EVE New Citizens Q&A

Most of my long standing members are people i'v met and befriended before they joined the corp. Try to get involved in group activities or invite younger pilots to help you on missions or other jobs. Have plenty of time for each new member individually, make sure you are doing things with them more than you are sat in station tweaking corp settings.

Decide on some goals you'd like to achieve with the corp and make sure potential recruits are aware what the focus will be, this will help filter pilots who will seldom take part in the main focus. When you talk to people for the first time, have a genuine interest in helping them rather than an interest in boosting corp memberships. Quite often if you try to give everyone a hand, someone will ask about your corp.

Lastly don't try to act like a CORPORATE CEO MAN.. You are a game player, so are the people you will fly with. Giving orders before you have proven you are worth listening to will land you in a corp of 1.

One last idea : If you find corp chat is always a bit empty in the beginning but dont want / need to join an alliance, make contact with other small corps in the area and set up a shared chat so all your members can find semi-friendlies to fly with and maybe some group goals.

Quick answer to all your 5 points:

Depends on your corporation.

Sounds vague, but as it's late at night I won't start my wall of text (likely asleep at the keyboard before I finish) but will come back tomorrow with my whole post.

So much immensely awesome information here guys. So far Its been incredible.

What about validity? What about a goal of living in lowsec (0.4 -> 0.1)? Is there a reason to want to form my own corp or is the energy better channeled into joining and making a corp my own (in essence, not in actuality).

Do you have a clear, concise, structured plan to make this happen? Are you experienced in living in that space, know what it entails and the best way to deal with issues? Do you know how to train your members into doing all this so they can operate independently of you?

Every small highsec corp of new players banding together has the same "lets go live in 0.0 one day!" plan, and it will never see fruition because the answer to those questions is "no, not really."

1) Names are indeed important. Don't copy other more famous corp names, spelling and capitalization counts, don't use numbers for letters, don't be stupid which is difficult to define, and don't use generic words in the name. And for Gods sake don't name a corp Knights Templar, Knights who say Ni, or Knights of the Round Table. A corp name defines you as a corp. if its obvious you don't give a **** about your name or spelling, then recruitment will be infinitely harder.

As for location, STAY THE **** OUT OF LONETREK! Omg there's an oversaturation of highsec corps who want to live in or next to Jita. If you want to distinguish your corp from the hundreds of highsec lonetrek corps, then stay away from the mindless generic herd.

2) Don't bullshit a prospective new member. A LOT of crappy corps spam new prospects with giant copy/paste walls of text. Don't do that. Don't spam invites to your channel either. There's quite a few terrible corps in the recruitment channel who do nothing except go down the list of players in the channel and mass inviting them to theirs. This is wrong. If you want your corp to grow you're going to have recruit each member personally and get to know them a bit.

3) Bonuses are a double edged sword. Right now if you mention a bonus for joining, you're immediately perceived as a scammer. So many new corps promise to give a bonus just for joining yet never follow through on their word. Just an FYI if you have to pay or are getting paid to join a corp, it's probably a scam. As for ship replacement, it's a good idea to offer free frigate and destroyer replacement regardless of the circumstances behin the loss. It makes it so new players don't have to worry about financial loss and will be more willing to fight for the corp.

4) Third party communication tools are not only recommended, they should be mandatory for a multitude of reasons.if youre not willing to invest in voice coms, then you're not really serious about growing your corp. A lot of player use the excuse that they don't own a mic. Whether that's true or not doesn't matter because no mic is required to at least listen in on coms which is usually mandatory for important ops.

5) Retention of members requires active effort on behalf of the CEO. Players get bored, especially in highsec. A lot of new CEOs make the common mistake of creating a corp and expecting it to take on a life of its own. That may work in WoW but certainly not in EvE. The corp needs reasonable goals and direction to work towards together.

Many highsec garbage corps either have no direction or too many directions. Ever see a corp in recruitment channel that does everything? Mining, mission running, production, WH ops, lowsec ops, incursions, exploration, sov warfare, faction warfare and PI all at the same time? Yeah, that's a corp with too many directions. They can't possibly do all those things with their six or seven members.

My last corp was a highsec garbage corp. They wanted to produce capital ships and were set on that goal, but were adamant on never setting foot outside of highsec. Unrealistic goals.

Ever see a corp advertising themselves as a social corp that doesn't take the game seriously? Just a bunch of dudes who wan to chill and stuff? Yeah, that's a corp with no direction or purpose.

That's just a few examples of why so many new corps fail.

I wanted to add a few things.

Time zone consideration is so incredibly important. If you have ten members who are all from wildly different time zones, they won't ever see each other ingame. If that's the case then why bother joining? If you're going to recruit, make it perfectly clear what time zone or general EvE time your members are most active. Nothing sucks more than being in a corp who's members are always logging off when you're logging on. Don't be afraid to turn away potentially new members due to large time zone differences. You'll be doing them a favor.

