Crime & Punishment

Been talking to a Corp that seems alright and I have seen no negative comments on the forums but figure it is best to ask is Nightmare Factory on the up and up?

They are offering the normle things train PvP, help replace ships (sometimes). Mentioned hauling ships to their base of ops and I relize that sometimes is a scam but since it is in Null sec I will be leaving my BS for missioning with my jump clone where they are anyways incase one day I would need to leave I will have a backup home.

So if you have stories, good or bad please share.

As of now after talking to them and not seeing any negative forum post on them I will probaly be joining them tonight my time so 11 hours.

Sorry new to Null sec so it doesn't. If you can give more detail please. Also what exactly do you mean by shell corp?

Mind if I ask how you have come to said conclustion? I do realize it is a very real possability, but do you know this to be the case first hand or have heard first hand accounts of such or are you drawing a probaly conclustion that such would be so?

Also how does Stein factor into this? Is there something I should know about this area.

They do promise various services and replacements of loses. I am not saying you are wrong, you are more experanced in the area than I and I posted with the hopes of gaining insight, but I also realize if what you say is true I can simply Jump back to my missioning clone and drop them if what you say is the case.

Truthfully I am going in beliving ever corp will probaly just take my ISK for the CO's gain so what About them, and Stain makes it more likely the case than the norm?

I wasn't saying her infor was not good. Just wondering if the conclustion was based on profiling on what normally happens or if in fact that this is known to be the case.

Seems low sec is hard to get into. I go alone and die untill I need to grind to pay for ships. If I try to find others to fly with normally since I am ill experanced I am refused and than there is always those con artist that only attend to betray you. (Have heard about them, havn't seen them personaly) And of course I been in a few Blogs with the Malitia but all I did was shoot someone till I went pop shortly after not any real learning with 100 on 100 combat. Looked cool though.

So what I feared is probaly the case, also these guys are mostly Romanian which is an issue. Not the fact they are romanian but that I am not sure how well comunications will go.

I will put all of my cards on the table for you, so that you can evaluate for yourself potential sources of bias. It is my hope that in doing so, I will be able to present you with a more realistic display of the situation so that you can conduct your own research and draw your own conclusions based on my testimony.

I have drawn the conclusions that I spoke to you from a few different factors. The first factor is that the motivations that I have observed behind those in leadership positions in spaceship corporations. With the notable exceptions of those communities which have a strong out-of-game presence, the primary motivator for achieving positions of leadership and power in EVE Online (as in real life) is to abuse that power for self-benefit; otherwise, it is simply not worth the effort and headache of dealing with dozens, hundreds or thousands of often-inept and troublesome people. In that respect, part of my conclusion was drawn from a probability analysis as you suggested. It is very probable that any given corporation that you might find exists for the purpose of generating wealth for the person or persons at the top of the leadership ladder.

This can be in the form of a "legitimate" corporation that uses taxes and the proceeds of conquest to purchase expensive toys for the upper-level players under the excuse that they are the ones who can be trusted with them (sort of like officers in other MMO guilds taking Legendary items for themselves rather than giving them out to some random schmuck), or through the blatant and often acceptable practice of "rewarding" veteran members in good standing. It may also take the form of a blatant and easily-identified scam or "farming" corporation, in which the corporation was created with the specific purpose of taking as much as possible from the efforts of the common player and then either running with the proceeds or continually absorbing them without ever acknowledging the scam. Examples of both types of corporation are plentiful, with the former being presented in various ways and sometimes not even consciously acknowledged as a case of wrong-doing by those who are doing the scamming or being scammed even after the process is made clear. The latter is also pretty common, where the CEO or directors are alts of other long-term players who view the entire corporation as an ISK faucet.

You can see these scams presented in the descriptions or bulletins of many corporations, under various guises. They might be listed with such terms as "profit-sharing," or they might refer to some program by which corporate profits are invested into greater opportunities for profit; or, they might take the form of corporation "projects," such as a collection of ISK and/or minerals for the stated purpose of building and selling [A Thing], with the promise of eventually sharing the proceeds. These and other schemes sound very plausible to new players because they make associations between the practices of real companies in real life offering stock options, or they rationalize the pooling of resources to afford the production of things that they assume cannot be realistically produced by a single player. The schemes take advantage of the common player's lack of understanding with regards to the mechanics involved in ship production, market dynamics, and so forth: to cut to the quick, anything promising to make a big thing with your money and then share you the profits is almost assuredly a scam in one shape or another since the building cost and selling cost of almost everything in New Eden are so close as to produce a minimal profit that is not worth sharing; however, the building cost of some things can be rather large, and thus a worthwhile theft from gullible players.

