I am highly sympathetic to the piratical sentiments of that opening statement. Eve is a full-time PvP sandbox game and I would want it no other way. In fact, the day I decide Eve Online has a safe space or lucrative PvE content immune from the other players is the day I leave.
That said, the current war mechanic really does open up a corporation to significant risk as compared to the NPC corp. That’s fine if it come with significant rewards like owning stations or taxing members or shared hangers, but if you just want to be part of a club recognized by the game, it seems a little harsh to ask the members to open themselves up to attack by any other group in the game just for a shared name and chat channel.
Really though, corporations should have even more benefits to establish a viable risk vs. reward paradigm and make it so players want to be part of corps and even defend them. But I’ve grown tired of repeating this argument and floating ideas, and perhaps I am becoming just another bitter vet, but I see no realistic hope of any major iteration on corporations, wars or structures any time soon so I won’t. I’ll save that until these appear on some sort of mid-term roadmap.
But even if CCP doesn’t ever get around to implementing social corps, new players and small casual groups should know that staying in the NPC corp and playing the game with your friends using a shared chat channel and some out of game social tools is completely viable (see: minerbumping.com for a perfect example of a large in-game community functioning largely outside of the corporation mechanic) . There is very little you need an actual corporation for, and if you do need one for something then well you are no longer new or casual in my book and should start talking to people to learn how to defend yourself. That too is also pretty trivial once you have a handle on the mechanics, and whether you choose to just evade every war, or use them as a teaching tool to get better at the game and maybe have some fun exploding things and getting exploded along the way, wardecs serve as a necessary and useful tool to facilitate player interactions in highsec.
Wars aren’t going away anytime soon, probably never at the current development pace. Best everyone just learn to deal with them and stop endlessly whining about the only mechanic that allows legal group fighting in a game centred on group PvP combat. You are not suppose to be 100% safe and always subject to player interaction in this game and a mechanic that makes you unsafe when you want to feel safe is not necessarily broken for that reason.