EVE General Discussion

So I've started a couple corporations in my time in the game. One industry oriented, one WH oriented, another that was trading oriented. Nothing epic for sure, probably just a dime a dozen type stuff. But you know how it goes, you get some good stories out of it and you remember the people you flew with forever.

I'm thinking about starting another, and I'm just on the fence about it. So while I take time to decide, I wanted to see who out there wants to share their experience with starting a new corporation. Here are some of the things I'm curious about (and I assume others who want to start corporations are curious too) :

• Where did you get the idea?
• How many people did you start with?
• How did recruitment go?
• What were your dreams for the corp?
• What were the realities?
• Where did you succeed at what you were trying to accomplish?
• Where did you absolutely fail and why?
• Any entertaining stories, like the kind you tell every player you fly with in TS?

And anything else you think that people looking to start corporations might find interesting. So this isn't a "share stories for the sake of sharing stories", more like "share stories when you learned truisms in this game".

A buddy of mine did something like that on a much smaller scale. It was a one man corporation that was centered in Jita. The Indy corp he had that I was a part of would manufacture the goods, he would buy wholesale from the Indy corp, and then sell them retail on Jita.

He also did the investment deal with shares, selling them at 10 mil a share. He would then pay a dividend out weekly depending on how sales did.

It went well, but the posting of sales, the research, his own time commitment in manufacturing + RL was just too much. He had to stop after a few months.

I think most people try to do everything rather than pull in people to help at various parts of the production chain. I don't know if its greed or just bad management skills.

No man rules alone. Except if you have one man corporation. But even then its dificult to convince yourself about some things.

Great resource. Just killed a lot of time reading it.

A lot of good stories about WH corps in there too.

*points to link in signature*

Where did you get the idea?

I left a cool corporation that produced Combat Boosters back when they were illegal and the gameplay to sell them was very drug dealer-like. Most of the leadership ran the corporation from slack and were AFK because of RL reasons, and It just got to be too much for myself to try and keep all the towers fueled and after considering all of the pros and cons I joined a different corporation, a sov-null corporation that promised the world. After approximately 19 hours and 40 minutes, I right clicked trashed the ships they gave me and left.

I decided to make my own corporation. The name came from a friend who said my name meant Savage/Warrior in an ancient language and he always mistakenly called me Luna so 'Savage Moon' was the name he come up with for my corporation. Which was taken by a Dust 514 player. I often hear this comparison to Sailor Moon but I have no idea what that really is, I've never seen the show. Anime is just not my jam.

How many people did you start with?

Just myself. I was really interested in chasing some of the lore of the game and my first ever act as my own CEO was to 'deploy' to the nearest Republic Security Service mission agent to grind enough standings to pull the Angel Epic Arc missions. Something I wouldn't have been able to do before because all my time went into fueling towers and probing wormhole chains.

Those first few weeks were pretty much myself versus local chat.

How did recruitment go?

I did not recruit whatsoever. But in all my travels and the corporations I was with, a few people asked and kicked tires on what I had going on and I took a risk I guess but I trusted them enough; for those few original Savage Moon warriors, I gave them all director roles.. And promised they could do whatever they wanted. Some still play, and are directors to this day.

What were your dreams for the corp?

I wanted to find 6 other "Lulu's" and have a really strong themed almost Power Rangers like ... uhh how do I explain? Instead of Zords and being the .. Purple Ranger, I have a purple title 'Luna.' Everyone picked or was given a favorite color and a title and I just wanted to be the seven Capsuleers in Savage Moon Society. A super tight small awesome corporation that did whatever.

What blew me away was it actually worked. I was thinking I'd be a jobless CEO since everyone had roles. But SAVMO is very decentralized, there's no reason for the corporation to have lots of things and assets.

So this was the theme:

Corporate roster capped to just 7 characters at first, then just 7 players.

I own all 7,777,777 shares of [SAVMO]

Corporation tax is set to 7% and POCO taxes are 0.7%. Sometimes I think about cranking it up to 100% so I can have nice things.

Cool name, cool logo, nice website, let's start this business.

The really far dream I have is to be like an NPC pirate faction and Savage Moon Society owns an entire constellation of sovereign nullsec for some alliance willing to take a flyer on us. Even if it was just one station. Of course, this dream was before Citadels, I've got two of those now.

What were the realities?

Everyone has alts. Couldn't have just 7 characters. And there is only one Lulu. Basically, I'm told it's not normal to have such small aspirations. Everyone wants to be a Titan pilot, not a Frigate pilot.

We are stuck in between something serious and casual. It's hard to coordinate efforts sometimes. Eve can turn into a job fast.

The two Alliance CEO's I've talked with thought my corporation was a joke, at least that was the impression I got. They offered to let me merge my corp with one of theirs though. And they expect me to provide spreadsheets of non-expiry API keys. I guess we are staying an independent nation.

Where did you succeed at what you were trying to accomplish?

I'm allowed to pretty much do what I feel like as soon as I log in. No mandatory comms, fleets, blues, ops, whatever.

Where did you absolutely fail and why?

I personally just don't like comms. Which means we can't ever be anything super serious. I'd rather be making movies as I play with music blasting and if I'm on comms I don't feel like I can do that as much. I'm critical of myself and I know I'm probably a little too solo-minded to be a CEO.

Savage Moon Society has had an engagement or two end pretty poorly for us but probably the worst operation I put us all on was a deployment to the Minerva Constellation, a hot spot for Blue Pill Gas sites. That constellation is a nasty crossroads between Minmatar Faction Warfare, Drone nullsec, Jita and the road to Molden Heath. The local pirates are so fierce. I had a hard time getting us to fly together there and I don't blame them lol.

Any entertaining stories, like the kind you tell every player you fly with in TS?

We used to deploy for short times, sometimes as little as a few days, up to a few weeks. Now we are much more permanent but we used to goof around with local chat a lot and use it as our fleet chat for laughs. Even in wormhole space. Would get random explorers or even the locals talking

We would anchor a small tower if there was tons of sites, we didn't care about the other forcefields on dscan. We had a small war over a class one wormhole (Yeah, seriously a class one) before with a German corporation and the language barrier and my diplomat Ellen .. oh man. Maybe you had to be there.

Otherwise we often daytripped into other people's wormholes. I'm not sure how we became a wormhole corporation, I guess the money was the best.

We go on a no-plan plan.

I've played EvE on and off since late 2006. Early on in my EvE career, I was active in different corps and alliances, I managed to fight on both sides of the great BoB/Goon war, and generally had a good time popping Internet spaceships. (And, yes, I did spend more time that I like to admit mindlessly running missions.) I started my first corporation around this time, and its sole purpose was to be able to transfer my hard-earned standings to alts and friends so that they could get jump clones.

As time went on, I realized that I could no longer support playing in an active corp with other players. Other interests and responsibilities kept me from showing up to ops, so I decided it was time to be my own boss. I started TKOTB as a place for me and my alts to share materiel, I set up shop near Amarr, I made friends (and enemies) with some of the locals, and I've never looked back since.

Given how sporadically I play these days, the "one player corp" model makes perfect sense for me. I can go for weeks or months without logging in and nothing grinds to a halt in my absence.