Zen and the Art of Internet Spaceship Maintenance

The question we pose to our fellow bloggers for the first installment of the CKIAGFEBBC is, “What is the thing you hate/dislike most about the player run corporation you are in.”

Well as I have just now joined Clown Punchers, I suppose it will take a day or 2 before I figure out why exactly these guys deserve to be publicly flogged. In Lieu of that I’ll comment on my primary issue with my previous corp The Maverick Navy, and actually a pretty consistently common issue with most of the corps I have been familiar with. This issue is focus. EvE is a multifaceted universe which is one of it’s biggest selling points. If today I get bored of mining, tomorrow I can go low-sec pirating and the next day I can get into capital/POS warfare (skills permitting). As stated this is one of the big selling points of EvE. That being said a corporation in EvE needs an agenda and everyone in the corp needs to be on board with that agenda or else the corp will never be particularly successful. Certainly there are corps out there who are broad based and that’s ok, hell I ran one for a year. These corps are generally lean towards the carebear side and provide a great place for players to advance their skills and pad their wallets while experiencing multiple aspects of the game and deciding where they want to focus.

PVP corps are different. A PVP corp needs to have as many capable pilots available at any given time. This means that if you are a 0.0 corp and members are dickin around in wormholes, pirating in lowsec and ratting a region away you will have a pretty tough time assembling a fleet even when given notice to say nothing of spur of the moment. This can generate frustration in members who are in 0.0 and ready to fleet up. Nothing is worse than having a target to fight but no people to take it out.

In MVN my personal perception was that when alliance combat was at a low instead of leadership taking the initiative and planning out ops (there were a couple attempts) the word was given for people to haul off for lowsec and pop newbs. I have no interest in this and I have no desire to have to spend my time killing rats to grind my sec status back up afterwards.

Now I’d like to be clear here. I have great respect for MVN, they have a wealth of skilled, experienced pilots and some good buddies of mine to boot. It was a pleasure flying with them and I have not ruled out the possibility of returning some day if they’ll have me.

For a PVP corp having members spread out all over means that for each pilot the signal to noise ratio on corp comms skyrockets. Half of what people are talking about won’t matter to you because they are elsewhere and after a while pilots tend to just tune out.

In any case PVP corps out there, be as focused as possible. Pick a style of pvp and stick with it. When thats done pick a home and work from there. If you need to move then move everyone. If people want to do other shit and are spread out all over the galaxy, boot em. They can alway re-apply when they are done strokin it and if not there are plenty of other capable pilots out there.

List of participants:

• Diary of a Space Jockey – I really like you but…
• Musing on utter crap – I ussually hate Clowns….
• Life in Lowsec – Why I hate Hellcats
• The Reckless Rifter – The Fast-Track to Roles Removed
• Shenanigans from PP – It has to be said…
• Argyuably Awesome – CKIAGFEBBC Entry
• This is how I do it! – It’s all about the BOZOs
• Hands Off, My Loots! – I frikin’ HATE Ninjas
• Screw Sun Tzu – CKIAGFEBBC #1 Entry (pending, currently invalid)