You are looking for a corporation and check for options.
After some research and chit-chat with 4 or 6 nice corporations, you decide which one suits the best. Apparently there are 40 members and they are so nice to you at their “pub channel”.
Soooooo you join and after some minutes you find out that:
Half the members have been offline for “more than a month”
The other 20 toons are in fact 4 or 5 persons with multiple alts.
After 2 or 3 days you either start feeling alone or on the contrary you see that the “real life comes first” and “no mandatory ops” are false advertisement and the corp forces you to do random ■■■■ you dont want to do.
Then you quit corporation and yeeeeet another stain in your employment history.
I can definitely relate, as I’ve been through similar. Every Corp is Amazing!… in the recruitment phase
I kind of wish Eve had more community around teaming up with other people who happen to be online when you are, in the same region, and interested in the same activity without joining their corp. Sort of a systematic matchmaking service similar to other games.
Unfortunately, I realize this wouldn’t really work with Eve due to issues of trust.
Are you talking about figuring out where you want to live in New Eden before figuring out what corp you want to join? That’s actually pretty insightful. I’ve moved to join corps in the past, only to discover that I hate the region of space they occupy.
This “RL first” is one of the biggest player created lies there are in EVE. If your home in EVE is on fire, you either represent and help fixing the problems or you are out and can look for a new cave. “RL first” and “no mandatory ops” are 2 things in corp ads that you can safely ignore always. That’s simply not how EVE works.
Then you should have checked their killboard better to see how active the corp is. Every corp in a PVP centric environment (ie. everything outside high sec) should have some activity on there. You should also ask questions in the interview before you join and see if their responses check out with what you learned about the corp from other sources.
You could also fly with public fleets first (Spectre, BB, whatever) and check out some corps that participate in these fleets to see if active, engaging and suitable corps are active there.
It’s not like that it is inevitable that you join a “bad” corp. There are many ways to reduce the of that happening. And while the following comic is true in the displayed direction, nothing prevents you from turning the tables and softly interrogate the corp:
The OP’s name doesn’t ring a bell, but the corp they describe sounds somewhat similar to mine. We have a public in-game channel called “(corp name) Pub.” We tend to be alt-heavy, though less so these days.
None of our ops, at present, are mandatory. We offer opportunities for mining fleets and welp roams, but no one is required to participate, and no one is berated for prioritizing their real life over the game. If there’s anyone in my corp who I discover is berating people for not participating, leadership will shut that down in a hurry.
My real sticking point is, 2 or 3 days isn’t a long time. Most of my corpmates are still getting their stuff from wherever they started in that time. They might’ve had time to participate in one or two fleets, but really, 48-72 hours doesn’t give you a good view of what a corp will be like, in my opinion. It also doesn’t give you much time to interact with a lot of the players very much, in a social setting.
In the future, perhaps you can contact leadership with your concerns and see what they say. “What’s with all the inactive members? Hold on, I thought there weren’t any mandatory ops. Why am I being hassled for prioritizing my real life first?”
I sincerely hope it wasn’t my corp you’re talking about. If it was, I’d like to know so we can address it with our members, but I’ve not seen any indication that someone has been forced into anything.
As for feeling lonely, speak up on that, too. Corps sometimes inadvertently ignore quieter members, but if you ask for help or suggest an activity, you’re more likely to get noticed and find people in the corp to play with.
What do you mean by “comms?” I’ve often wanted an in-game comms feature so we don’t have to depend on third-party programs like Discord or Mumble, but as it is I find Discord to be useful in communicating with my corp. We couldn’t do ops without them.
Blizzard did, for “World of Warcraft.” They had an in-game feature that allowed players to join voice chat within their guild.
Allowing for voice comms in-game doesn’t make a company liable. They can absolve themselves of that readily with an update to the ToS.
However, that doesn’t address the question: what do you mean by “comms,” and why do you say they’re the worst? I’m not sure what your initial comment has to do with the discussion at hand.
I wasn’t sure if that was the case or not. I’ve only been with my one corp, which I love. I do know alts and multiboxing are popular, and I know some of them treat participation the way the U.S. military sometimes treats “mandatory fun.”
One thing I recommend to players–and I wish they’d do it more often–is a “farewell letter” to corp leadership. In private, explain your reasons for leaving, so a corp can improve if they really care to do so. I can understand why most don’t take the time for that, but it would be helpful.
No corp fits everyone, but some of us would appreciate feedback that allows us to identify areas where we can and will improve.
