Greetings Melany! Excellent question. The short summary:
At this time, there are no plans to change our operations as part of a collaboration with Faruzen en Divalone. While we are aware of each others’ projects, no private dialog has begun. However, please do not mistake this lack-of-an-answer for a “no”. Regardless of whether there will be a collaboration, our corporation views Oz’s investment in this space positively for the ecosystem of the whole for general free-market reasons – yes, even when not invested into us.
For those who wish to know more:
We have not initiated outreach to Faruzen for the simple reasons of time and energy. Our corporation’s efforts have been aggressive in focusing on internally improving the quality of our launched, live services. Many of these improvements in robustness are invisible to our customers and bounty hunter clients. That is the ideal outcome of our investments because the alternative could only have been worse: a dissatisfactory experience. As a result of reinvesting in ourselves, we are constrained by our remaining time and energy to initiate outreach for new efforts.
Our organization is generally open to collaboration. However, each and every potential partnership would be evaluated on its own merit. Our openness means we are willing to entertain discussions, but it does not guarantee the outcome of a successful business arrangement.
To set expectations for you and other readers, our organization generally holds these values:
- Offering transparent, open, and dependable services of the highest quality for our customers and bounty hunters
- Always operate the service in a manner that builds a verifiable track record that inspires confidence and trust – this is a long road and there are absolutely no shortcuts: merely saying this is not enough, we have to do it
- Minimizing operational costs – and thus our fees – for our customers and bounty hunters
This does mean we have made business tradeoffs that other entrepreneurial capsuleers would not make. There is no “correct” way to run a bounty system, merely different approaches. We are confident in our business approach: it involves heavily integrating with and optimizing the fluid routing in Jita IV-4 to alleviate much of the day-to-day burden on our organization’s capsuleers, but compared to alternatives it has very low marginal costs and allows no-barrier-to-entry scaling up to the whole of the cluster – and we can pass on these cost savings to consumers/bounty-hunters who can come and go as they please.
Other business ideas make different tradeoffs. For example NEPF’s former bounty hunting scheme circa 2019 relied heavily on capsuleer-in-the-loop operational processes and closed-participation-system via a licensing scheme to specific bounty hunting capsuleers. We welcome more competition and different ideas in the bounty hunting business. It gives capsuleers more choices in their bounty placing and bounty hunting experiences. And our organization is a firm believer that having more choices uplifts all bounty hunting businesses. When customers go to decide which service to use for their bounties – or a hunter chooses which bounties to pursue – they will naturally gain awareness of all services in the space. And then each service is financially incentivized to do the best they can in the free market.
In summary: there are currently no concrete collaborations, but that is an absent-answer (not a “no” answer). We have no initiated discussions due to aggressive investment of our limited resources in ourselves at this time. And even if the answer would become a “no” – by the accident of time passing, or by a deliberate decision – we view the development of additional bounty hunting services positively, as it is an opportunity for us to differentiate ourselves in the free and open market.
No matter our future and regardless whether we have a joint partnership, we wish Faruzen en Divalone the best in his ventures and Oz an excellent ROI.
themselves in our offices.