Heretical Innovations and Our Recruitment Status

Well, I have had a recurring theme pop up here of late, so I figured that maybe I would address it best on this medium. I have had a few of you readers out there,(thanks for reading!) contact me in Eve and say that it sounds like a wonderful adventure, and that you'd love to join the corp. In fact, two of our new members are, in fact, readers who had done just that.

To say I am flattered is an understatement. Some of you people want to follow me out into the black. My first notion is that you lot need your heads examined. :)

The next one is that, of course, I would get you all killed. Repeatedly. Without a doubt you would end up with wrecks as ships, pod goo freezing in space, and probably lots of posts about it on Crime and Punishment.

Most of the people interested in joining have probably read about the large amount of isk that it is possible to be made in wormholes, and it is all true. The vast majority of them have been from new players. I hate to say it, but new players have very little business being in a wormhole, even with veteran players by their side. The lethality of sleepers, PvP, collapsing wormholes; the ways to die in here are really endless. And extremely lethal. The only reason us veteran players live through it all(and we don't always make it!) is that we understand the game mechanics to the point we know what is going to happen. And we still die!

Here's the real short explanation: If you can't tank at least a sleeper battleship in whatever class of ship you can fly, be it battleships or even frigates, there's very little for you to do in a wormhole except mine.

Of course, that's nothing against miners, but what happens when there are no grav sites? You can't mine, and you can't help kill the sleeper sites. And you end up bored to tears, and might even end up hating Eve because of it.

The two I did accept into the corp were both 30 mil + SP point players. Both can fly ships that can now tank sleeper battleships. And both were well told repeatedly that there would be days when we couldn't do anything except planetary interaction. And they could accept that with the knowledge that I knew they had at least a vague sense of what they were getting into.

This is certainly not meant to discourage new players from playing Eve. It's more of a statement that wormholes are higher end content, and that we are focused on them.

I have led "guilds" in many different games for over ten years now. I have always held to the ideal and motto that "No One Is Left Out". It has always been a hallmark of the groups of friends that I have led in many different games, that one thing that is different about our "group" than others, even among those who say they do the same thing. My members have always said "You guys are different than other "guilds"" and my two new corp members have already said the same thing.

Have I finally run into a physical wall where the new players cannot be included? I mean, short of attaching a remote rep carrier to them, there's no way to keep a low SP player alive in a wormhole. Every wormhole guide says "You must have scanning skills, you must be able to tank X amount of DPS, etc etc" and I have to agree with all of them. Eve is much different from telling some new player "Now stand back while we whack the dragon, and when he does kill you, we'll rez you."

Okay, so in this analogy, when the new player gets whacked, he loses a ship. And as long as it's an NPC, he can climb into a new ship. If it's a player he gets podded by, a whole new scenario ensues. We have to open the static and he has to fly to us, but only after we run off or kill the players that killed him. And that's assuming there aren't more coming, or more cloaked and waiting.

Because in Eve there always are. You have to assume that.

Honestly this conversation with myself is mildly disturbing.

But then in Eve, we have to throw in the trust issue. In other games, you don't give these new players access to your guild vault. Pretty simple. In Eve, there are tons of permissions to set, tons of things to have go wrong. And if you do something wrong, remeber, this is EVE we're playing here, even normally honest people may decide to jack that Orca or steal all those BPOs, because this is Eve, and this stuff happens all the time.

So, on top of that, we live in a wormhole, where we basically live out of freeze dried astronaut food and a space tent. We are floating, alone, in a black void. If said new player logs in, and is the only person on, he is alone. He can't go group with someone from another corp, barring him using a scanning ship and opening our wormhole,(which I'd kill him for!), he can't head to a dungeon to solo, he can't even head to the closest village to see what's for sale. he can, however, head to the nearest sleeper combat site his onboard scanner can find him, and get promptly blown out of the sky because he most likely is flying a frigate, or maybe even better, a cruiser. And he's probably trying to both armor and shield tank. O.O

Do we see the dilemna I have? I don't want to turn people away, but I have all this psychology of the game to deal with in regards to it.

Maybe I should turn my other corporation into a Class 1 wormhole learning center?

I guess in the end, the easy answer is: this is Eve, and we have to play it as such.