Eve: Corporations: scum villainy and goodfellowship

A few days ago Sonoran Scotsman asked me this:

I don't know if you take requests, but I'd love to hear about Corp life a little. I've been in a mostly PvE Corp of about 100 members for 2 weeks, and recently we've been declaring war or having war declared on us by veteran PvP Corps over and over again. Ultimately it seems like our Corp got changed into a PvP corp overnight. Our CEO and Founder just transferred control to someone who hasn't been online for at least a few months, and then he resigned.

Sure, I do requests :)

The deal with game guilds/corps is the deal with any internet gaming community - it's transitory. There are some few exceptions but the vast majority of in-game friendships are with people we've known less than a couple of years and won't know any more in a couple of years times. Layer on top of that the ferociously competitive nature of hardcore achiever-subtype gamers and you have social nitroglycerine.

The larger the Eve community the more volatile the community. So the ones that endure make an art of riding the wave of nerdrage.

Pretty much every large nullsec entity in Eve has some pretty appalling characteristics including hazing of newbies, casual use of hate speech and an appetite for griefing outsiders, especially those in high sec. There's also a lot of fun to be had there if you don't let that bother you.

I don't like it that it's "normal" in Eve to share comms and chats with people who can't complete a sentence without saying faggot or nigger but I feel that it's a battle that's already lost, just like an earlier generation must have felt when "damned" and "bloody" became ordinary expressions.

In addition there's a fashion for sensationalism. Someone shooting the mob you wanted to shoot is a SLAP in the FACE, the WORST thing ever, must be SORTED out NOW!!! And the worst of it is the people who sensationalise other people's over-sensationalisations turning complaints into guild-splitting dramas.

Naturally some people respond to events by stealing everything they can then leaving under a cloud creating new waves of drama. Eve is specifically designed to allow people to easily steal from and mess with their friends, it encourages the kind of fascinating gaming train wrecks that have made its name. (Although that's becoming less true with features like the Crimewatch safety toggle and the just announced personal pos hangars).

OK, I've got the bad stuff out of the way - what's the good stuff?

Well the advantages of playing with others in Eve are several:

- foremost is having online friends to share the experience with. Here's a NSFW video of us all being dicks to some miners and giggling about it. Maybe that's your kind of thing - it certainly is mine I had a great time. My CEO is running the fleet, I'm the one stealing the mining barge. I have a great laugh with these guys, I'd quite happily be still playing with them in 5, 10 years time maybe in Eve maybe in a different game.

- next it opens up a ton of possibilities that simply aren't available to the soloer. I'm now fleet commanding for my coalition as a trainee FC. I can just decide to pick on and hunt people and dozens of other people will come along and help kill them. I get to make moment to moment tactical decisions that lose or kill hundreds of millions of isk (and later on billions if I move up the ladder). FCing in Eve has been called the best RTS one can play.

- the drama itself is pretty entertaining. We just had some guy rage at us because he couldn't get his own way all the time, then rage-steal an Apoc which the goons blew up on his way to high sec. It was pretty good fun taking the piss out of him, especially as he takes everything super-serious and gets really irate over nothing all the time. If you play Eve it's quite likely you were sucked into this crazy universe because of some massive drama and they're more fun at first hand.

- it's worth a ton of isk. Most corps give free stuff, alliances give ship reimbursement and if you're new and poor people will usually help you or give you stuff. You can ask your mates for help - one guy asked me for help with an officer rat, a special high end rat found in null sec, so I helped him and we shared a module worth 3.5 billion isk. He wasn't able to kill it on his own.

Lastly if you do want to join us out in nullsec then here's the advert for my current corp. They're a laid back cheerful bunch that I'm having a lot of fun flying with.