Word Gets Around: TNF's Winter Growth Spurt

"I promise we are not actively sniping people!"

That was Odysemus, writing to the whole corp on March 22, 2026, after a winter in which TNF kept picking up pilots who already had a home elsewhere in the alliance. "I am sure many of you have noticed," he began, "we are picking up a LOT of people from within our own Alliance."

There is a particular kind of compliment in EVE: when people who could fly with anyone in the alliance pick you. Between November 2025 and March 2026, TNF got that compliment over and over.

The roll call

The welcome channel tells the story better than we can, so here it is, in order of arrival.

The headline for the AexisKae and Hans Ericson double welcome has since become a TNF catchphrase: "It. Just. Keeps. Happening... We. Are. The. Inevitable... The. New. Federation."

The welcoming committee

Every arrival got a crowd. A few of the people who made the welcome channel the busiest room in the corp that winter:

• Tamanade greeted Adama Kanjus and oli Padecain within hours of their arrival: "welcome to the mad house!"
• Marri02 welcomed Malcolm Galora to "the icelandic takeover, brother."
• ziggy Okaski, AmoriA and Cyphonteo were first in line for GuardianNomu ("welcome dude!", "Welcome mate"), with AmoriA adding a friendly warning about flying with the Icelanders.
• Killjoy Ender and Malcolm Galora gave Adama Kanjus the shortest possible orientation: "just go kill as much as possible" and "kills kills and more kills."
• SadisticSloth welcomed Frank Yeager "to the madhouse," and Pict1on reported he had "already roped him into some shenanigans and got him blown up, perfect welcome gift."
• Jekktarr watched the transfers stack up and suggested a rebrand to "The New Excavations."
• Aidon Star, Frost Ikkala, Emperor Caligula and Melkafet kept the welcome GIFs coming, and Janwaar answered his own welcome with a crisp "07."
• Aralo Meza and Emperor Caligula turned one welcome into an Icelandic vocabulary contest, after Pict1on offered a newcomer a single Icelandic word over sixty letters long. Aralo tried to decode it through Norwegian and gave up. miki Terona's contribution: "Sorry I don't speak forren."

The verdict from one of the new arrivals came within days. PalmarSiamang53: "Only a few days in, and already had more fun here than I was having there." He blamed SadisticSloth.

What they were looking for

Odysemus described Trajon and Judas as pilots who wanted "a community that provides an active presence in the alliance while maintaining strong community bonds." That phrase covers most of the table. Nobody on it was short of options. They chose a corp where people talk to each other.

His own explanation, in the March 22 message, is worth having in full:

when you have a healthy community, with active and involved leaders it inspires members to be active and makes others on the outside look in and wonder what makes our community awesome. Well, its YOU, the members.

What they found

Every welcome post follows the same shape, and it is a good shape. A public message asking everyone to say hello. Pointers to the alliance freight service, the corp buyback and the fleet ship contracts. A reminder that pinged fleet ships are covered by ship replacement. And the two fundamental rules of TNF:

And then the leaderboard moved

The same March 22 message carried a scoreboard update. That week TNF had "officially overtaken" one of the alliance's top corps on the Sigma Grindset PvP leaderboard. Odysemus's instruction to the membership was three words long: "KEEP IT GOING!"

Trajon, the pilot who did his homework, went on to make it look easy. Within a few weeks he was logging the best day of his EVE life, and a few months after that he was past 5,000 kills.

You can buy ships in EVE. You cannot buy being the corp people move to. The only way to get that is to be it, one welcome post at a time.

It. Just. Keeps. Happening.