LegendOfTheWolf responded with a great statistical answer. I understand that you have a concern that USI may be concentrating a lil' bit too much on security. For that, I would like to give you my own response. As you know, we represent the Universal Shipping vanilla faction. With that representation comes a lot of responsibility. For example, with every decision we have to make we first have to ask ourselves, "does this make sense for Universal Shipping?"
When it comes to managing security, we asked ourselves the same question. Since the beginning of the LN-RM war, USI has taken the aggressive route. We wanted to corner the military commodity market and establish ourselves as a powerful entity in the war. As a result, we have supplied Liberty's front line hundreds of times and have attempted to effect the economy of Rheinland by going after their mining operations in the Omegas (this is before the changes in ZOI).
Since that aggressive policy change, we have also become more aggressive with the security around the bases we influence as well as the routes that our traders typically take. We believe, in RP, that if we can regulate the lanes that our traders frequent then we can make their routes more secure and lower the pirate activity in those areas for all traders. In OORP, we want our security members to feel like they can do more than just escort. We want to encourage them to help the independent traders; RP with the lawful and unlawful through either collaboration or PvP/negotiations, respectively; and be able to do the very things they could do in other factions, such as collect bounties. With bounties, in RP, we believe that since USI helped Liberty with the war, that we could do the same with the war on piracy. Again, we believed that this is a good fit to our developing RP as a faction.
Thank you for giving us your feedback and advice on your observation of our faction. Personally, I really enjoyed the last encounters that I had with one of your characters (Vlad). I hope that they will continue and we can make an RP event that will bring utility to us both.
If you have any more comments, questions, or concerns in regards to USI, please post them here. I love reading them.
- Michael Trenton (Tenspot68) Vice President Universal Shipping, Inc.