You seem to have misunderstood the event. To me the Gala event was a very nice one and relatively well done after some of the past ones, they finally got it right.
It was an awesome booster farm, eitehr for use for your own characters or profit. Not necessarily to PvP. though there was plenty of PvP over the lootboxes, especially during the first week, then it waned off just like every event.
The event seem fairly well balanced vs some of the otehr events which were either too easy, so vet players just 1 shot everything (or 2 shot), or too hard for example the sleeper drone event was too difficult for new players due to their low skills and the cap drains, scrams, dps reqs, etc. for the sleepers.
In HS, Gala event could be soloed by us vets, or done in groups of 2-3 new players, which I think was perfect difficulty wise.
In LS, the difficulty would on occasion spike up depending on boss spawns, and of course you have to fly a different fit due to PvP, usually less DPS and omni instead of rat specific tank, along with more utility or some sort of a plan (fit) that lets you get away when PvP comes about. I havenāt done any of them in NS this round due to time constraints, but I imagine it would be much like the ones in LS, with even more frequent higher end boss spawns.
Just because you are not in a corp / alliance, doesnāt mean they canāt blue you and you canāt fly with them and / or talk to them on their TS / discord. I do this with my ex mates on relatively frequent basis as these days I just prefer to kinda lazily hang out rather then get into all the alliance crap and my main PvE toon is in an NPC corp at the moment for a plethora of reasons.
If you are looking for a āpureā dungeon style co-op play, I donāt think that exists here. But in HS and NS (but surprisingly not in LS) there are plenty of places where you can achieve almost that. So you can play a carebear style game in NS.
The āisolationā that you speak off after the tutorial depends entirely on you. Do you wait until you complete some more ship training before joining a corp ? It is wise to do so. At the same time you will have a better grasp on the game and which corp to join when the time comes.
If I were you I would not be too concerned about leaders sec status, but check their and the members of that corp killboard for corp / allaince kills, and make sure they have a group of people playing at the time when you play the most, as well that they are the right fit. if its a PvP only corp and you join it and wanna do some events / ratting, you will be alone, and vice versa for example. If you are general combat oriented, then avoid joining mining indy corps or again, vice versa.
So joining the right corp is what makes that go away. Also, if you do join and the corp turns out not to be what you thought, then just leave. Leave on as good terms as possible, donāt throw a hissy or tantrum over it, just be polite and say farewell. But donāt be afraid to leave it and then go to another.