Stain as a region factors into this discussion because of a series of mechanics and historical precedents that as a new player you are presumably unaware. For a long time, the Stain region and surrounding regions have been controlled back and forth by a few specific entities, with the majority of the entities who live in the region being beholden unto those core powers in a fealty system that very much resembles medieval Feudalism. With a few notable exceptions to include my own Alliance and our coalition of like-minded entities, the majority of nullsec powers have operated on a similar principle.

The majority of major powers are interested in their own betterment, and at the same time are very lazy; so, they exert their military power and flaunt it so as to attract vassals whom are installed in positions that serve as a buffer between the core powers and their neighbours. In short, the majority of all citizens who live in nullsec are "pets," vassals, or some other negative term. Their purpose is to ease the costs of maintaining sovereignty claims over a large area (by diffusing that cost away from the core powers unto their tenants), and to serve as a wall that must first be breached before an invasion may enter the core systems. Also, they are often abused to generate profit. You get a system in which the alliances and corporations surrounding the core powers exist to generate tax revenue which goes towards coalition membership fees, which in addition to bearing the cost of maintaining sovereignty and infrastructure upgrades also generally produces sizable profits for the core powers. As with the medieval vassal, the choice territories with the best yields (there are resources that can be "farmed," in space by static structures; that is a lesson for another day) are reserved for the core powers, and the vassal entities must generate a greater amount of money than is required to maintain the territory by exploiting the limited resources at their disposal. In short, most vassal entities are poor, dirt-farming share croppers who slave away to pay their masters for the privilege of being the first line of defense against invasion.

The entities of the Stain region, and Stainwagon, are notorious for this practice. This is not so much a "bad thing" from the perspective of most players as I have made it out to be, because it is the expected norm. You don't have a huge fleet of powerful ships as a single player, or a small corporation, or even a small alliance; so, it is not realistically possible for you to hold space on your own. But you want to live in the "good space," out in nullsec! So you join a bigger entity as a vassal, being assigned to live in worst space they have available (which is less profitable than just running missions in Empire), under the implicit promise that one day you will move up in the organisation and get a better stake in the region. The problem here is that, much like modern corporate capitalism, the promise of vertical mobility—if it is even explicitly made—is a bold-faced lie, for various reasons not limited to the greed and underhandedness of the core entity.

Far more likely than your group of dudes sticking around long enough to attain stakeholder status—even if that is possible in the model presented by a given renter—is that the land lord will come under attack by some hostile entity long before then and your group will be one of the dozens of amateurs that are rolled over by a well-coordinated, professional army and see all of your space and profitable ventures destroyed as they steamroll their way towards your core entities. And you will be expected to keep paying your coalition membership fees throughout this period of time, in which it is impossible for you to generate income in that space. Your inability to generate income will be lauded as a reason to prune you from the alliance, if for some reason you do not start hemorrhaging members as they suddenly realize their lives suck when they cannot even undock and do stuff due the constant presence of invaders or the threat of them. If somehow you have saved up money or have alternate means of income (i.e., high security business models that provide a side income), then this will be cited as evidence of how you have not been fully contributing to the war effort and will serve as grounds for your removal.

And all of this assumes that your masters are relatively nice, compared to some of the horrible tyrants this game has seen.

Something I am wondering about. You've been in your corp for 5 years and some months? How is it, that you still have these questions?

Being in an NPC corp for 5 years doesn't mean the player has been active those 5 years. Additionally, it's an NPC corp. The dynamics are quite differently when you're engaged in a player corp.

Be sure to do a forums search for my name and start shining your +reps on me! I will return the favor.

But regardless of everything else, don't join a corp if you think there's going to be a language barrier because the bulk of them are from another country. You're setting yourself up for a bad time. Even if language isn't an issue, player timezones might be (although in a sizeable alliance this is less of a big deal since they probably have another corp that's most active in your own TZ.)