Assembly Hall

Associations: A stepping stone to corporations, or squads for everyone.

What I propose is to formalise and extent support to something that basically already exists in a variety of forms in EVE Online.

Over the years various like minded players have created chat channels to socialise in, but unless you know they exist, you can only find them by accident. You can drop named cans outside popular stations, or link in your character bio and spam local, but these are very limited forms of advertisement.

Now, a corporation can be advertised, but possesses a great deal of functionality that is unneccessary and frankly bewildering to the unintiaited. For new players especially, all that's needed are the social functions that a corporation has access to.

So I propose a minminalised form of corporation, that possesses no physical assets, that's streamlined for easy of use and setup, and can be advertised in game with all the necessary tags that can be searched and sorted for. Essentially a purely social form of corporation, which we could call 'Associations', or whatever else you happen to prefer.

Addtionally at the end of the new player career tutorials, stick a new tutorial that shows a new player how to find or create an Association.

Importantly an Association is just a glorified chat channel with a few extras such as fleet finder and calendar and recruitment advertising, it doesn't preclude you being in a corporation as well, or being in multiple Associations, so it can't be war-dec'ed, it can't setup a POS or have hangars or offices. It's just an addtional tool to promote social play.