You’ve found a player corporation that looks interesting and are ready to take the next step and join! What 10 questions should you ask when joining a corporation?
- What are the character requirements for joining a corporation? Some corps will have SP (skill point) requirements meaning that you need a minimum of 5 million to be considered as an applicant. Others may require you to be able to fly certain doctrines of ships. Regardless of what the requirements are, make sure to ask!
- How big is the corporation? Is it a big corp with hundreds of players? Or is it a small group of pilots that fly with each other every Saturday? The size of the corp can give you a feeling on what to expect with activity or even help from other pilots.
- What time zone is most active? This is a HUGE questions players fail to ask. If you’re a European time zone player looking at joining a US time zone corp, unless your play time aligns with theirs you may be left out of activities a lot. Try to find a corp that has players when you’re most active in Eve.
- What does the corporation do? Find out what the corp does. Is it a wormhole corp, is it a null sec
corp that primarily mines, or is it a corp that focuses on helping new players navigate basic activities? If you enjoy mining but the corp you join primarily pvps, you may not be happy. - Where does the corp live? If it’s a wormhole corporation, you can expect to have to move to their hole. If it’s a null corp, you’ll have to move out to their system(s). If you enjoy running incursions or doing level 4 missions, think about where your corp’s home and resources are located before saying yes.
- If you join, what will be expected of you? Will you have to move all your assets to their home station or system(s)? Do you have to participate in structure defence fleets? Are you expected to PVP or turn over so much ore a month?
Another question along the lines of what’s expected of you, are you expected to front a certain amount of isk for doctrine ships (i.e. some ship doctrines you’re expected to fly can be quite expensive, do you have to make the isk or will the corp help? - Will you have to actually participate in voice chat? Corps all have their own Discords, team speaks or mumble servers. You can expect having to connect to voice channels during operations or fleets, but will you have to talk as well? Ask!
- Will you have to submit to a background check? Yes, that’s right. Some corps will do background checks on potential applicants. In a nutshell you’ll log in to their website with your Eve account and they’ll be able to pull up certain information via the Eve API (yes, this is allowed and perfectly legit). Things they may be looking for is any red flags in your mail or big donations in your wallet among other things.
- Does the corporation participate in war declarations? This is a very important question to ask, especially if you participate in the incursion community or Forward Bases with Eve Rookies.
Additionally, when there’s a war declaration, anywhere your character goes (including high sec), the opposing players can attack you without consequence. Also, if a corp is participating in war, sometimes normal activities like mining or ratting are suspended and you’re expected to help with war activities. If this doesn’t sound fun, you’ll want to know ahead of time! - Can you talk to other members about the corp? Sometimes you may want to talk to other members about the corp. This may or may not be allowed and they may let you hit anyone up or want you to only talk to specific people. If a recruiter doesn’t want to let you talk to other members, this could be a red flag. Or if they only want you to talk to certain members first. Just be aware that lying, cheating and scamming is part of the game and recruiting into a corp isn’t immune.
There’s plenty more questions that a player can ask when joining a corporation. What questions do you like to ask? Put them in the comments below!
