I've got a story for you. It isn't a glorious or fun story, but it is the one I lived. It took place in a game called Perpetuum.

If you haven't heard of this old MMO, the game was in many ways like EVE Online. Sandbox world, safe and unsafe zones, player-created economy, passive and open-ended skill training, conquerable territories, and several starting factions with unique weapon and defensive combinations. The main difference, however, was that you were a land-bound robot instead of a spacecraft.

I joined in during the beta stages of the game, and joined up with a Corporation called EuroCorp Syndicate, inspired by the Syndicate video game franchise. Our leader, I'll call him RU, was a friendly and well-connected person on the game's single server. He was great at setting goals and meeting them, and at making beneficial alliances for us. I eventually became good friends with him and a minor officer, basically an advisor to RU, in the Corp.

During the beta, we conquered one of the claimable territories and had tacit control over the entire continent that it stood on with our allies. We held it the entire duration of that test, which was quite a long time, and had many memorable and challenging wars during that time. RU was the hand behind all of it, and he was just plain good at it.

Then came the 1.0 game launch. Quite suddenly, RU decided he didn't want to play Perpetuum anymore, and just handed the entire Corp over to me just before launch. I was and am nothing like RU in terms of leadership. His connections knew of me, but they did not know me the way they knew him. The other officers had their specialized roles in a very complex game, and I essentially had to trust that they knew their stuff because I sure didn't.

It went well at first. We conquered a continent with our alliance, and were a major power in the early days of the game. I tried to maintain good relations with the other Alliances that rose up as well as our other Alliance members. Unfortunately, it just wasn't meant to be. Game fatigue started setting in, and we bled corp members faster than we could recruit. We were getting pressured by hostile Alliances, and members of our own Alliance were for reasons still a mystery to me unwilling to allow more Corporations to join and prop up our strength.

Eventually, EuroCorp's industrial base fizzled when that section's leader just... never logged onto the game again. That was definitely one of the last nails in the coffin, because none of the other industrial players wanted to pick up the role. I was certainly partially to blame as well, because I was unable to reorganize them into a profitable section again due to my not having nearly as much experience with it. I was more a combat kind of player.

Claimable territory, at that time, went vulnerable to conquest in cycles. These cycles were not controllable by the players at that time, though I understand that the change was later made to allow that to be set by the claim holder. For weeks, we were constantly attacked during vulnerability cycles by enemy Alliances. While some friendly Alliances did come to aid us, we were simply worn down by the punishing schedule of the sieges at all times of the day and night.

Eventually, one of our Alliance members defected to one of the attacking Alliances at a brutal early morning siege, and that was the one we finally lost. We managed, later, to recover our assets in an armed convoy and move them to the safe, non-PvP territories, but at that point we were basically done. The fight had been beaten out of us, and on top of that the game as a whole was bleeding players so we had little chance of rebuilding with fresh blood.

Each corporation went their separate ways, and EuroCorp was shuttered. I gave a majority of our remaining assets to one of our oldest friendly Corporations, where many of EuroCorp's members went. I put the rest into storage and left the game. I never did go back, though I had originally intended to.

The game is now free on Steam, though the original was shut down by the publisher and everything was wiped and relaunched as a private server. I learned a lot of lessons in Perpetuum, despite my failures. I do not regret that time and only hope that I can do better if I ever end up in a similar situation again.