EVE General Discussion

The problem with corps in EvE is that there are just way too many corps out there and the amount of corps which are nothing more than a chat channel also is quite large.

As someone who ran several small corps myself I might be able to give you some insight on why, especially in smaller corps you can get bored fairly quick. The corps I ran were all newbie friendly corps and actually targeted at helping new players to get to know different parts of the game.

Let me explain what I went through and maybe you can get a little bit insight of why so many corps fail.

I started my corporations and usually it first did some ground work like setting up a website, a forum and a Teamspeak or Mumble server. Once I was done with that I started the process of recruiting people. I mostly focussed on combat oriented players both PvE and PvP.

You spend a few days flying around advertising the corp, talking to a lot of different people and at times like now when a lot of people it usually does not take that long to find a good amount of "Rookies" you can work with.

Naturally new pilots have a lot of questions, so besides doing all the administrative stuff you need to handle if you start such a project on your own, you spend a lot of time helping the new members how to actually play the game.

I also always organised things for the corp. I took out completly fresh players and did things like running level 4 missions with them in frigs, gave them one on one PvP lessons if they desired, organised little PvP tournaments for the corp. Planned fleets to go roaming, worked out a lot of newbie friendly frig and destroyer fittings for roams and did all the logistics work as well, since I was always the only one who had the characters available to transport larger quantities of ships and modules to the systems where we needed them.

All well so far, but you will only be able to run a corp like that on your own for a certain amount of time. If you have to do all these things on your own, you will burn out sooner or later.

I tried all kinds of things to motivate people to step up and take over some tasks, like advertising for recruitment, or forming fleets without me. I tried to motivate them with little presents like faction ships, but sadly nobody was ever willing to step up and to actually try to help making the corp successfull.

Nobody would have stopped the people who were online to do the things I did with them without me, but every last one of them always was waiting for me to get online to do stuff. You log in and it does not even take 2 seconds until the first questions come flying in, at the same time 3 people ask if we can do something together and you still keep doing things like kicking people who are completly inactive, have to find replacements and so on. The work for me just kept getting more and more, while everyone else was just sitting back and relying on me to do everything.

That kind of behaviour is something I have also seen in other corporations and even large alliances, where nobody would want to step up or do anything unless the 2-3 main FCs were online. On the other hand site people who complained that nothing would be going on was quite large. Not a single one of the people who liked complaining ever did anything for the corp themselves though.

Which brings me to the end of my little text:

The main problem with many corps out there are the members themselves, people join corps and expect to be entertained by somebody else whenever they are online. If you have a corp where 1 out of 10 members is willing to actually put up some effort to help make the corp being fun and successfull you can really concider yourself lucky.

Sadly I do not have a solution to that problem either, you just can not change people, no matter what you do. You either get lucky and find people for your corp that are willing to step up or you try to keep things running as much as you can but eventually burn out and either disband the corp or just let things run their course, which ends in everyone doing their own thing and treating the corp as nothing other than a shared chat channel.

So whenever you end up in a corp where not much is going on, before you start pointing fingers at others: think about what you can do to make things more fun and don´t rely just on 1 or 2 persons in the corp to do everything. And lack of experience also is not an excuse. Even if you do not know how to do certain things, you can either look them up, just go with learning by doing, or ask people how certain things are done. Even if you fail sometimes, if you do it together with other people it can still be a lot of fun.

tldr: if you are in a corp and you find it boring: think about what you can do to help making it fun to be in the corp and don´t be a part of the problem.

In this game, you're not just a content consumer.

You're also a content creator.

Your are right, but not offering any help to newbies.

To create content as a FC for example, I think one should know at least, how to be a functioning fleet member, how a fleet is working and how it is led. So when you want more FCs, first offer fleets to newbies and help them learn the basics.

There is over a decades worth of information, that would likely take decades upon decades to read, that details every last square millimetre of EVE. Don't only rely on people in game to teach you things. Take matters into your own hands, Google stuff, hit the forums, read the thousands of guides that hundreds of players have built up in the last ten years, watch YouTube videos. Educate yourself, don't expect everyone to hand it to you. At the risk of sounding mean, this is EVE, not kindergarten.