This months topic is brought to us by L'Dene Bean of Nitpickin's who asks: Why and how did you pick your corporation? Is your loyalty solid or just until a better placed organization "recruits" you. The shorter version: Who holds your Unshakable Fealty and why?
I first discovered MMO's back in 2004 with Star Wars Galaxies and a few weeks into the game I was invited to join my first ever player guild; STORM.
STORM truly gave me a baptism of fire into the social delights that are possible with online gaming. At its height the guild numbered around 200 members, its underlying ethos was to have fun and be helpful (and arguably to be drunk and filthy at all times). I was absolutely hooked.
I loved them with real feeling and made some wonderful friends. The game itself was pretty awesome but had a lot of bugs and issues along with a development team that often seemed at complete odds with its subscribers. However the social side of it all kept me firmly glued to my PC. Where else could a 22 year old office junior living in the middle of nowhere get to hang out with so many different types of people, of all ages, all walks of life and from literally all over the world?
When the guild eventually closed, after some drastic game mechanic changes, I followed the bulk of its membership onto various other games (WoW/EQ2/LOTRO/AoC) and just as in SWG we kept the same ethos of friendship, fun and drunken antics before epeen waving and private goals. This always remained important to me in the guilds/corps/kinships I have chosen to play with.
Moving on to Eve-Online. I never really had much to do with the first corporation I joined, preferring to keep myself to myself as I found my feet. When Rashmika decided to run Revelation Space as a proper player corp (having initially been a private corporation mostly used for jump clones) it had the same undercurrent theme from our STORM days. We wanted team-players, people who would look out for each other, help each other and work together. I know, it sounds cheesy! Now there was nothing cheesy about Rev Space, but we had values, morals, integrity and a ridiculous sense of humour to go with it.
Then we found ourselves faced with the offer of a corporation merger into the pvp centric Shadows of the Federation. I knew I risked leaving behind not just the corporation I loved and which we had both worked so hard on, but also the essence of what I valued most in an mmo corp. It was a huge risk, especially in a game like Eve Online where the social aspect is, to my mind, often less important than in other mmos. Eve is a much darker environment, with more risk. Betrayal and mistrust are often a way of life.
Not long after tentatively joining SOTF I x’d up for a fleet op, curiously named "suicide roam". I was quite nervous and hoping not to do anything too stupid on my first night out with my new corp. I had little to worry about… everyone was drunk, everyone was filthy and, after a couple of hours everyone was dead...apparently this was the point of the op... I was soo relived!
I count myself lucky to have accidently found a corporation in Eve, that kicks a lot of arse, doesn't take itself too seriously, has a whole bunch of colourful characters in its membership and lives by the same core values that I have always found important in the past (including the obligatory alcohol abuse and filthy humour). Sure the stakes are higher now and being able to fly my choice of ships and pvp in the way I want to IS very important to me. But essentially my decision to stay with a corporation will always come down to the people around me.
Would I leave? Well I know enough about Eve to never-say-never but it would be a bloody hard decision to make.
Fellow Banters responses...
1. Cogito Ergo Yarr - Maybe I'm stubborn
2. More to come...
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