EVE General Discussion

Compression. The ONLY way to do compression in highsec is with a POS.

The only other way besides a POS is an Rorqual

Like-minded maniacs to play with.

A nice stiff 25-50% tax rate to encourage me to take other people's money rather than grinding for it.

War.
War means people to shoot at.
I like having people to shoot at.

A banner to fly under, a name that is known, a reputation that is maintained.
I like having the option occasionally to not shoot at people or be shot at, it's not all that common, but it happens.
Being one of the scary aggressor types gives me that luxury.

Experienced fellow pilots to give advice and help with training of new members also.

Did I mention the like-minded maniacs thing? That's kind of important. It's very enjoyable to be merrily and drunkenly chattering away with each other on comms while we're occupied with smashing someone else's sandcastle, or hunting down prey.

Just a few reasons for me to enjoy a corp.

Makes sense.
If it truly is all about you then each war is like a fan letter or whatnot.

Kind of like for me, when someone contributes to my bounty I consider it a tip for services rendered.

For me its friends, I have made friends in corporations in Eve that though don't play anymore, are still in touch via facebook or others and share whats going on. If you remove the friend aspect from an mmo, why even bother play it.

You can join a corp and run a separate personal one via alts for activities such as industry so you get the best of both worlds. If your indy corp is dec'd you have a larger group to call on to assist, or the other way around if your main corp is fighting/suffering activity dips you can potter away uninterrupted. First year or so I played was in highsec corps and I wasn't all that interested in PVE even though that was their dominant playstyle - so was more active sometimes on alts getting that set up. But there were a fair number of industrialists in corp who had similar settups so they were useful for info and when we had decs we actually took it in stride and had tons of fun (rather than getting all worked up over our mission running being interrupted).

Even if you are very introverted and can pick up masses of info from reading forums and guides, having people take you through new gameplay aspects step by step is invaluable. Even in a large corp where the members are all relatively new there's usually a handful kicking about who are more experienced. If only one out of dozens takes the time to mentor you through basic, then complex mechanics you may pick it up a lot faster. Industry might look like the perfect solo gamestyle but networking and creating contacts is one way you can optimise your profits, and corpies generally don't gouge each other the way competitors do. So it also opens up material avenues you might struggle to break into solo.

Ironic and contradictory are not the same thing.