Foxholers is a small corp. We’re about as large and almost as capable as my pet bird, Freya. Spreading that metaphor even thinner, you could say that we’re a seasonal bird of a corp and, as of March 2019, we’re back in wormhole space again. Another year, another round of Foxholers, and another attempt to build the best corp in wormhole space (lol).
Now you might be thinking, “Ashy, what is the point of this article. Isn’t this a thinly veiled advert?”, and the answer to that is well, maybe! Really what I want to do here is talk a bit about the history of [W-FOX], why the hell I keep coming back to this game, and why we always reform Foxholers.
See, Foxholers is a corp that has been around for about two or three years now. Ever since I left hawks I wanted to set up my own corp and it always seemed like some lofty goal that needed too much ISK and time investment. And that’s almost right. Running W-FOX has been one of the most stressful things I’ve done for a while now, but I’m so glad for it. Without this corp I wouldn’t have made so many good friends in the game and I would never have met my fiance, actually.
A History Lesson
2016 was an interesting year for me. If I remember correctly it was when I first started writing for Niden and the CZ team by publishing a few pieces about wormhole life. This was also about the time when I left Lazerhawks because something something you shouldn’t write articles while in that corp. Later on in the year, though, I found myself rather unexpectedly as the head of GMVA’s Alliance Tournament team. Yeah, you can say technically it was Jules but shush, I’m the FC.
Some time after the tournament dust settled I found that I really had no goal in the game. Sure I could stick around in lowsec and try a bit of solo PvP but that just felt icky. Roaming gate to gate and finding nothing but camps or stabbed farmers really takes it out of you. There’s also no way I’m ever going to be a nullsec player so that suggestion is out. What I really wanted to do was to return to wormhole space.
Looking back, maybe I should have done what any sensible person would have and join a new wormhole corp. HK probably hate me, but at least I could have gotten into TDSIN, POSPY, or NOVAC. Hell, I dated a Novac director for a while so that might have worked out well. Instead, I thought to myself “Hey let’s make a corp purely because I’m stubborn and hate changing bookmarking systems.” And so, after a South African Galmil dude thought up the name Foxholers, I toddled off to my own little Pulsar-flavour sand pit to play my own little Game of Thrones.
Foxholers v1
So the first version of Foxholers was pretty short lived, I’ll say that now. We probably only lasted about a month. And when I say “Foxholers”, I actually mean that I repurposed Galmil’s Julianus Soter Appreciation Society Villore Accords for wormhole space PvP.
And uh, nothing happened really. Honestly I didn’t know what the hell I was doing and never really managed to do much more than make a fancy krab hole. I’m gonna cut this one short because all it really served to do was teach me not to talk to people about your own Fortizar anchoring unless you’re REALLY sure that they’re friendly. No I’m not explaining how i lost an officer Panther there >.>
Lessons Learned: Don’t tell people about your anchoring structure (duh) & don’t go into wormhole space without having actual doctrines…
Foxholers 2: Electric Boogaloo
Roll on 2017. It doesn’t seem that long ago and I suppose it really isn’t. It was around March that I randomly picked on Steel Roamer and Keeperofthe7keys on Tweetfleet Slack. I had the itch to try again, this time with a plan. I honestly don’t know why I picked on these two, but as heads of the corp ShekelSquad they really helped give me advice on how to grow a corp without the associated dying and quitting everything, again. The plan was that I would start Foxholers again, living out of their own Red Giant, Inferno. Despite the problems with bookmark sharing this wasn’t too bad at all and it was almost like being a member of their corp.
Now I don’t know if anyone reading has tried building a corp up from one person but if you want to take away anything from this, the secret is to not do that, it’s hell. It wasn’t until almost a month later that anyone took up my recruitment offer. It was some Goon called Rex Reynolds with about 11m SP if I remember correctly. If it’s any testament to his character, he’s still with me 2 years later and next to Ben is probably my most trusted director.
For the sake of compressing the following 6-8 months into a paragraph: Lots more people joined, we all had a lot of fun, and pigs flew. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. We probably could have gone on to be pretty big if it wasn’t for Daddy J’s Best Bois us running in the Alliance Tournament and destroying all activity and motivation to play.
Lessons learned: Don’t burn yourself out, make sure you delegate to directors, and remember that the Alliance Tournament needs a hell of a lot of practice and it WILL kill your corp!
