EVE New Citizens Q&A

Do most corps allow people to fly along with them without actually joining them? I know that once you join a corporation it's in your employment history forever so I don't wanna just join some random corp, be in their fleet once and leave if I don't like it that much.

I was wondering if most corporations will just let you join them in a fleet once or twice if you go to their channel, just to try it out and see if you like them.

I'm a huge advocate of flying with people before joining their corp. If they won't let you do that, they probably aren't worth joining. A corp is a tool to get stuff done. If you can't work together to accomplish the short term goal of a fleet, a long term goal seems pretty hopeless. You should get a strong clue of how they might work together under wardec, or even just the social dynamic. Most corps do have public channels, it's pretty much a necessity, but they usually suck, which is okay, it's the private channels like fleet chat where the fun stuff happens.

I used to do some corp management, and one of our unwritten rules was a requirement that someone in the corp has flown with potential recruits. Our recruitment drives were just public mining fleets in starter areas. We weren't always the most ambitious recruiters, but our recruits were solid.

I'm not sure I would advocate this as any sort of rule. Most null sec PvP corporations would be wary of letting an unknown pilot join their fleet without going through their vetting procedures to join. Fleet spies are enough of an issue, let alone someone who might make a perfectly reasonable mistake putting the fleet at risk. Then you have access to fleet comms, which is usually restricted to members. Finally, without resetting the non-member pilot from neutral, other allies in the area might well shoot them on sight (since they wouldn't be blue). In these circumstances, I think it's entirely reasonable for non-member pilots to be refused.

Even Pandemic Horde, which has no joining requirements beyond the ability to press the Apply to Corp button, still requires you to be a member to join their fleets. Trust is a thing in EvE, and with assets on the line, it's in short supply.

There are specific organisations like SpectreFleet that encourage participation from non-members. However, I would say that most serious corporations do not. However, having several corporations in quick succession in your first year, would not count against a pilot too much. Also the new player corporations are reasonably well known, so if you have several of these on the list, that would be considered neither here nor there.

In Faction Warfare, being a member of the NPC faction corporations can get you noticed by player corporations you might wish to join, and you can fly alongside these 'on the same side' reasonably easily. However, NPC corp members are also widely regarded as spies and/or farmers, so it might not be very helpful either.

The best advice above is to use the corporation chat channel to speak at length to the recruiters and other members. But if you join and find the culture not to your liking, don't worry about having that on your employment history. When you want to join a good corp, the recruiter will ask you about these things anyway, and you'll have a chance to explain. Past the new player alliances, you'll probably be put on probation within your first few months of membership too.