Killing is just a means of communication.
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Nobody dies in EVE, brah.
Mr Epeen 
Agreed. But better options for enhancing socialization don’t remove anyone’s ability to play solo. As long as required content isn’t “forced grouping” then people will always choose their own path.
Neither of these are true, though. A lot of people believe “modern players refuse to put in the work”, or expect a “gimme” of everything. This isn’t the case, and it’s never been any different. The primary difference between EVE ‘then’ and now is simply that all players have far more options and demands on their leisure time. Particularly since everybody now carries a 24/7 gaming device in their pocket.
Players have always taken the easiest route, and MMOs have always had far more solo players than group players. Going back to early Everquest and UO (and earlier).
As for “gaming the incentives”, that’s a red herring. Gankers are just gaming the standings system, Abyss divers are gaming the Abyss, filament hoppers are gaming filaments, gate campers are gaming the jump choke points, and many players are gaming alts and multi-boxing. EVE is pretty much about gaming the system.
It’s a matter of how it’s done and how scalable it is. CCP has typically handed out incentives and restrictions with a clumsy and heavy hand. See Rorquals and “Rebalancing the Economy” and your own example, unrestricted referral links with no ties to actual referrals at all. All of these things are essentially desperation moves that CCP was forced into to encourage more play and more pay, and/or to correct the previous problems they added to the game.
As it stands, the turnover and play schedules of EVE players make it somewhat unattractive for existing corps to really focus on welcoming, recruiting and helping train new players. Because that’s a lot of time you could be doing more profitable things, time that will likely be wasted when the newbie disappears forever two months in. You can refer to “lots of efforts” if you wish, but the vast majority of new players are greeted with nothing more substantial than spam&churn invites to dodgy corps.
Which makes sense, in a way, because for most corps, recruiting isn’t worth much more effort than that. Because the payoff isn’t really there.
If there were systems in place that rewarded corps for actually helping new players grow, then there would be more concerted efforts to do that. EVE already has activity trackers and AIR so it can track how much SP, how many new skills, how many new ships, how much activity a player undertakes while inside a corp. And add up a score for doing so.
Maybe that score helps the corp buy some perks from their ‘faction sponsor’ (which is a different idea). Maybe they purchase 3% warp speed while in faction territory. Maybe they purchase a discount on faction ammo. Maybe they invest in a 3% mining yield bonus or repair module cycle time.
Incentives don’t have to be huge, they don’t even have to be gameable. If a bonus is earned by maintaining certain activity levels then it doesn’t really matter if it’s done by new guys or alts. It just shouldn’t be earnable/sustainable by sticking alts in a pile and letting them rust there.
CCP just needs to show a little more forethought, understanding and finesse in how they design things.
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Whine more.
The last thing CCPs clumsy hand needs to do is provide more rewards for the dopamine addled gamer so that it can instead be min maxed to death with a rich multiboxer and their alts.
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This has been an interesting thread but I feel if this grows it will need a counter play .
Maybe people on there own are the wrong targets , what can force players to be solo are the mass invites to corps that just get try are grab every new player they can get.
Only the other day I met a guy from one such high sec alliance trying to do something and he was playing on his own , he may as well been in a starter corp.
Maybe these corps and alliances need to be dealt with rather than players mining away, which if they really want to mine they should be allowed to continue.
( Don’t tell me it’s because they are semi afk and mining when we have bot fleets flying around farming everything)
There has always been an issue with corps, Githany. In my view, it’s down to human nature and so is largely resistant to regulation.
There are current and would-be CEOs whose primary motives remain the exercise of power over others and the amassing of wealth. These are often combined, in an exercise which sees the recruit as little more than a tool for the satisfying of these aims.
Of course, not all CEOs are like this; there are outstanding examples of good practice.
The difference, in my view, lies in the CEO’s attitude to responsibility. If he/she takes seriously their role in guiding and providing opportunities for corp members - as a primary motive - it should be possible to achieve the financial and other goals cherished by those in charge.
Such a CEO, though busy and sometimes challenged, will know his/her members. Will leave to themselves those whose style largely encourages it, and periodically check on or chat to the others.
I’m reminded of Alexander the Great who, when dragging his poor army half-way across the known world, found time to speak to his soldiers individually, talking knowledgeably about their families back home and their struggles in the wars they were waging.
We can’t all be Alexander, of course, but power and responsibility should go hand in hand. That they do not always do so is, regrettably, a fact of life.
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Absolutely accurate. However, it’s essential to identify both competent CEOs and beneficial alliances, as well as those with detrimental qualities. I advocate for targeting the particularly negative ones. By placing them under scrutiny and potential threat, it could incentivize them to improve their practices.
Yeah, like… burn all renting empires 
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Why do you still play this game?
Why do you still post all day when you don’t play this game?
Mr Epeen
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What a foolish thing to say
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why? it is interesting to know what keeps you playing. Perhaps it can help.
Truth be known I do have some training ahead of me to get out of that sort of isolated socialization situation.
Are there others out there similar to me?
/ I mean do you find yourself being heterogeneous?
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Frostpacker, your attempts to be obtuse is truly obtuse.
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I reckon to reply with no worries
No, we dont. Where is the research about that?
Usually I have egg for breakfast. That doesnt make it usual for everyone’s breakfast.
Cherry-picking, arench ya?
Quite a few words that dont really mean anything, thats not a proper research, only constructing a phrase with intention of forcing the narrative.
I think its ASCII bunners that make it great. Without them it would be just another dirty sandbox multiple cats were in before to drop some heavy loads, so nothing very inviting.
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Yes, we do. It is CCP‘s own research, see „The Friendship Machine“ and the 5 years worth of forum threads you’ve ignored already discussing the topic.
It’s not my job to educate you, and being ignorantly hostile instead of inquisitively curious makes me want to help you less.
That’s what cherry-picking is.
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You mean the ad CCP posted on you tube? Games dont have what they were talking about there. Even multiplayer games. Socialization in games is a prosthesis replacing real socialization the civilization was build upon. Especially what Tryggvi said is needed, but you have so much barriers in games, including loss od social contract which is crippling to “game society”. People ganking other people is not socialization.
Even 100 years of spewing nonsense by ignorants isnt a good source of information.
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