Foxholers 3: Return of the Rex
Ok I honestly can’t remember the actual reason we started up again, but we’re in March 2018 by this point. If I remember correctly it was probably Ben, Rex, and director that I met on a dating website, Huntze, all ree’ing at me do Foxholers again. After a hell of a lot of stress and shame from the previous year I reluctantly accepted, probably thanks to my self-desire to have control over everything. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Being the wonderful people we are, we took up residence in our old Pulsar (Novac’s old home!). Unluckily for our fledgling band of somethings, we were promptly evicted when Novac decided they wanted their old spiritual home back for themselves. Who woulda guessed? I know I didn’t when I saw Sleipnirs appearing on scan then disappearing again after cloaking up.
Moving on, my merry gang of space hobos moved on to live in a C5-C5 black hole. It was good fun to be honest and I *really* thought that this was it. We had a proper shield-skirmish doctrine, we had heavy armour, we had heavy shield, we even had a hell of a lot of members at one point. This is also around the time I recruited Gimli the Israeli soundboard junkie. He’d probably feel amiss if I didn’t mention him somewhere in here so there you go.
Unfortunately, I’m an idiot and life happens. With one gentle stroke of the devil’s cock, my entire command team suddenly had things happen that stopped them playing. I personally moved house and got a new job, one of my directors got married, another had a baby, another ragequit because he was German and that’s what he does. Shit happens. Oh and I thought it would be great to do the Alliance Tournament again myself. Combine all that with a general burnout from the lack of C5 space content and you end up with a dead corp. Oh well.
Lessons Learned: Don’t burn out *for real this time*, high-class wormholes are dead, and Jimmie was right about C2’s somehow.
Foxholers 4: The Refoxening
Four. Why did we start Foxholers up again for a fourth time? Oh yeah.
Sir Gimlidope: If I keep giving ashy memes and soundboard clips eventually she’ll do Foxholers 4.0
Ashy: I really can’t make Foxholers this weirdo seasonal corp that exists then doesn’t again each year.
Malmar Padecain: I should still be in foxholers… Should I really give EVE another chance?
Rex Reynolds: Foxholers 4: return of the screeching autism. Coming soon to a wormhole near you.
Jimmie: I love the Foxholers decision making process:
1. Question posed
2. Everyone provides answers
3. Ash shoots down all answers, enters a 14-day thinking and theorycrafting process.
4. Ash suggests something even more absurd than the first round of answers. Goes to absurd lengths to defend it against any criticism.
5. Ben talks her down because he’s like a horse-whisperer for autistic EVE players.
6. Compromise is reached.
Yeah, I give in to peer pressure quite readily. It turned out that most of the older members still hung out on a Discord and badgered me into doing this again. It also turns out that we had enough members restart things with a bang rather than being the quiet one-person corp that we were two years ago.
Nowadays we live in a C2 with C5 and NS statics and it’s damn good fun. I don’t know how I went so long denying that having a nullsec static would be a good idea. Some might say it means we’re less of a wormhole corp, but not me. Being able to pop out just about anywhere in any kind of ratting space is the best, even if we can’t kill the blobs of 15 Rorquals (yet!). At the time of writing it’s still early days – just a couple of months into things – but I really do feel like this could be the one. Now I just need to make sure I keep telling myself to relax. I may be the CEO, but I need to not burn out.
There’s a lot more to this. I could sit here and detail just how stressed I’ve been over things that happen in a video game, how I’ve been angry at a red killboard and taken it out on myself. Nobody wants to read that, though. That’s probably why this post morphed into more of a retrospective; at least then I might be able to convince people that this isn’t just self indulgent writing about my own EVE history.
All I care about at the moment in the game is having fun and meeting all the new friends I can find. Pushing back all those old feelings of “grrr I’ve got to be the best corp” is really hard. Running a group like this in general is really hard. I think it’s the expectation of every other corp in EVE to not be scrubs and I was blindly following along. [W-FOX] is not as strict a corp as we used to be and if you still want to join us after reading this then you’re probably welcome to. Just don’t be a dick and I hope you like birds.
Addendum: If you’re looking to join us then hop into the ‘W-FOX’ channel in game or hit up Ashley Traynor // Vaeltek // Rex Reynolds // Amadeus Korsar // Lord Torak.
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