As Ferris said, life moves pretty fast, and we did manage to coast on past our one-year anniversary without too much pomp and ceremony, nothing more than an 'OMG we're one today, Yeahhh!' moment in discord.
But what have we achieved in that time?
We have grown considerably, we're currently taking on an average of 3-4 people per week, and we've had some time to slicken our processes. We created an induction process that gives new members the chance to sample a bit of what each of our branches have to offer.
We made lots of money, lost it, made some more and by working together we've managed to equip our Logistics and Trade & Industry teams with the ships they need to do their job (more than once).
We've struggled through some of the worst patches that CIG have ever put out, fought desynced enemy, struggled to charge our weapons and arranged org vs org events where the objective became invisible to the entire opposing team. We've lost countless millions in randomly exploding ships and had entire inventory wiped at random from ships in the hangers.
But despite this, we've had some fun. True pirate gameplay with much cargo relocation, the slam wars, massive fights at ghost hollow, the breakers yards and jump town. We've made new friends and probably a few new enemies.
Most importantly we've got a great team that is really active and all work well together.
Our daily discord voice usage is excellent, with an average of 9.46 people on all the time over a 7 day period. As you can see on the graph, there are often 15 or more players on and there are only a few hours in the week when nobody is about at all!
A typical day has excellent cover from 14:00 UTC through to 06:00 UTC the following day!
These numbers are even more interesting given that we're not just using Discord but are also fully committed to Od3cia and DCS-SRS for battle comms.
We have noticed that we were picking up people who joined and then went silent for a bit, and we've taken steps to address that, mainly by insisting that new applicants spend some time playing with us before we even start the interview process. We get to know people and they get to know us, before we start getting them involved in our closed user groups and putting in the effort on the induction and training. We're hoping that this will give us a better 'quality' of new member that want to be more engaged with the group. None the less in a typical week we have a great number of active people chatting away.
Within the Org, we've made big steps forward with all branches and the recent promotion of a Capt. 4230 to lead Eagles has added some much-needed support for the players that don't want to go hard-core into one of the branches.
Regular events for fun and games are now in the schedules. The game has also stabilized to a point that org vs org is now also spinning up again.
In a year, I would expect us to have grown more, continued to refine our processes and I'm confident that we can keep walking that line between casual and hardcore that allows everyone to flourish. I'm most proud of the culture we have and that we continue to accept great people that enrich it further all the time.
If you think you'd enjoy playing with us and want to join then jump onto our discord https://discord.gg/eyrie and come chat / play with the team. If you select 'I want to join' we'll know you're interested. If you just want to play with us and then decide to join later you can quite happily ask any member of the command team!