems such as the buyback program optional.
Current state of the community
The current state of our community can be described as stable. Ronne as an area has not forced us into any content we do not wish to join and we have managed to pump out a stable amount of roaming fleets and other events.
However stable status is not what we seek on the long run. Stable status means no improvement and no improvement over time means death.
While it is also thanks to Ronne that we have not had any hostile content thrown on us it also means that it has made us more passive to the surrounding. We have not needed to worry about ganking or wars for a very long time.
We have been monitoring the local player count around Ronne as well as the amounts of players joining our fleets during the year. While our fleet participation has remained or slightly improved during the year since we moved to Ronne the active players around our HQ has been declining. By this we have come to a conclusion that the remote location of Ronne is hurting our participation numbers in various activities. The increased amount of members in our fleets can be explained by us opening our fleets to public and running more fleets from popular stagings such as Jita.
Thanks to the efforts of our FC team and new players signing up for the FC training program we have managed to keep our fleet activity levels on a healthy level despite our remote HQ location. As interaction is key for any community survival we will keep on focusing on training new FCs and other players who wish to run educational content for our members.
While our goal remains to be a place that you can join, do your own things if you whish and take part in our events it is not healthy for our members to be too spread out in EVE. When comparing the numbers that we had in Audaerne before the Ronne move we have not come close to see 100+ players in mining fleets at the same time nor in the system.
The declining player numbers in our HQ locations clearly indicates that the remote location while safe its too safe for its own good.
Our current plans
The current state of our community has led us to look at our goals for 2022. One of the primary goals that we have been working with the CEOs is to increase the things we do together.
A week back we launched operation snowplow and dropped multiple wars on corporations holding structures in Oisio. This operation is part of our plan to increase our community activity in multiple different areas of the game.
Operation snowplow has currently the goal to clear out structures from the system of Oisio. The primary structures are the moon mining athanors that are occupying some of the moons in the system. The contract for SLTRN to deploy and take down these structures comes directly from me with an agreement of the other CEOs that we will need to shake things up.
As some of you may have figured out and put together our war operations in a 0.5 security system and CCP making moons again viable for mining our plan with operation snowplow is to take over the moons in Oisio and fill it up with moons with mining athanors the same way we had did in Audaerne.
Operation snowplow is the phase 1 of our attempts to increase activity in all areas.
Phase 2 of our operation will be to move our HQ location to Oisio. While moving is always annoying we have come to the conclusion that risk is isk and that more activity closer to Jita will only be beneficial for us in the long run.
This said we are not yet starting our move into the system as we do not have the needed infrastructure and stations in the system nor have we yet managed to finish phase 1 with operation snowplow and cleared out some moons for us. The success of our war operation in the system is vital for us to completely move into the system. You can however expect us to keep on pushing the structures in this system as long as is needed.
The primary goal with our move as mentioned is to get our activity up. This comes both up and downsides.
Moon mining is again viable so we will seek to launch as many moon miners as needed to support 24/7 moon mining operations. As always the more structures you have the more attention you will raise and the more wars and hostile aggressions you will have on you.
However increased amount of wars against us will again mean more activity. It will also be then more clear for miners that the mining in high sec should not be taked for granted and always comes with a price to pay. Most often this price is ganking and wars which we have both lacked in Ronne making mining too safe and boring.
The obvious second upside with going back to full moon mining operations is that it is much more money than belt mining. Again risk is more isk.
Oisio is also located much closer to Jita. This will greatly help with our public fleets as most players joining for those operate from Jita. Obviously living close to Jita comes with its own downsides such as gankers, bumpers and mission griefers but all of those are part of the game and will only feed your activity in the long run.
To summarize the previous we are seeking to take over enough moons in Oisio to support around the clock moon mining and then move into the system to make it easier for all players both part and not part of our community to attend our operations.
The move
There is no time schedule for the move and instead of thinking about the move we ask you to think about helping our efforts to take and maintain the system for ourselves. There are some deadly enemies and allies of those enemies that we will need to overcome before we can make the call to move in.
Once and if we manage to take a foothold in Oisio we will announce in good time when we will start to shut down our operations in Ronne and start to move them to Oisio. All structures and services will remain online in Ronne for multiple months after the call to move has been made.
So we highly recommend that you do not yet start to relocate your assets to Oisio as there are zero services and support for you there outside SLTRN war operations. Instead of thinking about moving we ask you to have a look at our war program and helping us in our efforts. You can obviously also start to downscaling your local assets and do a winter cleanup of the items you no longer need. Moving any massive assets into Ronne should also be tuned down for now.
We can emphasize enough how important it is for us to be able to take over enough moons in Oisio to move in as without the moons there is very little to mine. This is also why our main targets in the system are the moon miners while everything else is extra. There will certainly be enemies and structures that with our current war program we are unable to take down which will lead us also trying to build up reputations with the local players. So the operations of Oisio are not to bully or push any local players out but simply take over the moons so that we can schedule them to pop at exact times instead of random times.
Be it the results of our war operations or diplomatic solutions we hope that Oisio will one point serve as our new HQ system and with the proximity of Jita and the increased amount of wars, ganking and other things that people often first see as a bad thing our activity and player count around our HQ will grow back to the numbers it was before the move to Ronne.
This concludes our current state of the community speech.
