I remember when I joined Signal, it was within the first week when the corporation opened its doors, there were about a dozen of us. My thinking, which echoed those that were with us at the time, maybe we’d grow to around 50 members. Explorers tend to be solo’ers, doing their own thing, rarely reaching out or needing anything from anyone. However, in just a couple of weeks we had grown to 100 members and new applications were still pouring in. At one year old, we had grown to over 700 members! Of course at that time, we were something exciting, fresh, and new to New Eden. Today, no longer something new, we’ve settled down to around 300 – 400 members on average as we do prune our ranks to keep active players and to keep ourselves from becoming a warehouse for Alts. Still, that’s a healthy number of explorers hanging out together.
What’s the secret to our success? A corporation is less likely to survive on just shared interest alone, there has to be a solid foundation and a shared goal, for us, that would be our Credo. Signal Cartel was born out of being a service corporation to all of New Eden. With the introduction of Thera in the Rhea expansion in December of 2014, Johnny Splunk wanted Thera to become a freely accessible crossroads to all of New Eden and the EVE-Scout Thera connections site was born. The model behind the service was simple: Thera connection information freely available to all equally, not a paid service, but donations were accepted and then used to compensate the independent scouts that scanned down and entered the signature information.
After some time, these independent scouts wanted to fly together under the same banner. Reaching out to Johnny, who agreed with the idea, a corporation under the EVE-Scout Enclave Alliance was created and Signal Cartel was born. Johnny was the visionary and creator of our foundation which became our Credo. However, as a successful EvE streamer, he knew how time-consuming building a new corp from scratch would be. So, he looked for someone to lead it. As it turns out, Johnny saw my interview with Mynxee, a previously successful CEO of an all-female EvE pirate corp, CSM 5 Chair, and upon returning to the game after a break an explorer and one of the independent scouts for Thera scanning. She was brought on board to be our first CEO. Together Johnny and Mynxee laid down our foundation, built our reputation to what it is today, and the rest as they say is history.
Over the years our services have expanded from Thera scanning to sharing the bookmarks publicly when those came online, to our EVE Scout Rescue services which include rescue cache deployments and live rescues as well as our recently added Storm Tracking service. Our cache program has consistently covered 90% or more of wormhole space, providing probes and launchers to stranded capsuleers. Should there not be a cache in the lost pilot’s system, then we’ll look for them and do live rescues if they’re willing to wait.
1,000 Live EVE Scout Rescues!!!
As it turns out, last month on December 11th 2021, Axar Tiberius saw the alert from our Signal Cartel 911 call service of a stranded pilot in system J——. The message from the stranded pilot indicated they had forgotten to bookmark the exit. Axar knew it was highly likely they knew their entry system and sure enough they did. Quickly he flew to the entry system, navigated the chain, it was an easy, straight forward, routine live rescue. Yet, it was a milestone. Signal Cartel has performed 1,000 live rescues and that doesn’t even include rescues via our cache program. We started keeping track of our rescue service stats in 2017 and it was on April 25th of that year our first live rescue was recorded and performed by Igaze.
Even though it may come across as an individual rescue pilot, that’s far from the truth. All of our services are successful because of the team effort it takes to make these things happen. From our developers that build the tools such as Allison, to our scouts that fly with her, to our cache tenders. All fly under our Credo, friendly to all in our travels and never initiating aggression in an effort to be recognized and respected by all across the cluster and left in peace to do our work.
Happy Birthday Signal Cartel and congratulations on 1,000 live rescues!