Don't be afraid of PvP. If you're in highsec because youre trying to get away from all that fight stuff, I've got bad news for you. Just because you and your corp are actively avoiding PvP doesn't mean the fighting won't find you. PvP is an unavoidable aspect of this game and your corp needs to be able to stand and meet the challenge, regardless if it's griefers gankers or wardecs. Having some kind of ship replacement plan helps alleviate te concern of financial loss, even if it's just frigates. In any case, PvP WILL happen, either on your terms or your enemies.

Pay your members what they're due. So many highsec corps run mission or mining ops and usually the CEO pockets all the rewards whereas the participants receive nothing for their time and effort. This is wrong an a waste of time for members. Like it or not, greed is the driving factor behind everything in EvE. If members are putting in their time and effort for corp poster aren't getting anything out of it, then why bother being a part of that corp at all? That's not a rhetorical question. Why bother mining or running missions for your corp when it's far more profitable to do these things solo? That's why highsec mining corps are suffering from member retention.

Don't advertise anything your corp doesn't actually do. So what if you and Dave poked your heads into a wormhole 7 months ago. That doesn't make you a wormhole corp. if your members mine all by themselves now and then, it doesn't make you a mining corp. A lot of new and/or clueless CEOs can't seem to understand this simple concept. You're not an X corp if you don't actively and consistently do X. Makes sense? I hope so.

You need a competent Fleet Commander (aka an FC). If you hope to expand your corp out of the single digit membership count, you will need an FC who has some idea what he's doing. This could be yourself as the CEO if necessary, but when your corp has a fleet running, you need someone to be in charge.

Spies are going to happen. It's unavoidable. Your job as CEO is to mitigate how much potential damage a spy could do. If you go off trusting everyone and recruiting anyone, you're going to run into this issue eventually. Always ask new recruits for a full API key. Always do *some* background checking. Never assume anyone is trustworthy. Wear a smile and keep a healthy dose of suspicion and paranoia. Believe me, there are players out there who make a career out of corp theft and corp kills. They love to prey on naive highsec CEOs.

Never give out full details of your operation to your corp unless it's either absolutely necessary or you're right about to commence the operation. If you tell everyone in your corp that we're doing a lowsec roam in this system on this date and this time, don't be surprised to find a hostile fleet waiting for you there. Dissemination of information is the name of the game.

Don't go off and buy a POS just so you can brag in your recruitment ad that the corp has a POS. That's just plain stupid and expensive. If your corp doesn't have a clearly defined and justified reason for owning a POS, them don't buy one. A highsec corp shouldn't have a POS tower unless they have a damn good reason and use for one. Anything else is stupid and wasteful.


*edit*
Please bear with my spelling and grammar. I'm at work and on my phone. The auto-speller is hard at work misspelling everything.

As promised, my full explanation.



1.) Name matters, it will be the name you all will fly under. So pick a good one and pick one others won't mind having in their tag. As for location, that depends on what you want your corporation to be. Miners should be near good asteroids and low-traffic space, mission runners should be near good bunch of agents, gankers should be near Jita or trade lanes, pirates near low-sec etc etc etc.

2.) Let people come to you. Nothing annoys people more then some random dude trying to get them into his corporation, and from the other side, nothing is easier for awoxers/spies/all the shady people to get into your corp if you invite them in. Make a forum post (best way to recruit people) and use the ingame search engine adverts.

3.) Depends on what type of corp you are. Mining corps => Ore buyback scheme, PvP corps => Ship replacement, of course you can have multiple things. But a corp doesn't bend or breaks with a SRP though it will help your corp. Your main concern is to keep your members happy and willing to stick around.

4.) Voice comms: for PvP it's a MUST it isn't even a consideration. Same for Incursions. For mining and missions you CAN live without but speaking to your fellow members makes you feel more part of a group then just that lame text chat in the bottom of your monitor.

5.) Keep them happy, easy as that. Happy people stick around. Also great guidance and help them with problems. Like said before being a CEO of your corp makes EVE more of a daytime job and less of a game. It requires a lot of your time (one of the reasons I merged my own corp into a friends corp, let him do all the hard work. Later moved corps and happy to be just one of the middle ranked people, I can pass all stuff either up the ranks or down to general grunts).



6.) Make clear goals. Goal: In future live in low-sec. That is not a clear goal, and you will find out you stay in high-sec and people leave as they thought they would move to low-sec soon.

7.) I do advice, join a pre-existing corporation first. Find out how corporations work, ask the CEO questions how he runs corporations. Tell him in the future you might leave to make your own corp and could use some tips and tricks. Maybe he even offers you to help while you have your own corporation.



8.) Website / forum. I would say, like voice comms, get one. Some corps heavily use them, some hardly. But if you use them people tend to feel more bonding with the group. They can contact, exchange ideas, etc. with each other out of game. Might even make your corporation more of a gaming community, where people find out they play the same games and start playing them together too.

9.) Put up advert on forums (most clear, least trolled form of recruitment) and wait, bump your post occasionally (max. 1 every day). You can hang out in recruitment but don't expect too much of it, it's filled with recruiters, trolls, spies and the occasional genuine recruit. Also try not to advertise in local, this makes it look like you are desperately seeking new recruits and attracts the wrong persons, however if you live in a certain spot and you know the people who live there too, you can contact them with the option of joining.